Chapter 29
Carly
Six Weeks
The house smells like sharp cheddar, butter, and toasted breadcrumbs, which is exactly what Penelope wanted when she very sweetly requested homemade mac and cheese this morning.
She'd looked at me so adorably, her lower lip puffing out, that I'd taken the request more like a private chef agreeing to an entree and less like the version of me I knew I'd end up as this evening — an exhausted woman with her hair clipped up and flour on her black tank top after three failed attempts and one success at a roux.
“Is it done yet?” Penelope asks for the fourth time in ten minutes, dragging a dining chair across the kitchen tile so she can kneel on it and peer dramatically at the oven.
“If you ask me again, I’ll put asparagus in it out of spite.”
She gasps. “You wouldn’t!”
I bite back a smile as I squat down beside her to stare into the oven. “You heard me.”
“Daddy won’t let you do that. He hates ‘spar-a-gus.”
“Your daddy isn’t home yet. I can do what I want.”
Penelope narrows her eyes at me, deeply suspicious, and I’m still giggling at her when I hear the door into the garage open.
I don’t need to turn around to know it’s him and not someone making a delivery or the maid dropping in like she does once a week.
It’s ridiculous, honestly. Ridiculous and annoying and a little humiliating, the way my ears seem to clock Gray before the rest of me does.
I know the sound of his footsteps now, the routine of the door closing, keys dropping onto the side table, shoes slipping off.
Penelope launches off the chair. “Daddy!”
He catches her one-handed, suit jacket still on, tie loosened, salt-and-pepper hair a little mussed like he’s been dragging a hand through it on the drive home.
He looks unfairly good for a man who spent all day in meetings and somehow still manages to come home looking like the expensive, fantasy version of a dad in a Rolex ad.
“Hey, bug.” He presses a kiss to her cheek, sending her into a fit of giggles, then looks at me over her shoulder as I push myself back up to standing. “Smells good in here.”
I wipe my hands on my tank top, wishing I'd had the forethought to wear an apron. “Mac and cheese. Per your daughter’s extremely adorable request.”
“Ah,” he says, a chuckle bleeding into his voice. “You’ve fallen victim to the pout, I assume?”
“Unfortunately.”
Penelope wriggles until he lets her down, then immediately starts talking at him about her day, the coloring she did at school, the fact that I apparently almost committed a war crime by threatening asparagus.
He listens, smiling and fully attentive, shrugging out of his suit jacket and tossing it over the back of a chair.
I open the fridge to get out the bits I'd bought for a side salad when Penelope declares that she can't just simply explain the picture she colored at school, but has to show him instead. The second she disappears up to her bedroom, Gray moves in behind me.
I only get half a breath before his hand circles my waist and turns me just enough to face him. My pulse spikes immediately, but then his mouth meets mine and my brain suddenly feels like it's been replaced with a swarm of bees.
It’s quick, just barely more than a peck, but it startles me like nothing else. Penelope is here, awake, probably frantically searching through her backpack, and his hands are on my waist in the middle of the kitchen like this is normal.
He looks entirely too pleased with himself.
“What was that for?” I whisper, feeling the heat flood my cheeks.
His shoulder lifts. “Just felt like it.”
Then he steps back like he didn’t just short-circuit my brain and reaches past me for a wine glass, slipping right back into normalcy.
Penelope comes skipping back in with the picture, and I turn to the counter before either of them can see the stupid way my mouth keeps trying to smile.
Dinner is easy after that, or at least it looks easy from the outside. Penelope chats. Gray asks her questions about school. She declares my mac and cheese better than any restaurant’s, which is objectively untrue but still enough to make me genuinely happy.
And all through it, I can feel him looking at me.
Every time I glance up, he’s already there, watching me over the rim of his wine glass with that unreadable, heavy-lidded look that makes me feel like the room is closing in.
By the time Penelope finishes eating and vanishes toward the living room with a pop-up book and full access to the TV remote, I’m already wound tight for no good reason.
Grayson waits until something starts playing through the television before he leans back in his chair and meets my gaze for what has to be the fiftieth time in the last thirty minutes. “Ran into your ex last night.”
I blink at him. “What?”
He lifts his glass and takes a sip like we’re discussing the weather. “At Cole's brewery. Was going to tell you when I got home, but you were already asleep.”
My stomach gives a weird little drop. “Aaron?”
“Yeah.”
“What happened?”
Gray’s expression barely changes. “He was drunk. Loud. Tried to convince me that I should come clean.”
“Come clean about what?”
His mouth tilts, like a bitter smile. “About the fact that, apparently, he doesn’t believe you and I are actually dating.”
I shouldn’t be surprised. He barely believed it weeks ago, but I didn't think he'd go so far as to tell that straight to Gray’s face. “God,” I mutter, pushing my hair back from my face. “I'm sorry.”
He sets his glass down. “It’s fine. He was just trying to get a rise out of me. Told me he knew this whole thing wasn’t real. That he knew you. That you weren’t—” He stops there, jaw tightening just slightly. “Doesn’t matter.”
It matters. I can tell by the look on his face that it matters. Whatever Aaron said, Gray hated it, and knowing Aaron, it couldn’t have been nice. I don’t even want to know what it was. “What did you say?” I ask quietly.
His eyes meet mine. “I told him that I had no idea what he was talking about, and that we’re together.”
From the living room, Penelope loudly announces that whatever she'd put on is boring and she's going to change it, but it sounds far away. Grayson gives her a loud, “Okay!” before turning back to me.
He studies me for a second, then goes on. “He invited me to the bachelor party.”
I stare. “He did what?”
“Yeah. Was definitely as a challenge, mostly.” His tone goes dry. “Subtlety isn’t really his strong suit.”
“Please tell me you said no.”
He doesn’t say a damn thing.
I sit back in my chair. “Gray. You said yes?”
“I did.”
“Why?” The word comes out sharper than I mean it to, and I immediately force an apologetic face instead. “You didn’t have to do that. You’re already coming to the wedding with me. That was already more than enough.”
He picks up his glass again, unbothered. “I know.”
“Then why would you agree to go to Aaron’s bachelor party? That sounds like actual hell.”
A corner of his mouth moves. “It does, yeah.”
“So?”
He shrugs, taking another sip of wine like he has all the time in the world and I’m not slowly unraveling in his kitchen. “I wanted to.”
I frown at him. “No one wants to go to their fake girlfriend’s asshole ex-boyfriend’s bachelor party. That is not a real desire any person has ever had.”
That gets a brief huff of laughter out of him. “Probably not,” he agrees.
“Then why on earth did you accept?”
He rolls the stem of the glass between his fingers, gaze drifting toward the living room, then back to me. “I didn’t like the idea of him thinking he could call you a liar. Or make you look stupid. Or insult you any more than he did.”
My chest tightens. He says it so simply, like it’s obvious, like protecting me from Aaron’s bullshit is the most natural thing in the world. “You didn’t have to take that bullet for me.”
His gaze stays on mine. “I know.”
“Then why…?”
This time, when he shrugs, it doesn’t feel dismissive. It feels careful. Like there’s more behind his teeth than he's willing to say. “Because I wanted to,” he repeats slowly.
I should leave it there. I know that. He’s holding back, and I shouldn’t push.
But my stomach feels like it’s somersaulting and my brain still feels full of bees, and I can’t help myself.
“When you told him we’re together…” I start, my fingers fidgeting in my lap, nerves threatening to make cheese sauce climb up my throat.
“Did you mean as far as Aaron is concerned, or…?”
I can’t make myself finish the question.
Or everyone? Or me? Or you?
Grayson sets his wine glass down. He looks at me, really looks at me, direct and steady and so deliberate that I forget I’m supposed to breathe. “As far as everyone is concerned.”
Every bee in my head just… stops.
I stare at him.
He pushes his chair back and stands, and I don't know what to do with that, don’t know how to react. My heart is beating so hard it feels ridiculous, like my body knows something huge has just happened before my mind can catch up.
“Carly,” he says, quieter now.
I stay exactly where I am as he takes a step toward me, leaning over my chair. His gaze flicks past me toward the doorway, checking for Penelope, listening for the television in the other room.
Then his attention comes back to me.
His hand lifts. The back of his knuckle brushes under my chin, gently nudging my face up toward his. There is nothing casual about him now. Nothing playful, nothing blurred, just straight up crossing lines we’ve already smudged into the earth.
His mouth meets mine, slow and sure, unhurried, certainly not overly worried about the four-year-old in the next room who could walk in at any moment. The warmth of his lips leaves my head spinning, his quiet little breath against me feeling far too real, far too quickly.
I don’t even realize I’ve gripped the front of his shirt until his hand wraps around the back of my palm. It’s just instinct now, just him and me and what that apparently means now.
This isn’t fake anymore.
When did that happen for him? For me? Somewhere between the first time he kissed me and all the thousand little things that came after?
Movie nights, the football game, Colchester Ski Resort, the way he looks at me across the kitchen, the way Penelope folds me into her little orbit like I belong there—
But this is the first time he’s said it.
As far as everyone is concerned.