30. Cali
CALI
The soprano dies. The tenor finds out and crumbles to his knees. The whole room stands and claps, and I borrow Ronan's hand, which is still holding mine, so I can applaud, too.
"What do we think?" he asks as the lights come up. "Do you like opera now?"
"I like the crying part," I say. "And the champagne part. I don't know about the rest."
"Well, then you're in good luck, because that's most of it."
We ride the elevator down to meet the car waiting at the curb. Paolo holds the door. I climb in and expect Ronan to give the driver my address like he always does, but he doesn't.
"Not home?" I ask.
"The kids are with your mother tonight," Ronan reminds me. "You have until morning."
"So?"
"So I thought I'd show you where I live."
That makes me do a double-take. In all these dates, all these weeks, I've never seen his apartment. I've seen his office, forty floors up over the Hudson. I've seen restaurants and aquariums and a party he threw for the whole city. But not where he sleeps.
"Okay," I say happily. "I'd like that."
Ronan gives Paolo a nod and we pull away.
The car goes uptown before stopping outside a building I would never in my life have walked into on my own.
The doorman greets Ronan with a deep bow.
Beyond him, there's marble and a gilded elevator that needs a key.
Ronan puts a key in it, and it goes up and up and up and doesn't stop.
The doors open right into the apartment. No hallway. Just, boom, welcome home, Your Highness.
I step out of the elevator and grind to a halt.
"Oh."
The place is huge. Like, bonkers huge. The ceilings are twice as tall as any ceiling should be. One whole wall is frameless glass, and behind it the whole city spreads out, all lit up, like somebody dumped a bucket of stars on the ground.
The floors are dark wood, wide planks, polished so I can almost see myself in them. The area rug looks older than my grandmother and feels softer than anything I've ever stood on. The furniture is sleek, clean, and expensive-looking, the leather and dark metal all gleaming brightly.
A granite hearth houses a fireplace big enough to roast a cow. Art lines every wall, illuminated by custom lighting. A kitchen looms in the far corner with Space Age appliances that do I-don't-even-know-what.
"This is where you live," I say in shock.
"Most of the time, yes."
I turn in a slow circle, taking it all in. "It's very clean."
"Were you expecting a pig sty?"
"No, no, of course not." I walk up to the glass and look out. From up here you can see Central Park, dark and huge, and the river, and the lights going all the way out. "It's just, like, a lot. It doesn't look like anybody lives here. It looks like a magazine."
"That's fair." He's taken off his jacket somewhere. He comes and stands beside me, sleeves rolled, and looks out at the same view. "I bought it because it was the best one. I don't spend much time thinking about it."
I glance at him sideways. "That's sad, Ronan."
"Maybe." He doesn't argue. He just looks out at his city.
I turn away from the glass and look at him instead. The man owns two yachts, a gorgeous penthouse, and an entire law firm, and yet he stayed at my house last weekend to make pancakes at my stove in a rumpled shirt.
I haven't figured him out yet. But in all the ways that matter, I feel like I know him. Who he is. His aura, his essence. His soul, if you want to go that far.
He's a bad man with a good heart. A dangerous man who knows when to put his weapons away.
Above all, an honest man with a bright line between truths that matter and lies that don't.
I like that.
"If you don't like this, I have a house upstate," he remarks. "In the country. It doesn't look like it came out of a magazine."
"No?"
"There's a lake. A dock. Trees. It's the one place I own that I actually like.
" He turns to me. "I'm mentioning it now because I want to take you there.
You and the kids. We can go up for a long weekend.
Hayden can look at whatever's in the lake, and Isabella can bring the caterpillar, and you can sleep in and not do your makeup in a phone camera. "
"A whole weekend," I say. "With my kids."
He looks at me, gray-blue eyes shining in the low lights. "Would you like that?"
It's so easy to picture. Hayden tromping happily through the shallows with a net, Isabella chasing frogs, Ronan and I lying in the sun on a dock with nothing to do and nowhere to be.
It sounds like a thing you'd see on a commercial.
An impossible dream, invented in some dreary ad agency to sell prescription medication or life insurance or whatever.
But it could be real. All I have to say is...
"Yeah," I say. "Okay. Let's do that."
Ronan smiles.
It's a slow thing, but it's a joy to watch it unfold. It starts at one corner of his mouth and ripples outward. It takes its time getting to the rest of his face.
But it reaches his eyes this time. All the way.
There are so many places on his face I could spend hours gazing at. His jaw. The little scar near his eyebrow. The shock of dark, half-curling hair falling over his forehead. His eyes, half-gray and half-blue, watching me watch him.
He's a beautiful man. I knew that from the first night at the bar. But it's not the beauty that's getting me right now. It's the smile and everything that provoked it.
I think, for the first time, without fighting it: I could fall for this man.
Maybe I already am.
"Good," he says quietly. "It's settled, then."
Then he doesn't say anything else. He just looks at me, and little by little, the look changes.
We got interrupted at my house by a little girl's bad dream and a caterpillar in a shoebox.
And then I fell asleep waiting for him. He did the honorable thing and just took my shoes off and held me while I slept.
Then there was a whole week of me agonizing about the fact that we keep getting interrupted.
Right now, though, there's no one here to interrupt us.
"Ronan," I say.
"Yes."
"There aren't any kids here."
He chuckles as he makes a show of looking around, like Hayden and Isabella might be hiding under the couch cushions. "No. Doesn't look like there are."
"And it's barely eleven o'clock. And my mom doesn't need me to pick anybody up until tomorrow."
"That's all true."
I take a step toward him. I'm still in my finest opera wear, but suddenly, it feels almost immaterial. Like I'm wearing nothing but a cloud that could be blown apart by a strong wind at a moment's notice.
"So take me to bed," I say. "This time, I'm sober, and I'll remember every second. Isn't that what you said you wanted?"
His jaw clenches. "You remember that."
"I remember everything you say. It's becoming a real problem."
He reaches out and lays his hand along the side of my face, his thumb at my cheekbone, and he tips my head back. He looks at me for a long time.
"Say it again," he says. "So I know it's you asking."
"Take me to bed, Ronan."
He kisses me.
It's almost unbelievable to me that this is legal.
Kissing isn't supposed to feel this good, but since it does, there probably ought to be some rules and regulations to keep it in check.
At the very least, there should be some fine print somewhere that says a kiss is only allowed to be this good the very first time you ever do it, before you know better, back when you're a naive sixteen-year-old who doesn't understand that mouths are mostly just for chewing and passive-aggressive comments about your stretch marks.
But there is no such fine print to be found here. No rules, no kids, no lies, no barriers to leaning into Ronan and sighing into his open mouth as my brain goes offline and my body comes alive.
Yes. Yes. This, I think, somewhere in the last functioning corner of my mind. This is what I was supposed to be feeling for ten years.
I forgot kissing could make you feel born all over again.
His other hand finds the small of my back and pulls me in until there's no space left. I can feel all of him, the heat of him, the hard planes of his chest through his shirt, the roughened edge of his breathing.
"What happened to the bedroom?" I manage to sputter.
"In a minute," he says against my mouth. "I've waited a long time for this. I'm not going to rush it."
He walks me backward, slow, still kissing me, until my back finds the cool glass. The whole city is behind me, below me, as he cages me against it with a hand flat on the glass by my head.
"Look at you, you fucking angel," he murmurs. He drags his mouth down my jaw to my throat and nibbles at the soft skin there. "Do you have any idea what you do to me? What you've done to me since that bar?"
"Mm… Nope, I'm clueless. Guess you'd better tell me."
"You let me buy you a drink you didn't want," he says against my neck, as his hands move to the zipper at my side, working it down tooth by tooth. "And then you told me I was a piece of shit. You were right. Too bad I haven't stopped thinking about you for one single day since."
The dress loosens. He peels it down my arms, off my hips, until it pools on the floor around my heels.
I'm standing against the glass of his penthouse in the lingerie I put on tonight because some part of me was hoping for exactly this.
The cool of the window meeting the backs of my thighs makes me shiver.
He steps back, holding my hands, and lets his eyes rake up and down my body.
For a second, I feel like the most beautiful woman in the world.
I'm Helen of Troy, and every tortured sigh that slips through Ronan's parted lips is another thousand ships launching on my behalf.
His gazes moves over me slow, but there's nothing polite about it.
It's fucking ravenous. Animalistic, almost.