9. Victoria #2
He wore the same three pairs of shoes in rotation and genuinely could not understand why a human being needed more than that.
I used to tell him it was about power. That there was something about the click of a well-made heel on a polished floor that put the room on notice before you’d said a single word.
He’d nod seriously like he was taking notes and then ruin it completely by saying something like “so basically you’re just being loud on purpose” and I’d throw a throw pillow at him and he’d catch it because he always caught everything I threw.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at my heels for a long moment.
The Ryan Caldwell Foundation had sent me their quarterly report this morning.
I hadn’t read it yet. It was sitting in my email along with forty-seven other things I hadn’t touched since the media situation erupted.
But I knew the numbers by heart. Three point two million raised this fiscal year for gun violence victims and their families.
Six new grief counseling centers funded across Nevada.
A scholarship program at Brynn’s old high school that Ryan would have been absolutely insufferable about in the best possible way.
I’d built the foundation the same year I took over the franchise.
Fourteen years of writing checks and chairing galas and sitting across tables from senators who needed to be reminded what the human cost of inaction actually looked like.
It was the one thing I did that I never talked about publicly.
Not because I was modest, and I was categorically not modest, but because Ryan hadn’t been modest either, and he would have hated the idea of his name being used for anything that felt like performance.
So it was quiet. Deliberate. The way he was.
I slipped the Louboutins off my feet and set them side by side on the floor with the deliberate care of someone who understood exactly what they were worth.
I held up my silken spaghetti-strapped nightgown.
A blend of linen and silk that was just as soft as it was light and airy.
For many, the combination sounded dreadful.
Ugly, even. But the lightweight, flowy fabric made a great nightgown set.
I slipped the black nightgown over my head, watching it fall over my curves and settle right at my ankles.
I whipped the matching linen-silk-blend robe, tying it off around my broad waist. A waist that had never quite settled back into position after having my daughter.
Then I made my way out of the closet and into the bathroom so that I could take out my fucking contacts.
I swear, sometimes, taking off contacts was more liberating than removing a bra.
I peeled the dried plastic off my eyes and blinked a few times.
Instead of adding them into the solution, I decided to chuck them.
If I couldn’t remember the last time I replaced them, then it was time for a new set, anyway.
I fumbled around for my purse before I found it back out next to the bed and dug out my glasses.
I would search for a new pair of contacts in the morning.
Knock, knock, knock.
Three rapid knocks came at my bedroom door before I heard Rhett’s voice. “Dinner is served. Mind getting the door?”
The smell of veggie alfredo and Brynn’s pie wafted through the closed door, and I quickly recovered an unopened set of contacts.
My stomach growled, denoting a need for sustenance, so after I placed everything where I needed it to be for the next morning, I strode for the bedroom door.
And when I whipped it open, there the gargantuan stood, holding a massive tray with two steaming hot meals on it.
Complete with tall, iced glasses of soda.
I swear to hell on high, there was no one on this planet more considerate than Rhett.
Sometimes, anyway.
“Please tell me that’s root beer,” I said as I stepped off to the side, ushering him into the room with my arm.
But he didn’t move.
“Rhett?” I asked.
He stared at me with a dumbfounded expression. His eyes moved between mine with a look I couldn’t place.
“Rhett? You okay?” I asked as I waved my hand a bit in front of him. “Is there something on my face?”
But all he said when he parted his lips was…
“You wear glasses outside of reading?”
Something about the way he said it made my chest do a thing I was not prepared for.
It wasn't the question. It was the way he was looking at me when he asked it.
Like he'd just seen something he'd been waiting to see.
Like the glasses and the nightgown and the bare feet and the hair down past my shoulders had rearranged the picture of me he'd been carrying around, and this version was the one he'd been looking for the whole damn time.
I took the tray out of his hands before my brain could talk me out of it.
"It's root beer," he said quietly.
"Good night, Rhett."
I closed the door with my hip and stood there on the other side of it, holding a dinner tray and staring at the wood grain and breathing like I'd just sprinted a hallway instead of closing a door.
That look on his face.
The one I didn’t have a name for yet, even though I’d been cataloguing it for three years. Not hunger, exactly. Something quieter than that. Something that had patience built into it, like a man who had already decided the outcome and was simply waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
I closed the door behind me and stood in the dark of the hallway for a moment, pressing my back against the wood.