46. Paisley
“It’sgood to have you back, boss.” Cecily dips a carrot stick into a dish of red pepper hummus.
“We’re going to need you to tell us all the things,” Paloma informs me, biting into a crisp endive leaf.
We’re at our favorite lunch spot. It’s my first day back after returning home yesterday. I’m exhausted, and my body clock is on Eastern Standard Time, but there’s something to be said for adrenaline. I missed work. I didn’t spend much time thinking about it while on the island, but now that I’m back, I’m excited to be in the middle of things again.
I miss Klein more, though. I miss his smile, his expressive eyebrows, the way he drags the pad of his thumb across his lower lip.
“What do you want to know?” I ask innocently, dunking a sesame cracker in the hummus and popping it in my mouth.
“We’re going to need to know how Klein went from fake to daddy.” Paloma’s eyebrows stay elevated on her forehead as she stares at me.
“It sort of just... happened?”
She shakes her head. “That’s not good enough.”
“It was the captions, wasn’t it?” Cecily wipes her mouth with her napkin.
I scoff. “Yes. The captions you wrote for his social media posts made me lose my bikini. Especially the one about thinking you had hearts in different parts of your body.” I snap a carrot stick in half. “Who knew you were so poetic?”
Cecily’s head tilts, trying to understand. “I don’t mean my captions. I mean his.”
I’m confused. “You’re managing his social media.”
“All the photos, yes. And responding to comments, and all that. But Klein took over the captions halfway through your trip.”
My carrot hits the table. “What?”
Cecily’s gaze bounces from me, to Paloma, and back to me again. “I assumed you knew.”
Pressing a hand to my stomach, I pull in a deep breath to calm myself down. Those posts were beautiful. “He didn’t tell me.”
Cecily’s lips purse. “Is this a good revelation?”
I picture Klein below me on the bed last Friday night, the words he wanted to say but swallowed at my request.
I didn’t let him say those three big words to me, but he went ahead and did it anyway. In the only way he knew how aside from speech. Through story.
“I have to go.” I push off from the table, fumbling for my purse. Paloma unwinds it from my seat when my shaking hands fail at the task.
“Here you go,” she says serenely. “Go get your man.”
Will he be home?
What am I going to say?
Am I a fool? Is it too soon? Too soon to love a man who puts me first? Who offered to swim me off an island, talked sense into my dad, tolerated Shane and all the other shenanigans of the week?
No.
It can’t be. It’s too good. Too right.
Maybe falling for someone isn’t a process. It isn’t meted out, like bullet points in a timeline. Maybe it’s a thing that happens quietly, when you’re watching them hug their mother, or pedal a bike under a canopy of trees, or climb a lighthouse during a storm. When they’re reaching for your hand when you’re struggling, just to let you know you’re not alone. Is it when they learn how you like to be kissed, and then to do it well, and often?
If so, I have my answer.
I thunder up the stairs to Klein’s apartment. Four knocks on the door and it opens.
“Paisley?” Worry creases Klein’s forehead. “Was that you on the stairs? What’s wrong?”
He holds out his arms, and I do not fall into them, because I’ve already done that. I float.
“Paisley,” he hums, stroking my hair. “Is there a problem? You’re dressed in work clothes.”
My head shakes, nose rubbing the front of his soft T-shirt. I want to bury myself in this man, get lost in him, never come up for air.
“Your captions,” I murmur.
Klein moves us out of the doorway, closing the door with his foot. He walks us to his couch, and when he sits, I crawl onto his lap.
His gaze searches my face, falling down my body. “I take it you’re happy.”
“So happy. Sublimely.”
He wraps a section of hair behind my ear, rubbing my earlobe between two fingers. “Does this mean I can say what I want to say out loud, to your gorgeous face?”
“Yes.” My hands run through his hair, sliding down and over to cup his cheeks.
“Paisley, I’m in love with you. And it feels like a flash, and also a throb. You are a place where my heart can settle, but still be itself. Your laughter prompts my own, and I didn’t realize how important that was until I met you. To be connected, loved, cherished, to be inspired, to be grounded but not tethered, I knew none of that until you walked back into my life.” Klein grips my face the same way I have his, absorbing the moisture on my cheeks. “We had something back then, Paisley, and we have something today, and that tells me we’ll have something in twenty years. In forty. In fifty. We are evergreen.”
Moisture forms behind my eyes, a salty sting.
“I believe I’m your soulmate, Paisley, but I don’t believe I complete you. I think you do that on your own, and I’m here to share in that. I think the same is true of me. We’re here to learn and grow and be better, and I’d like to do that with you, unconditionally. What do you say?”
Tears tumble down my cheeks. I’m not a crier, and yet, here I am unable to stop. “I thought I was coming here to tell you I love you,” I sniffle. “Instead I got the most heartwarming declaration of love I’ve ever heard.” More tears arrive. Wiping at my cheeks would be useless. Klein has a hold of me, and I’m not about to break that contact.
He grins crookedly. “Yeah, well, I thought I went to Bald Head Island for cake.”
I breathe a laugh. “Klein the writer, you have a mouth that says beautiful words, and a heart that feels beautiful things. I can only hope I’m as good as you, as thoughtful, as expressive. And when the time comes I don’t say words the way you do, I hope you’ll see my actions and know how much I love you.”
“Communication has many forms.” Klein gently eases me closer. He kisses me like I’m sustenance and all he desires is survival.
When I take a break to breathe, he says, “There’s another form of communication I know of that’s as effective as the written word.”
My hips wriggle. “Oh yeah?”
He hooks his hands around my backside and presses me harder against him. “Hold on,” he instructs.
I wind my arms around his neck, and he carries us to his bedroom.
Pressing kisses to the scruff of his neck as we go, I whisper, “Klein the guy I’m in love with.”
“Of all the nicknames you’ve given me, that’s my favorite.”
“I’ll get it tattooed on my other thigh.”
“And I’ll bite it. Every. Damn. Day.”
We tumble on his bed together.
Pulling his shirt over his head, I rasp, “Please tell me that’s a promise.”
“Everything I say to you is a promise.”
He unbuttons my black work slacks. I tug off my blouse. He buries his face between my breasts, humming happily.
“Paisley the everything,” he murmurs against me.
“Is that my second nickname?”
He nods, taking my nipple in his mouth. “It’s perfect for you,” he murmurs around the hardened peak. “You are my everything.”
My heart fractures, splits, making room for something newer, bigger. He lines himself up with me, notches in, his gaze on mine.
“I love you,” he husks when he’s all the way inside me. He sets a perfect pace, the one he knows I prefer, and his I love you echoes through me like it was shouted into a cavernous hall. I hear it over and over, with each of his withdrawals, and every return.
I kiss along his jaw. “I love you, Klein. So much, you don’t even know.”
He pulls back, then in again. “I know, Paisley. Believe me, I know.”
I don’t return to work until the next day. Paloma tells me I’m glowing. I ask her for a double date with her architect. She’s cagey, insisting they’re only casual, but I see through her vehemency.
My mother’s package arrives, and I wrap it in pearlescent paper and attach a note.
A Halston for Halston.
Thank you for everything.
- Paisley
Klein gives it to her at his next shift, and texts me saying she got teary-eyed, then punched his arm when he pointed out the tears.
The following weekend, Klein’s mother has us over for dinner. Eden and Oliver are there, and Eden swears she knew we were going to develop into something real. “I saw the way he looked at you, and I knew my brother was done for.”
Under my breath, I say to her, “Next we’ll work on that soccer coach.”
“He posted a video of bridge lifts. Do you know what those are?”
“I’m picturing hip thrusting.”
She nods, slowly and with lips pushed out. “It was almost pornographic.”
“That’s disgusting,” Klein complains as he kisses the side of my head.
“Get over it. I read every one of your social media posts since your account was created. I’ve liked, shared, commented, printed them out and glued them to my car, the whole nine.”
I burst out laughing. Eden grins.
“I appreciate the support,” Klein says dryly. “Let’s hope the interested publisher is at least a fraction as enthusiastic.”