Chapter Twenty-Three
Bobbi
I groan as muscles not generally used ache in protest of last night’s vigorous sex. The gap between the curtains lets in the light, which looks like late morning. But then I needed the sleep.
Thank God it’s Sunday.
Despite the soreness, I feel fantastic. I haven’t had so many orgasms in one night in a long time—not since Noah ghosted me. And as much as I like my toys, they can’t deliver the intensity and intimacy Noah can. It’s ironic that the man who’s disappeared on me more than anybody else also gives me the most intense emotional connection I’ve ever felt.
Feeling silly-happy, I roll face-down and slide my cheek along the sheet. It’s a bit warm—so he hasn’t been up for long—and it smells like him. A small voice warns me to be wary. After all, where’s the proof he’s changed? But at the same time, I promised to give him a chance. Doubting him wouldn’t be fair. And constantly worrying about bad outcomes won’t help the situation.
Still, that doesn’t mean I’m going to ignore what he’s done wrong. He needs to explain his behavior. Why didn’t he show up? Why didn’t he call? Why did he ghost me over and over again? He needs to offer some real answers if he’s serious about wanting to be part of my life. We can’t keep doing the same thing and expect a different result.
Noises come from the kitchen. Noah must be looking for food—maybe even nonexistent croissants—there. He might be entertaining Se?or Mittens, too. I’m stunned my cat isn’t here in bed with me, demanding to be petted and fussed over.
I stretch, then roll over and out of bed. Time to grab a quick shower and start the day. I walk into the master bathroom naked, then stare at myself in the mirror. What the…?
Hickeys cover my torso, like somebody carpet-bombed me with kisses. Noah was acting jealous, but I thought he got over it once we started to make out.
“Marking his territory. Mature. Very mature,” I mutter, then laugh, a flush spreading over my face. Is it weird of me to be pleased that he was so possessive last night? It makes me feel like I matter—and that he cares. Even my own parents didn’t care what happened to me as long as they never got a call from school.
I shower quickly and put on a red tank top with cotton boxer shorts, then follow the heavenly aroma of fresh coffee to the kitchen. Noah’s in there, dressed only in shorts. The sunlight pouring in through the windows hits his body just right, showing off the incredible lines of his abs and shoulders that make my breath hitch. But the best part is his forearms. He practices martial arts—he didn’t take me down with a quick judo move by just being pretty—and he has forearms that a top-level practitioner would envy. They’re thick but so lean that every muscle and vein is visible. Most importantly, they’re strong. When he grips you, it’s nearly impossible to get away.
And right now, he’s hanging on to me with everything he’s got, in every way he can.
His back and shoulders are scored with scratch marks going every which way, which is a little embarrassing—I marked him up pretty well, too. Guess I lost control, but he drove me absolutely crazy. It was probably the best sex we’ve ever had.
Noah hands me a mugful of coffee. “Here. With a dash of sugar.”
I raise my eyebrows and take a sip. “You remembered.”
“Of course.”
I sigh with appreciation as caffeine starts to seep into my veins. “You make the best coffee. I don’t get it. It’s the same machine, same beans and same water, but it tastes better when you do it.”
“Because I make it with lurve.”
I laugh.
But he continues, “It’s the same way you bake better than me even though we use the same recipe, oven and ingredients.”
“Because I bake it with love?”
“I believe you do.” He flashes me a wide grin, the corners of his eyes crinkling.
This scene feels so blissfully ordinary, a normal vignette out of a regular couple’s life. I’ve dreamed of having that with Noah, but it’s a little weird to experience after having decided it would never happen. When I wanted it I couldn’t have it, but after I gave up, thinking it wasn’t in the cards for me… Now I get to live it. Why?
To hide my unsettled emotional state, I drop my gaze. Se?or Mittens seems to have no such existential uncertainty as he tucks into his breakfast. “What’s he eating?” I squint. “Are those bugs in his cream?”
Noah chokes back a laugh. “No, I wouldn’t feed Se?or Mittens bugs! Ew.” He pulls out a bag of egg bagels from my pantry, the movement easy and familiar. He must’ve been busy reacquainting himself with my home while I was sleeping. “Want one?”
“Yes. But what are those black things?” They might not be bugs, but they definitely look iffy. I’ve never seen cat food that looks like that.
Noah cuts the bagels and dumps them into the toaster. “Fish eggs. Caviar, to be specific.”
“You’re feeding my cat caviar?”
“He already ate the filet mignon.”
I gape. “You gave him filet mignon, too?”
He nods. “Caviar doesn’t provide all the proper nutrients. You didn’t know that?”
His tone says he’s shocked I didn’t know, but I’m too stunned to comment on that. “But caviar? And filet mignon?” Then it hits me, and my eyes narrow. “Just how long have you been feeding him?”
“As soon as it became clear how important he was going to be in my quest to get another chance, and I ramped my efforts up after you bought that ring. But don’t worry. I’ve varied his diet—beef, tuna, wild salmon…” he says when he notices my expression. “I’ve been very conscientious about Se?or Mittens’s health and nutritional needs.”
Oh my God.“So what have you been doing? Lurking around, luring him outside so you could feed him?”
“Uh, no. That would be weird and stalkerish. I just fed him here when you weren’t home. Or, you know…were sleeping.”
“I changed the locks!”
He gives me a look. “And? Come on. You know that no lock can keep me away when you’re the only one I want.”
There it is again. He constantly tells me I’m the only one, so I should be used to it. But every time he says it, my heart still leaps like it’s the first time. “That explains why Se?or Mittens refuses to touch my food.” I try for a normal tone of voice, not wanting him to know just how deeply he’s affecting me. We haven’t established all the ground rules and expectations, and while the sex is fabulous, sex was never the reason our relationship faltered.
“Nothing beats a sashimi-grade ahi tuna steak topped with caviar.” His light tone is a little forced. He’s aware of my unease and is trying to keep the mood from growing too heavy.
“Seems like a lot of effort to go to.”
“I also petted him, brushed his fur and bought him some toys. Well, the toys were secret, but I’m not sure how well he hid them from you.”
“I never noticed because I was too worried about him not eating. I wondered why he wasn’t as grumpy as he used to be.”
Noah takes my hand in his and gently squeezes, linking our fingers. “You said you’d give me an opportunity if I could win your cat over. I would’ve done anything for a chance with you.”
“You keep telling me that, and I’m not going to deny our chemistry is still amazing. But Noah, I need more than that to be sure it’s going to work out between us.”
“I know.” He puts the toasted bagels on two plates and pulls out a tub of whipped cream cheese—my favorite. It’s a new tub; he must’ve bought it earlier. “Let’s eat and talk. More coffee?”
I nod and grab another cup of coffee. Noah heads to the storage closet in the living room. He must’ve hidden something there while I was out. So much for the secure lock.
I take a stool by the counter, spread cream cheese on a bagel and start eating. A few moments later Noah brings out a canvas and carries it sideways into the kitchen.
My eyebrows arch. “Are we having an art show?”
“I was going to show it to you yesterday, but then you decided to attack me.”
“I thought you were a burglar!”
“I was going to say something, but then I realized you were with another man.”
“I wasn’t.” I prop my elbow on the counter, then drop my chin in my hand. “And as much fun as it is to watch you get all jealous, it’s pretty gross to hear you talk about my cousin like we have something going on.”
He goes still for a moment before a gorgeous smile splits his face. “Thank you. I was going crazy inside.”
“Just inside?” I look down at myself. “My torso looks like somebody decided to open up a hickey farm.”
His index finger tips my chin up as he looks into my eyes. “When the only woman I’ve ever loved comes home like that… You should worry if I don’t react.”
My pulse picks up at the stark intensity of his tone. A deeply buried sense of self-preservation says I should put up my shields—and fast—because too much honesty will leave me exposed. At the same time, if I can’t be honest with him, I can’t expect him to reciprocate. It’s scary as hell, but…
“I know,” I say softly. “And…I liked it. It made me feel like I mattered to you.”
“You matter. I was thinking about you when I made this.” He starts to fuss with the canvas. It’s a bit awkward to arrange it in my rather small kitchen. “Remember how I said I was manifesting my future with you? I don’t know if that stuff really works, but I wanted to be specific in case it does. And I wanted to put some effort into it rather than cutting up magazine photos or something. That’s boring.”
“What I remember is you putting your face on my vision board,” I say. “Don’t tell me you printed out our faces and put them over pictures.”
He shakes his head. “Oh, no. Better than that.” He finally gets the angle of the canvas right and whips the cover off. “Behold! The vision painting!”
I steel myself not to say the first thing that pops into my head. It’s not an abstract or post-modernistic piece like I was forced to endure when my former clients went to galleries full of super-weird art you must love if you want to be considered cool. But I’m not a hundred percent sure what it is either. It’s an oil painting, that much is clear…but there are so many random objects on the canvas, and none of them are particularly well-drawn or to scale. A couple stands in the center with four strollers. The man has dark hair and is wearing a tux. The woman must be the bride with yellow-brown hair with specks of ivory mixed in. Her dress is long and white, the skirt huge and puffed out. But the man manages to stand next to her anyway—ditto for the overly large strollers that surround the two. White globs circle the couple. They are too big to be rocks. I squint at them. Maybe ghosts?
On their left is something that reminds me of The Last Supper, except there are seven men and seven women at the feast with little puppies—or kittens?—in colorful clothes crawling underneath the table. To the right of the couple is a house on a yellow cliff over pounding waves the color of fresh bruises.
And are those flying croissants, cupcakes and…a donut in the sky? They might be interesting interpretations of UFOs, except thematically they feel off because I just realized the thing that I thought was a glazed donut is actually a sapphire ring. It’s just that the stone is so big, I thought it was a glob of unblended paint.
Not an unfair assessment, based on the artistic talent displayed.
“Did you commission it?” I ask, debating what it’s supposed to represent. Or, if it’s a present, where I’m supposed to hang the thing.
“Commission it? Baby, I did it.” Noah beams. “So every aspect is exactly the way I envision things. This is actually my third try. The first two weren’t that great.”
“Oh. Well, third time’s the charm, and all that.” Now I’m morbidly curious what the first two were like. He looks at me expectantly, reminding me of Buster when he’s done something he believes is particularly clever. I smile, doing my best to appear excited. “Wow. It’s, um, amazing.”
“Thank you.” He laughs a little, the tips of his ears turning slightly red. A sheepish vulnerability tinges his smile, and I realize with unexpected tenderness that he knows his masterpiece is no da Vinci, but it was the best he could do.
I study the painting again. After the initial shock, it doesn’t seem that bad. And most importantly, I appreciate the effort he put in.
“This way,” he says, “everything that I’d like in our lives is properly represented. I was going to use color pencils, but that would have taken too long. Plus I didn’t want to mix them with crayons. It’s not a kindergarten art project.”
“Definitely not. It’s far too serious.” I try not to giggle as I imagine the little toddler Noah working with crayons to draw something pretty for his mother. Or the teacher he had a baby crush on. “Why don’t you explain what this picture is supposed to represent?”
He puts a hand on my shoulder and points. “Okay, so the couple in the center? That’s us—married. Your wedding gown. All white and pretty.”
“Where’s the ring?” I tease a little since he was so adamant about buying me a suitable ring at Peery Diamonds.
“Over there.” He points to the flying sapphire ring. “A blue diamond stone because you seem very partial to that.”
I blink slowly. “That rock is totally not drawn to scale. It looks as big as my fist.”
“Nah, just your thumbnail, maybe. You can find one that large, no problem. And I plan to get one so everyone knows you’re mine, and how much I value you.” He lifts my hand and kisses the back, his lips warm and firm. His eyes are on mine, shining with earnestness. Hope stirs, dancing in my heart like a little fairy under the moon. “Bobbi, I’ll lay the world at your feet if you’ll just give me a chance.”
He is charming his way back into my heart, so effortlessly. But I’m not ready to fully accept him yet, not after what he’s put me through.
I sniff. “Why are we surrounded by ghosts?”
“Ghosts? Where?”
“There.” I point to the white blobs circling us and the strollers.
His jaw drops. “Those are calla lilies!”
“Calla lilies don’t get as big as strollers.”
“They’re for our wedding.” His cheeks are slightly flushed. “As for the size, put enough of them together and they’ll make a sort of, you know…corsage that’s that large.”
Laughing, I lay my forehead on his shoulder. He’s surprisingly cute and vulnerable. “What about the cupcakes and croissants?”
“Your career as a baker.”
“I don’t bake flying cupcakes.”
“It’s, like, allegorical. They represent soaring success.” There’s such a deep level of faith and humor in his tone.
I laugh again.
“I thought it looked better than having Bobbi’s Sweet Things buried under a giant pile of money,” he says. “I tried that, but it ended up looking like somebody moved your bakery to a pot farm.”
I’m to the point of wiping tears from my eyes. “And that brooding gothic mansion?”
He frowns. “Gothic? Does it look gothic to you? That’s the Malibu house.”
I lean closer. “Your place is not on a cliff.”
“That’s sand.”
I shake my head, then giggle. “It’s a good thing you’re independently wealthy.”
“Agreed,” he says sincerely, good humor sparkling in his gorgeous eyes. “I thought you might like living there better. It’s on the beach, which, see, is represented by that sand there, and bigger. The kitchen’s pretty impressive too.”
“With a much prettier floor.”
“That too.” His expression softens. “But if your commute is too sucky, we can live here.”
The offer is surprising. I know how amazing his house is. “You want to downgrade to here?”
“It’s an upgrade if I get to be with you. Plus we could buy a house we like better. Or I can just buy you a helicopter and you can use that for the commute.”
“And how am I supposed to pilot it and where am I supposed to land it?”
He waves a hand. “I can get you a pilot. The Malibu place doesn’t have a helipad, but I can put one in, no problem. And the building your bakery is in has a big enough roof—enough to support a small helipad.”
“Floyd—my landlord—is a dickhead.”
“I’ll make it worth his while.”
I suddenly realize Noah is totally serious, even though I was half-teasing when he got too extravagant for my middle-class mindset. He’s thought a lot of this through, put a lot of effort into visualizing what he’d like us to have together.
“But really, that’s just details,” he says. “What’s important is that you and I will be together. That’s why we’re in the center, holding hands.”
“With four kids…?” I glance at the strollers around the couple in the picture.
“Well, I thought you’d want more than one.”
“But four?” I ask, surprised he painted the ideal number of children I had in mind.
“Thought it’d be a good upper limit, although we can have more if you want. I’m flexible.”
The way he says “I’m flexible” makes me want to double-check. He shouldn’t think only about what I want, not if he hopes to build a future together. It should be what we want. “Don’t you have an idea of how many you’d like?”
“Nope. I’m not the one carrying them for nine months. I have more than enough money to support them financially, and it’s about you being happy with the family we end up creating.”
“What about your happiness?”
“Making you happy makes me happy.” He tucks a wayward tendril behind my ear, his fingertips brushing my sensitive skin and sending warm shivers down my back.
“What if you do something that makes me unhappy?”
“I’ll kick my own ass.” The response is prompt and serious.
“I don’t think you’re that flexible.”
“I’ll work on it. Or you can ask Griffin. One of my brothers, who does kickboxing. His kicks hurt like hell. I’ll be limping for days.”
I snort, then laugh at his exaggerated expression of pain. “Did you guys fight a lot?” I ask, curious about his childhood. I realize that we’ve never really talked about our families. I wasn’t in the mood to talk about mine since it hasn’t been that long since Dad died, and I didn’t want to dampen the mood, especially when I wasn’t even that close to him. And since I wasn’t going to talk about my family, I didn’t feel comfortable probing about Noah’s. I didn’t even realize his father was Ted Lasker until Noah crashed that godawful “date” with Joey.
“Nah. I mean, we argue and give each other shit as much as any siblings. But we’ve been always tight since it’s just us against the world.” A fond smile crosses his face, then he must see something in my expression because he adds, “Our parents just aren’t always around. And it turned out better that they mostly stayed out of our lives. We’re happier on our own.”
I nod. “I’m glad you have your brothers.” I wonder if I would’ve been less distraught over the loss of my mother and father if I’d had siblings. Although I’m close to TJ and Josie, I felt so bereft when my parents died overseas.
Okay, time to reset my mood.Don’t want to dwell on the past right now. I gesture at the final section of the canvas. “And The Last Supper?”
“The Last Supper?” Noah chortles, then tilts his head. “I guess it bears a passing resemblance… Does this mean my painting’s almost as good as a da Vinci?”
“Well… If you cut this section out from the rest of the canvas…”
“Can’t do that. It’s part of the whole manifestation.”
“With flying cupcakes and croissants. And a ring.”
“Yes. But you’ll notice there are no crème de la hairballs. Anyway, it’s the brothers and the wives getting together,” he explains.
“Do they have a lot of dogs?”
“Dogs?”
I point at the animals around their feet.
Mock horror crosses his face. He probably thinks I’m messing with him. “No! They’re the kids. Can’t you tell from the onesies?”
“I thought they were dressed up puppies.”
Noah looks mildly insulted. “They don’t look anything like dogs. See? No fur.”
“You might’ve tried to draw fur and failed.”
“No.” His shoulders shake with mirth. “Oh man, just wait until I tell my brothers. They’ll give me shit about it.”
“So just don’t tell them…?”
“Nah, it’s fine. We always do it.” He grows sober. “I haven’t introduced you to them, but they’re important to me, and I want you to like them. All of us can be together and make a bigger family unit that has each other’s backs.”
“That sounds amazing.”
“Yeah. They’re fantastic. And your family can be part of the picture, too. I just didn’t know how to fit them in since I wasn’t sure who you like and who you want to delete from your life. I can add people, though.”
“I’m sure my cousins and aunt will appreciate that,” I say with a small smile.
He points at a white dot near us and the stroller. “The cat is Se?or Mittens.”
I keep a straight face and nod. “How about a dog?” I ask, in case one of the wraithlike globs is a puppy Noah always wanted.
“Can’t. That’d be cruel to Nicholas.”
“Nicholas?”
“Another brother. He’s allergic to cats and dogs. About once a month or so, the brothers go around and host boys-only brunches, while the women get together for their girls-only fun time. None of us have pets, so Nicholas can join us without any problem.”
“Oh…” How will that work with Se?or Mittens? He’s part of my life and I can’t imagine giving him up. But Noah’s brother matters, too.
Noah says: “But Se?or Mittens is an important part of the family, so I can host the brunch elsewhere when it’s my turn. You shouldn’t have to give anything up, Bobbi. I don’t want you to, and none of my brothers would expect you to, either.”
It’s such a lovely vision that my wariness is starting to dissolve. But my logical side says he still hasn’t explained why he hasn’t been keeping his word to me. Unless I can be sure he won’t do that again, I can’t be certain that everything he’s told me just now isn’t just an empty promise, like before.
I consider what I’m about to say with care, so I don’t come across as unappreciative or dismissive of his effort. Turning to him, I meet his eyes with a little smile and place my hand on his. “That’s really nice and specific. Thank you for sharing. But I’m kind of having a problem trusting that it’s really going to happen the way you’ve laid it out.”