12. Dean
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Dean
I’ve never brought anyone here before.
The thought keeps circling while I watch Eve move through the empty restaurant, her fingers trailing the marble bar top, the reclaimed wood shelves, the brick I spent three weekends on my knees scrubbing back to life.
Afternoon light pours through the front windows and turns her hair gold, and my chest cracks open so wide I doubt I’ll ever get it shut again.
Six months. This place has been my secret for six months.
My escape hatch, my proof of concept, the evidence I kept hidden even from her that there was a version of me that existed outside the long shadow of the Valentine name.
I never showed it to anyone because showing it meant it was real, and real meant it could be taken, and everything I have ever loved in front of my family has been taken.
So I kept it in the dark, mine, unspoiled, a candle I cupped my hands around so nobody could blow it out.
And now I’m handing it to her, and my pulse is going like I’m doing something dangerous, because I am.
“I wanted to surprise you,” I say. Drop cloths still cover half the tables.
The air smells of fresh paint and the sawdust from last week’s shelving.
“This was supposed to be our first real date. I had the whole menu planned. I was going to cook for you myself, badly, and pretend I meant it to taste like that.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” She turns, the light behind her, and I lose the thread of whatever I was going to say for a second.
“Because you were drowning. The wedding, the revenge, the fire, the hearing. I didn’t want to be one more thing you had to hold.
” I drag a hand through my hair, the nervous habit I’ve never beaten.
“And honestly, because I didn’t know how you’d take it.
A man who keeps a whole second life in his back pocket and never mentions it.
That’s the thing that turns out to be a red flag in the third act. ”
“Is it a sex dungeon?”
“It’s a bistro, Eve.”
“Could be both. I’ve stopped assuming.” But she’s smiling, and the smile reaches all the way up, and I feel it like sun. “Does Hilda know about it?”
“She tried to buy the building out from under me last year. Anonymously, through a shell company, because she’s nothing if not theatrical.
” Grim satisfaction, there. “It failed. The paperwork’s airtight.
My grandmother set it up specifically to lock the Valentines out, every last one of them, on purpose.
Grandma Rose knew exactly what her daughter had become.
She left me the one piece of the family money my mother could never get her hands on, and she did it with a lawyer Hilda hates, just to twist the knife from the grave.
I think about that a lot. It keeps me warm. ”
“She sounds incredible.”
“She was the only one of them who ever looked at me like I was the answer to something instead of the problem.” I cross the room to her, slow, and wrap my arms around her from behind, and breathe her in.
Coffee and something floral, her shampoo, and the thing underneath that’s only her.
“I’m calling it Nightshade. Pretty, and a little bit poison.
It seemed honest, for the year I’ve had. ”
She huffs a laugh, leaning back into me. “It suits you. Beautiful and quietly lethal.”
“You’d know.”
“I would.”
“Here’s the part I’m actually nervous about.” I turn her in my arms to face me, my hands settling at her hips. “It opens in a few months. Grand opening, press, the whole circus. And I want you there. Not in the back, not hiding, not a secret. Out front. As my partner.”
Her breath catches. “Dean, I don’t know the first thing about running a restaurant.”
“You know business. You know numbers. You know how to build something out of ash, because you’ve spent the last month doing exactly that with your own life.
” I search her face for the answer I’m starving for.
“I’m not asking you to plate the food. I’m asking you to build something with me.
Something that’s ours, with our name on the lease and nobody else’s fingers in it.
We leave Simon and Kiara and my mother to their lawsuits and their misery, and we go make a place where people are happy, and we run it together, and we never have to sit at one of their tables again. ”
“You’re asking me to go into business with you.”
“I’m asking you to build a life with me.
” I take her hand and press it flat to my chest, where she has to feel exactly what she does to my heart rate.
“I know it’s fast. I know we’ve been whatever we are for a matter of days.
But I’ve wanted you for years, Eve, longer than I’ve let myself count, and I have done patient.
I am the world champion of patient. I’m done being good at it. ”
“Yes.” No hesitation, none. “To all of it. The restaurant, the partner, the life. Yes.”
My whole world shrinks to her face and the way she’s looking at me, like I just handed her something she never let herself want out loud.
We spend the afternoon cleaning the place, peeling drop cloths, making lists, stealing kisses behind the bar like teenagers.
For a few hours she forgets that there are people trying to ruin her, and I forget that I lost my family in a doorway this week, and we are just two people in an empty restaurant building something instead of burning something down.
I’d forgotten that was an option. I’d forgotten you could make a thing instead of survive a thing.
We order a pizza from the place down the block and eat it on the kitchen floor, sitting on overturned crates, grease on napkins neither of us bothers to use. The sun drops through the windows and lights everything gold and rose.
“Tell me something I don’t know about you,” I say, reaching for another slice.
“I wanted to be a marine biologist. Quit in college when I found out I get violently seasick on anything bigger than a bathtub. Wept on a whale-watching boat. A child gave me a cracker.”
“Devastating.”
“What about you? Something real.”
The slice goes still in my hand. There’s a thing I’ve carried for years, a stone in my shoe I’ve never taken out for anyone.
“I almost told you how I felt once,” I say. “The night before you got engaged to him.”
She goes very still. “What?”
“You and Simon had that fight, the one about the trip he canceled last minute, the one you’d planned for months.
You came to my parents’ for dinner anyway because you didn’t want to make a scene, and he was an hour late, and you sat there making conversation with my mother and pretending you weren’t dying inside.
” The memory is still vivid enough to draw blood.
“I walked you to your car after. And I stood there with the whole thing right behind my teeth. You deserve better than this. I could be better than this. Pick me. Five words. I had them ready.”
“What stopped you?”
“He showed up. Headlights in the driveway, flowers in his hand, that grin he does. And you lit up, because you wanted so badly to believe he was the man he pretended to be, and who was I to take that hope away from you in a driveway.” The bitterness leaks through no matter how I hold it.
“So I watched you drive off with him. And the next morning he told me you two were getting engaged. And I shook his hand.”
“I remember that night.” Her voice has gone thin.
“I went home and I couldn’t sleep, and I told myself it was nerves about the proposal I knew was coming.
But it wasn’t. I lay awake thinking about you, about the way you looked at me in that driveway, and I felt so guilty I made myself stop.
I trained myself out of it. Three years. ”
“There was nothing to feel guilty about.”
“Wasn’t there? I was about to marry your brother. And part of me was already gone somewhere it shouldn’t have.”
I kiss her before she can finish the sentence, because I cannot stand to hear it end with his name in it, not here, not in the one place that’s only mine.
“I am so tired of talking about my brother,” I say against her mouth.
“Then don’t.”
I lift her onto the marble counter, the one I chose six months ago because I loved the way the veining catches the light, the one I am about to ruin for any other purpose for the rest of my life. She gasps at the cold of the stone against the back of her thighs.
“Here’s the thing about my brother,” I say, dragging her shirt up and off, my hands settling on her bare waist and gripping, “since you brought him up. He had you for three years, Eve. And he never once looked at you the way I’m looking at you right now.
He never learned you. Never paid attention.
Never noticed when you went quiet at a dinner table because someone said something that hit wrong.
” My mouth finds her throat, finds the mark from the courthouse still faintly there, and I press my lips to it, satisfied in a way I am not entirely proud of.
“I noticed all of it. From across the table. The whole time. So no, I don’t take you for granted.
I take you like a man who watched someone else waste you and swore he never would. ”
“Dean.” It comes out half warning, half plea, her fingers fisting in my collar.
“Say you’re mine.” I don’t recognize my own voice, low and rough, every leash I’ve ever worn finally off.
I reach behind her, unhook her bra, watch it fall, and put my hands on her like I’m staking a claim I waited three years to file.
“I know it’s too much. I know it’s too fast and too soon and too everything.
I have spent years watching another man have you and pretend it didn’t gut me, and I am done pretending. Say it.”