Chapter 25
?
This is a first. I…like it.
Mirabelle
A dinner date. A perfectly normal and regular dinner date.
I’ve been on dinner dates before, so this isn’t a big deal.
Okay, fine. I actually have never been on a dinner date before, because I know the rules about dinners and afterwards, and since I’m not interested in all that, I have only ever gone on lunch dates with the guys I’ve considered as romantic options.
Lunches are, obviously, safer options whereby it concerns chastity.
And I am big on chastity, when I’m not being an idiot.
And I am no longer being an idiot.
I got the idiot out of my system.
I am now only being smart and wise and reasonable.
Which is why I will figure out what I’m wearing and be ready by the time Damion crosses his backyard to pick me up.
“You promised to be yourself,” I whisper at my reflection in the full-length mirror on the back of my bathroom door. “You promised.”
I promised, and so I have to dress as I normally would on a first date with someone.
Which means wearing my usual clothes.
I’ve selected a billowy skirt that shapes my nicest apron well while keeping my legs warm and one of my favorite hair scarves, which is more lace than not and dotted utterly with tiny pink flowers.
My long-sleeve sweater has two peekaboo shoulders that are wonderful for cuteness, but dreadful for mid-November warmth, which is why I’m hoping my skirt really pulls its weight.
Tangling my fingers, I stare at myself, at the dusting of light-pink makeup, at the apron, at the hair scarf.
I curled my hair. Just a little bit. Just enough for it to be a bit wavy.
I look nice.
I look me.
But I can’t stop thinking about that article. That he makes her line.
I’d look nice without the hair scarf and apron. I’d not have pockets, though. That’s a big reason why I am always in my aprons. They have pockets. Nice, big, wonderful pockets. And skirts, often, do not…
Pulling my phone out of one such big wonderful pocket, I gulp. I have two minutes to be at the door.
Blowing out a breath, I tuck my phone back in my pocket, exit the bathroom, and get my purse. If this relationship goes anywhere, I will need to get past the media nonsense and come out the other end as me.
The second that thought runs through my brain, I stop in the hall and blink.
When was the last time I concerned myself over coming out the other end of something as me?
I can’t remember ever thinking that. For as long as I can remember, I think I’ve always defaulted to getting through something by making sure that other people were most comfortable at the end.
The hairs on my arms and legs rise as I swallow, take a breath, head toward the door to wait.
It’s a bit scary to approach this with something to lose, with something I care about losing. But, in a way, when the something I care about losing is myself, it’s also refreshing.
It has been so long since I cared about losing myself.
So long since my heart has felt this light.
This hopeful.
This frightened.
It trips when Damion knocks, and I fortify myself to open the door.
Handsome as ever, he also looks like him. No fancy suit. No exaggerated pomp. Just him. In a pair of usual nice slacks and a well-fitted sweater.
His severe expression settles, melting, to accommodate a soft smile, and my chest squeezes. He murmurs, “You look beautiful.”
“It’s just my normal clothes.” I touch my cheek. “And some makeup. But…”
“You always look beautiful. I’ve always thought so.
It was the first thing I thought when I saw you.
” He swears, “—she’s beautiful. They let housekeepers be this pretty down here?
I gotta rent this place next year.” He tugs at the collar of his sweater.
“By the end of my first vacation, I’d booked the place for the next five summers.
By the end of the second, I was making plans to buy it.
By the end of the third, I only left so I could make arrangements to move.
And all because you were so pretty in your normal clothes, I couldn’t drag my eyes off you.
” He extends his hand before I can regain my breath. “Shall we?”
Eyes stuck on him, I lift my hand and let my fingers find the warmth of his skin before I whisper, “We shall.”
Bending, he touches his smile to my knuckles in a kiss, then leads me to his car, and my first ever date…as me…begins.
?
“So…” I blink at my pasta in the low lights of Viano’s Neighborhood Italian, then I jerk my attention back up, to my date. “Sorry. Context. It took me an entire car ride, ordering, and the appetizer to process what you said when you picked me up.”
Mouth full of chicken marsala, Damion looks up at me and arches a brow.
“You moved…because of me?”
He swallows. “Yeah.”
How positively casual an answer.
I find myself leaning over my garlic butter broccoli and baked ziti. “No, no. I mean. You moved for me?”
He blinks. “Yes. I moved, for you.”
I stare at him. “You packed up your life in…”
“New York.”
“New York.” I swallow, wet my lips. “And moved to…”
Humor courts the corner of his mouth. “Amarella, Georgia.”
“Here, yes. Here. Because of me?”
He reaches for a piece of Italian bread, dips it through a garlic and herb oil dish, then brings it to his lips. “To wife you, specifically.”
“I cleaned your house—” I shake my head. “I cleaned not even your house once a week each summer, and somehow that caused you to decide I was wife material?”
“Well. It’s more like I…fell in love at first sight and decided to move in an effort to see whether or not you were indeed wife material. My wife material, specifically.”
My lips part and hang open for several seconds. “You hired me on personally…”
“To get a closer look at your day-to-day behaviors, yes.”
My brain overheats and then possibly shuts down.
So I give it some pasta. Because pasta usually helps with most things.
“What even caught your attention? You just…like the way I look that much? Or maybe moving as a billionaire who can do anything isn’t that big of a deal?
” I relax some. “That must be it. You have so much money, it doesn’t really matter.
You can make insane choices on the off chance something will come of it. ”
“Does thinking that make you more comfortable?”
I shrink and poke my ziti. “Is…it not true?”
“To answer your question about me liking the way you look that much…in a word, yes. And to elaborate on the decision to turn my position remote, it mattered. It took loads of effort and reworking and an entire year. It was possible, because I am a billionaire and most things are possible in my class, but it wasn’t easy. It was just worth it.”
Worth it.
Worth it to turn his entire life upside down, leave everything he knows, all his friends, all the familiarity, even the climate he’s used to…to be closer to…me? That surely was not worth it.
And another thing, from the start he’s been considering me for marriage?
I reach for a slice of bread, because bread also tends to help with most things. Nibbling it, I murmur, “I’m afraid I don’t think I’m really following…”
“It’s okay,” he says. “You don’t really have to. What matters is that I’m serious, and you’re serious, and we’re seeing if we can work.”
“Right…” My eyes catch on him scribbling in his pro or con book. “But also, what are you writing down?”
“Do you really want to know?”
My stomach sinks. I know I’m a little stunned right now, but I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong. “Yes?”
“Pro: the way Mirabelle eats bread.”
“Huh?”
“It’s cute.”
I look down at my bread, which I am eating, like a normal person. “I don’t understand.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
I am extremely worried about it, and also everything.
He moved for me. He upturned his life for me. I was not prepared to experience this kind of pressure on our first date. I feel obligated to live up to these insane expectations I didn’t even have anything to do with, but I don’t know how to, because—quite apparently—the way I eat bread is a pro.
It hits me that this confusion and pressure qualify as cons, so I finish my piece of bread and scribble my own notes. Graciously, Damion doesn’t ask what they are.
Because he’s not saying anything.
He’s eating.
So I eat.
Until the silence chokes me.
“Damion?”
“Mm?”
“How…how’s work?”
He lifts a brow. “Work’s fine.”
I wait. Nothing more comes. Deflating, I whisper, “I don’t think I know how to carry a conversation.”
He puffs. “Where are you trying to carry it?”
“I don’t know. Out of the silence? I don’t want to bore you.
Aren’t we supposed to be talking so much we can barely find time to eat?
I don’t think we’re supposed to just sit here quietly.
How will we get to know each other that way?
What if we don’t click? What if we don’t share any interests?
What if the generation gap is too large? ”
His other brow shoots up to meet the first. “Did you just call me old?”
“N-no. You are older, but that doesn’t make you old.” I avert my gaze.
“Mirabelle.”
I tense.
“Please tell me you know what a VHS is.”
“Of course I know what a VHS is.”
“And Blockbuster?”
My eyes roll.
“RadioShack?”
“I’m not that much younger than you.”
“Huh. Then I guess I’m not that much older.” He takes a bite of his food. “It was sad when they stopped delivering milk in glass bottles, though. You remember that? What an uproar my parents caused[1].”
I…do not remember that. Because that stopped being popular in the sixties. “You aren’t old enough to remember that. Surely.”
He shrugs. “Really? What do I know? The paint was full of lead and science hadn’t been invented yet.
Whenever I got sick, my mother would pour eight glasses of whiskey and my family would gather round screaming shots, shots, shots.
I’d down everything, and be off to school.
Uphill. Both ways. In the snow. With thirty…
no, fifty pounds of books in my backpack. ”
I stare at this outrageous man for a good long minute, then I laugh. “You are unbearable.”
“Well, we know how I feel about the soft-core insults, but is my tendency to be unbearable a con in your little book?”
No. Not even a little bit.
“Your family,” I say, “what are they like?”
His gaze roves the ceiling for a moment, then he starts talking about his parents and a little sister, which reminds me I’ve always wanted a little sister, but never got one, which descends into a conversation about things we’ve wanted but couldn’t have, including a story about how Damion’s parents refused to get him a toy one of his friends had as a means to teach him that even though they had money, that didn’t mean they could have everything they wanted just because they wanted it.
“It’s good to want, they’d always say,” Damion murmurs, eyes fixed and heavy on me.
“It makes you ambitious, and someday…you’ll want something that isn’t effortless to get.
But you won’t give up on it when it isn’t just handed to you.
No matter what, you will want, and you will fight, until it’s yours.
” He smiles, so soft, so at peace. “It was mad frustrating when I was a kid, but, what can I say? They were right.”
From that point on, I don’t know if we remember to breathe in between talking and eating. I laugh more than I think I have in my entire life, and we walk the streets of downtown, over and over, as shops close all around us just so we can pretend that the night doesn’t have to end.
When it inevitably does, though, I find a list of pros in my little book headed by two cons, which I cross out.