At Valentina’s
RILEY
At Valentina's
Maybe stepping out was a mistake. I should’ve stayed home.
An even bigger mistake is dragging Easton into this mess.
A million and one thoughts run through my head, and for a minute, I feel lightheaded.
The owner of the boutique, who introduces herself as Valentina with the kind of warm efficiency that suggests she has handled worse mornings than mine, takes one look at me and doesn't ask a single question.
She just steers me into the main room of the boutique, which is small and beautifully lit and smells like jasmine and the faintest trace of perfume, and pours me a glass of cold water from a carafe before I have even sat down.
“Sit. Breathe.” She presses the glass into my hands. “Easton, water for you too?”
“I'm fine. Thank you, Valentina.” My eyes find his, and I realize he’s watching me with an intensity I haven’t seen from him before.
“You are not fine. You are tense. Sit.”
He sits. I almost laugh.
It's the first time I have watched him be told what to do, and the way he just absorbs it, no pushback, no negotiation, tells me Valentina is the kind of woman whose authority isn't up for debate.
She's in her fifties, dressed in soft gray linen, and she has the particular bearing of women who have made other women feel beautiful for a living and are very good at it.
“We’ll do this quickly, yes?” She's already moving, pulling rolling racks from somewhere along the back wall, eyeing me the way a tailor eyes a measurement. “Sizes?”
I tell her.
“Beautiful. Stay.”
She disappears.
For a second, the only sound is the soft hum of the air conditioning and my own slightly uneven breathing.
I take a sip of the water. The glass is cold and steady in my hands.
I look at Easton, sitting across from me on a small velvet bench, sleeves of his long-sleeve pushed up to his elbows, his forearms resting on his knees.
This is the first time I’ve actually looked at him in a good light.
The boutique’s lighting is the kind designed to flatter skin, soft and warm, and it catches on parts of him I hadn’t really noticed before.
The dark line of ink curling out from under the cuff of his pushed-up sleeve, more of it than I had clocked in the car last night, and in the living room this morning, when he’d emerged in a wife-beater.
The dark lines run down the inside of his forearm in clean black geometric shapes that disappear under his palm.
The shadow along his jaw that isn't quite stubble and not quite a beard, the way the soft light brings out the green in his eyes that, in the half-dark of the car, had only registered as hazel.
I’ve never been one to call a man beautiful. But Easton is.
“You okay?” He breaks the silence.
“Hm? Yes. Yeah. I'm fine.”
“Don’t lie to me, Riley,”
I smile because it’s the only way I can show him I’m fine. Well, not totally, but I’m going to be alright.
But he just tilts his head a fraction and lets it pass, which is becoming a pattern with him. He sees everything and is mindful with his words.
“We can go home, if it’ll make you feel better.”
“N-no. I’m fine. Really.”
Valentina comes back with an armful of fabric that, even from across the room, I can tell is going to be more beautiful than anything I’ve previously owned.
She hangs it on a rack beside the fitting area, gestures at the curtain, says, “Take your time, querida,” and then sweeps off toward the front of the shop to give us privacy.
I stand up. The first pull I do on the rack is the most boring thing on it. A gray t-shirt. Soft cotton. I pull a second hanger. A pair of black trousers, simple cut.
A third. A navy sweater.
I'm building a uniform. Half of me hears Preston’s voice in my head telling me gray isn't a color, it's an absence of color, why would I want to walk around looking like an absence, and the other half of me feels the small calm of selecting clothes that no one will criticize and talk down on.
Both halves are working at the same time and I don't bother arguing with either of them.
“Riley.”
I look up. Easton is on his feet, hands in his pockets, watching me work.
“What?”
“You are picking clothes that look like you are trying to be furniture.”
“I'm picking clothes that I can wear. That I want to wear.”
“They’re practical. I’ll give you that.”
“Yes.”
“They’re also the three fucking most boring things on that rack.”
I laugh and turn to him. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“What’s your problem?”
“I don’t have a problem.” His mouth twitches as he nods toward the rack. “I just didn’t realize we were shopping for clothes to attend a very stylish funeral.”
I laugh again, but he gestures toward the rest of the store.
“More importantly, I’m asking what you actually like. Not what you can wear or what you think you should wear. What do you look at and think, fuck yes, I want that? What makes you excited to put it on?”
I open my mouth, then close it.
He waits.
I can't remember the last time someone asked me that.
I can't remember the last time I asked myself that.
It's such a small question, yet I'm standing in a boutique in West Hollywood in someone else’s hoodie with my hand on a navy sweater I picked because no one would look at me twice in it, and it’s not a color Preston would have approved of, and I genuinely don't know.
“I…” My voice comes out thinner than I meant it to. “I don't know.”
“Okay.”
“That’s embarrassing.”
“No, it’s not.”
“It absolutely is.” I let the sweater drop back onto the rack and press the heel of my hand into my eye for a second. “I used to know. I think.”
“Take your time.”
I take my time.
I go back to the rack. I make myself look at it the way I used to look at things, before.
Colors. Fabrics. The shapes, and designs.
I pull a soft cream blouse that I would never have let Preston see me in because he would have called it bridal.
I pull a pair of jeans in a faded indigo that I love on sight.
I pull a green dress, deep emerald, the color Preston used to tell me to avoid because it was too much for a daytime event, which is exactly why I want it.
I pull a cropped cardigan in a butter yellow that has no business being as soft as it is.
Not that one. It doesn’t fit the image we’re trying to maintain, and it washes you out. The familiar voice fills my head.
I hold it a second too long, contemplating. Then I look up and see Easton’s eyes watching intently.
Can he tell? Oh god, am I that obvious? But at the same time, his words ring in my head. What do you like?
I grab the cardigan. I want it.
I also pull a slip dress in pale champagne that I've absolutely nowhere to wear it to but I take it anyway.
By the time I'm done, my arms are full, and I've not picked a single thing I would have picked an hour ago.
Easton watches me carry everything toward the fitting rooms. He doesn’t say a word, but as I pass him, I catch the slightest upward tug at the corner of his mouth.
The fitting room is generous, more like a small living room than a closet, with a velvet bench and a full-length mirror set into the wall.
I pull the curtain closed and start with the easy things, the t-shirt, the jeans, the cardigan.
They fit. They look like clothes a normal person would wear.
I feel, for thirty seconds, like a normal person.
I save the green dress for last.
It's deep emerald silk, and it has a high neckline in the front and a low scoop in the back, with a short zipper at the small of my back that I can't quite reach.
I twist and stretch, even attempting the over-the-shoulder approach, but it doesn’t work.
I stand there for a second, in a half-zipped dress, with my hair coming out of its knot, and consider my options.
“Easton.”
“Yeah.”
“I, uh.” I close my eyes. “I need help with a zipper.”
A beat.
“Are you decent?”
“Y-yeah.” I look down to be sure.
“Okay.”
I hear him stand. Hear his footsteps crossing the floor.
Why is my heart beating faster?
I pull the curtain back six inches, turn my back to it before he can see my face, and listen to him slip in.
The fitting room isn't small, exactly, but it becomes small with him in it. I feel the air change, accompanied by the warmth of someone standing a foot behind me without him touching me.
“Where?”
His voice is closer than I expect, and a shiver runs down my spine.
“There. The zip.” I point awkwardly behind me. “It’s stuck. Or it’s me. I don’t know which.”
He lets out a quiet breath. Then his fingers find the tiny zipper at my lower back.
I stop breathing.
This is stupid.
He’s helping me with a dress. That’s it.
But then he starts drawing the zipper upward, slowly and carefully, one inch at a time, and his knuckles brush my bare skin.
A gasp slips out before I can stop it.
I hope he didn’t hear.
I lift my eyes to the mirror, searching his face for any sign that he did.
Big mistake.
Easton is already looking at me.
His eyes are darker than they were under the boutique lights five minutes ago, his jaw tight, his mouth pressed into a line like he’s concentrating very hard on something that has absolutely nothing to do with a zipper.
My stomach flips.
I should look away, but somehow, I can’t. It’s like something invisible is holding my gaze to his, and for one breathless moment, nothing has ever felt more natural than looking at him like this.
Or more wrong.
I ran away from my wedding yesterday.
Yesterday.
I’m supposed to be devastated. Confused. Emotionally unavailable for the next decade.
I’m definitely not supposed to be standing in a fitting room wondering what would happen if Easton moved half a step closer.
The zipper reaches the top.
His fingers fall away.
For a second, his palm hovers at the small of my back. Close enough that I can feel the heat of it against my skin.
Then I blink, and it’s gone.
He steps back first.
“There,” he says, his voice low and rough, almost a growl. He clears his throat. “All you.”
“Thank you.”
“Yeah.”
He turns and slips back through the curtain. I hear him sit down hard on the bench outside.
I stand there in the green dress with my hand pressed to my own sternum and try to remember what breathing is.
When I come out, his eyes are on me. “That is the one. We’re definitely taking it.”
“It's just a dress.”
“Made for you, sweetheart.” The words come out in a voice so low that I could argue I wasn’t meant to hear them.
The rest of the shopping goes on, but he doesn’t look at me anymore.
And I notice the distance too. He’s not walking as close as when we arrived.
He’s not holding my arm to lead me. He’s just here, a step behind, except he does it again.
A palm at the small of my back when Valentina calls us over to a display of jewelry, gone the second I notice it.
A hand on my elbow, steadying, when I almost trip on the hem of a longer skirt.
Each one of them is so brief that if I were not paying attention I would miss it, and I'm paying attention to every single one of them, and I don't know what to do with any of them.
He pays. Valentina doesn't bat an eyelash at the total. The bags go into the car through the back lot, no paparazzi this time.
We pull out onto the road.
His phone buzzes on the dashboard mount.
This time, the name flashes in white on the small screen before he can do anything about it.
Maya.
It's up there for maybe a second and a half before he reaches forward and silences it, face flat, eyes on the road, not looking at me.
A girlfriend? It’s the first thing I register, with a frown but I shake it off.
“No one important,” he clarifies. Our eyes meet, and I simply nod.
The drive back is quiet. When we pull through the gate and the house comes into view, my phone buzzes in my lap.
I look down.
Dad.
I open it.
Dad:
Riley. Your mother and I need you to come home. Whatever is going on, we can sort it out as a family, the way we have always sorted things out. Preston is devastated, honey. He just wants to talk to you. Please come home.
I read it twice.
The car comes to a stop at the top of the driveway. Easton cuts the engine, and the silence settles in me.
I look up at the house. Then at Easton, and it dawns on me.
I don’t want to go home.
At least, not yet. So, I lock the screen, face down on my thigh, and turn to Easton again.
“Help me bring the bags in?”
“Whatever you want, love.” He winks and gets out of the car.
Love.
First sweetheart. Now love.
The words seem to come so easily to him, like affection isn’t something he has to think about or ration out. Maybe that’s just who Easton is. Warm. Kind. Caring in a way that feels completely effortless.
I know he doesn’t mean anything by it. He probably calls everyone sweetheart and love.
Still, I sit there for another second with a stupid smile spreading across my face.
Because apparently, I like the way those words sound when they come from him.
And just like that, the text doesn’t feel quite so heavy anymore.
I climb out of the car, close the door behind me, and decide I’m not letting thoughts of Preston ruin another minute of today.
This is my life now.
I intend to start living it.