She just hadn’t remembered it this morning, on account of all those damned orgasms.
She smiled. “It is my birthday.”
“Ha! I thought so. Don’t move!” He pointed a finger at her like he was robbing her, and she played her role, lifting her hands up into the air.
Then, to her utter astonishment, he reached across the table and slid a birthday candle into her gelatinous egg. Because it wasn’t in an egg cup, was just rolling around on her plate, he had to pick it up and hold it in his hand. Then the other hand produced a lighter.
And the tears were back, little motherfuckers, threatening behind her eyes.
To distract herself from the wave of emotion that was hitting, she dug out her camera and said, “Say cheese. It’s only seven in the morning, but I can guarantee this is going to be the highlight of the day.”
He smiled for the camera, and when she was done she asked, “Where’d you get the candle and lighter?”
He waggled his eyebrows as he lit her candle. “I shamelessly manipulated that front desk woman at the hotel. Maybe you were right—I think she is into me.”
She stared into the flame, and, paradoxically, it made her remember the darkness of last night, the magical darkness that had made her the opposite of afraid.
“Are you going to sing?” she said, aiming for a teasing note but not quite hitting it.
“I am not going to sing.” His eyes danced. “But I am going to wish you a year of…” He trailed off and pursed his lips. He was trying to find the right thing to wish her. “A year of no regrets.”
It wasn’t the generic “health and happiness” sentiment most people would have expressed. No regrets. It was a good wish, if an impossible one.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Thirty.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s a big one.”
“Ah! Then I wish you a decade of no regrets.”
“Just a decade?” she teased.
“Point taken. How about you leave all those regrets behind in your twenties? Leave them behind for good.”
“Okay,” she whispered, and, wishing it could be so easy, she blew out her candle.
* * *
As Bennett pulled onto I-95, all was right with the world.
Well, of course that wasn’t true, not in any real sense. The world still contained hunger and poverty and war and—he glanced at Gia—eating disorders and sexual harassment and women who had no idea what they were worth.
But right here, right now, the cold of a New York winter was a distant memory, he’d been well and recently laid, he had a pretty damned amazing person in the passenger seat next to him, and he was on his way to his best friend’s wedding.
“I’ve missed Noah,” he said, apropos of nothing, but wanting to share with Gia how happy he was to be on his way to see him.
“Aww,” she said. “Best boyfriends!”
He rolled his eyes, but in a self-deprecating way, because she was right. “I could deal with that endless trip of his, but it kind of guts me to think that he’s never coming back to New York.”
“Thrown over for Wendy,” she teased.
Bennett nodded. “Not that I blame him. Wendy is pretty amazing.”
“She is. So are Jane and Elise.”
“I’ve met Jane, of course.” Noah’s sister had been a frequent visitor to New York over the years. “And yes, she’s pretty great, too.” Elise was the only one he hadn’t met. Gia’s best friend among best friends. Part of him wished he could enlist her to help Gia with the food stuff, but if Gia hadn’t told Elise, no way was he going to break her confidence.
He didn’t know what to do about that, truth be told, and when he thought of it, it deflated his good mood somewhat. He didn’t kid himself that he could “save” her. He wasn’t a white knight, and lucky for him she would never tolerate one. All he knew how to do was to…try to take care of her. And the only way he could think to do that was by being there. Trying to help in little ways. For example, he’d been stupidly gratified when she’d eaten the egg he’d ordered for her that morning.
“So what’s keeping you in New York?”
“What?” The question startled him.
“You hate the cold, your best friend bromance soul mate moved away, it’s super expensive there, and you’re trying to save money for this community restaurant initiative. There are people down on their luck pretty much everywhere, and—”
“I know, but—”
He’d interrupted her, but she interrupted him right back. “And you just made peace with your parents, or at least you’re on your way to doing that. You clearly love Charleston. And Chef Lalande is there. Why not move back?”
“I…have no idea.” He’d never thought of it, had honestly never considered doing a restaurant anywhere else. New York was where you went when you wanted to go big in the restaurant world.
But did he want to go big?
Not really, right? If he did, he’d be working on earning a Michelin star, not on feeding high-quality food to the hungry.
Fucking hell, maybe she was right. Why couldn’t he do that anywhere?
Then he thought about how the farther south they got, the more alive he felt.
He glanced at Gia. She was staring at him, eyebrows raised like she’d just yelled checkmate across a chessboard.
Or maybe that aliveness, that ever-increasing stirring in his blood, wasn’t the weather; maybe it was the woman next to him.
* * *
Bennett sure was in a good mood. Gia, on the other hand, was unsettled. The farther south they got, the worse it became. By the time they stopped outside of Jacksonville for lunch, she was pretty much having a low-grade panic attack. Which was absurd, because getting to the wedding had been her singular, driving goal for so long. Now it was within reach, and she was losing her shit?
She tried to break it down as they pulled into a truck stop restaurant for lunch.
First there was the immediate problem of lunch—namely, that she was going to have to eat something.
She and Bennett had been together 24-7 for the past three days. There was no way to brush off a meal the way she usually did. He knew she hadn’t “eaten earlier,” that she hadn’t “had a big breakfast so she wasn’t hungry for lunch.” Beyond that, even, she had confessed her secret to him.
He knew.
She was pretty sure that if she ate something reasonable, he wasn’t going to say anything. He was watching, though. He couldn’t hide it as he slid her a menu and said, with an air of forced casualness, “Hey, cool, they have a salad bar.” He certainly wasn’t saying that for his own benefit—there was no way he was having the salad bar.
So, basically, she had talked herself into a corner. If she didn’t want him to make a big deal over lunch, she had to eat.
She wondered if some part of her, some self-preserving part running on pure survivalist instinct, had told him for this very reason. If she’d talked herself into a corner on purpose.
The second part of her unspooling unease was the birthday thing. She was thirty freaking years old. That was hella old for a model with continuing runway and editorial ambitions.
“You know how some models cross over into lifestyle?” she said suddenly.
He furrowed his brow. “Doesn’t everyone have a lifestyle?”
He was so cute in his cluelessness. “No, I mean lifestyle like they make themselves into brands that sell stuff, like housewares. Cindy Crawford, for example, sells La-Z-Boys.”
“Cindy Crawford sells La-Z-Boys?” His confusion deepened, and so did her amusement.
“Yeah, or they sell, like, really expensive T-shirts by posing idly on verandahs with windblown hair and making you think that if you bought that T-shirt, you too could be beautiful and carefree.”
He barked a laugh. She hadn’t really been kidding, but she smiled at him.
“You want to do that?”
“No.” She really didn’t. “I’ve always been adamant that I’m not intereste
d in being a brand. I have no interest in acting, either, like so many models do. I get terrible stage fright, actually.”
“Still? Haven’t you been at this for years?”
“Every single runway I walk down, I’m sure it’s going to be my last because I’m literally going to die.”
“Huh.”
“So no gooping for me, is my point.”
“No what for you?”
She let loose a big belly laugh. She adored the way he was trying so hard to listen to her, to follow the conversation, but he was just not tuned into this world. Which was part of what she loved about him.
Liked. Liked about him.
“Lots of them don’t even go that far,” she said, not bothering to explain goop to him, because if she tried, pretty soon they’d be talking about jade eggs and hoo-has. “You don’t need your own brand these days. You just build up a huge social media presence, and then companies will get you to do sponsored posts and stuff. Like, oh, look at me, I just happen to be sunning myself here on my yacht with a million bottles of Coppertone casually strewn about.”
“That’s a job?”
“Well, they pay you for it.”
“Do you need the money?”
She shook her head. “No. Anyway, I’ve avoided social media like the plague. I’m not on any of it.”
“The ‘no selfie’ thing—I knew you were smart.”
“I didn’t want to be famous, you know? I’ve worked at the peak of this business, but I’m not known outside it. I don’t get stopped on the street. I designed it that way intentionally.”
“Like I said: smart.”
“Yeah, but maybe not. Maybe I should have thought more long-term.”
“Is this about your birthday?”
She shrugged. It was totally about her birthday, but she didn’t want to cop to it—which she didn’t have to, because the waitress arrived.
“I’ll have the salad bar,” she said, surrendering her menu and suppressing a sigh. She’d been thinking, recently, that things were getting better on the eating front. But that brief burst of optimism must have been an aberration. You didn’t have to be a shrink to see why. It was her birthday, which reminded her about her career dilemma. The more out of control she felt—and in her line of work, turning thirty was enough to make anyone feel out of control—the more she tried to exert control elsewhere. But just because she could recognize this pattern didn’t mean she knew how to break it.
Bennett ordered a patty melt and fries, which only proved her previous point: He was watching. He had pointed out the salad bar for her benefit.
The server departed, and they were left staring across the table at each other. She was sorry she’d started this whole conversation. She’d been thinking out loud, but that was a dangerous thing to do in front of He Who Is Always Watching.
“I’m going to hit the salad bar.” She stood, but he clamped a hand down on her forearm, preventing her from walking away.
“You can do whatever you want, Gia. If you want to do something else, do it.”
Yeah, that “dream big” bullshit was something you told six-year-olds. Not thirty-year-olds with no postsecondary degree and no skills to speak of.
She smiled weakly and pulled out of his grasp.
At the salad bar, she took a deep breath as she surveyed the offerings. It was better looking than she would have expected from a truck stop like this.
She filled her plate with lettuce and fresh veggies. And she should have some protein. She selected a few slices of chicken breast. Oh, and there was shrimp that didn’t look half-bad. Okay. She could do this.
“Finding everything okay?”
There was a man straightening out the dressings section. He wore a tag that said “manager” under his name.
“I am, and I have to say, I was glad to stumble onto this salad bar. It’s nice to have some fresh options while road-tripping.”
“Yeah, I hear that from people a lot.”
“You should advertise it. It’s not something you expect at a truck stop, you know? You have those billboards up on I-95, which is what drew us in. My…friend is always in search of nonchain, mom-and-pop places. But I bet if you actually said on there that you had a fresh salad bar, more people would come.”
The man was looking at her funny. Okay, fair enough. He didn’t need a lecture from her on how to run his business.
“You know what? You’re right. I’m not sure why we never thought of that.”
Gia blinked, surprised by his enthusiastic response.
“Your lunch is on the house, young lady.”
She gloated as she slid back into the booth across from Bennett. “My lunch is free because I’m a business genius!”
“What? Why?”
“I was just chatting with the manager. We were talking about how they should advertise that they have a salad bar. There are lots of truck stops on this interstate, but how many of them have a huge salad bar like this? It’s a competitive advantage, but most people, unless they’ve been here before, wouldn’t know it was here. I bet a lot of truckers get sick of the usual fast food.”
“I bet you’re right,” Bennett said quizzically.
“Or, oh! What they should do is measure it. It’s really big. Then they can say, ‘fifteen feet of fresh salad bar’ or something.”
Bennett cocked his head. He seemed to be giving the matter more consideration than it deserved. “I wondered what you guys were talking about. You looked really…animated.”
It had seemed like he was going to say something else, but stuck the word animated in there at the last minute. But he seemed to be done talking and was looking down at his lap with a weird look on his face.
Okay, well, lunchtime. Suppressing a sigh, she stabbed a beet and put it in her mouth.
“What’s the matter?” he said, and she realized she was making a face.
“Nothing. I was just thinking about those beets on the salad you fed me at Boudin. This is nothing like those beets.” It was about as far from those beets as Salisbury steak was from filet mignon.
He grinned. “The next time you’re in New York, come by, and I’ll feed you all the beets you can eat.”
And suddenly, with a great big sickening thud, the third item on her little “Why is Gia having a low-grade panic attack?” list rose in her consciousness.
The closer they got to St. Pete’s, the closer they were to the end of…them.
Bennett was, quite reasonably, referencing a time in the future when they would be separated by many miles. When she might “visit” him, and he might make her dinner, like they were old friends.
They had been floating in this weird bubble where it was just them. Gia and Bennett versus the elements, whether those elements were actual storms or metaphorical ones. They’d been operating outside the order and strictures of normal life, beyond the reach of the forces of chaos that usually governed relationships.
And now it was time to give it up. Give him up.
She didn’t want to.
But hey, she was pretty good at doing things she didn’t want to. Her bum knee twinged, a physical reminder of that fact. And no matter how much she tried to contort reality, no matter how blurry her math was, she couldn’t find a way to rationalize continuing to sleep with him. Beyond the fact that her friends would be onto her—she was sharing a room with Wendy for the few nights that were left before the wedding—it was profoundly unwise. Her “stupid rules,” as he’d called them last night, kept her safe.
If she kept sleeping with Bennett, pretty soon she would be upending her life for him. It wasn’t that she thought Bennett was anything like Lukas—or like that Wall Street guy who’d balked at her sweatpants or any of the other men who’d failed her various tests. She was pretty sure Bennett didn’t give a shit that she was a model. But he would try to collect her all the same—or, worse, to “save” her—if she let him. Serious, atoning Bennett would try to make whatever it was between them more than casual, because
that was what he did. He would try to make himself fall in love with her. He would try to make her fall in love with him. And she wasn’t doing that again.
She waited until Bennett went to the bathroom, flagged down the server, and had her take away her barely touched salad.
* * *
By the time they drove through Tampa on the final stretch of their journey that afternoon, Gia had steeled herself to do what needed to be done. It wasn’t like Bennett was going to be surprised. She’d been perfectly up-front with him from the start.
He pulled over suddenly, turned to her, and said, “I have a proposition for you.”
Here we are. This was the perfect opportunity to make sure they were on the same page about how things were going to unfold—or, more accurately, not unfold—over the next few days. He was going to push things, and she was going to have to shut him down.
Say it. Open your mouth and say it: “We can’t sleep together anymore.”
“How about we take the top down for the final stretch?”
She blinked. The way he’d pulled over right on the side of the highway rather than exit and find somewhere reasonable to stop, and the way he was looking at her—so earnestly and with such happiness in his eyes—had primed her to expect something more.
“We just have to cross the bay on the causeway, then drive a bit through the city to the hotel,” he said. “So the wind won’t be as bad as it would have been on the interstate.”
Say it. Say it.
It wasn’t like she was breaking up with him—they had never been together. She was just…clarifying things.
She opened her mouth. Closed it.
“But it will probably still turn your hair into a rat’s nest.” He turned back to start the car again.
“No!” she said, too loudly. “No, I think it’s a great idea. Why else do we have this ridiculous convertible?” That was true, regardless of what else needed to be said. Driving the final stretch with the top down would be fun.
He was back facing her, beaming. “Right? We started this wack journey in the snowstorm of the century, and we’ll finish it cruising to our ocean-side destination under sunny blue skies.”
Three Little Words Page 19
