Sleeping With Her Enemy(76)

By the time the boat docked, he knew a bunch of things with certainty. He knew that he would make Amy Morrison beef stroganoff every single goddamned day for the rest of her life if she wanted him to. He would eat peanut butter cups at the movies. He would trade in the millionaire-mobile and fold himself into her stupid little toy car every time he needed to go somewhere. He would memorize the stats of every single one of the Jays’ pitchers.

He’d spent the past fifteen years thinking he wasn’t looking for a relationship?

Fuck that.

The idea was as radical as the one he’d had years ago—more so, even. The stakes were higher. That had been his job. This? This was his life.

He picked up his phone.

Gary had better be home.

…

Amy juggled her popcorn bucket as she waited impatiently in line to board the ferry. She hoped she wasn’t too late.

Too late for what? It wasn’t like he was going to marry someone else this afternoon.

It was more that she had to do this before she lost her nerve. Being New, Fearless Amy was hard. She was fairly certain she was going to get her declaration thrown back in her face and her heart shredded.

But she had to try. She had to be honest. She had to go after what she wanted.

Because that’s what she was about now.

She just needed this goddamned ferry to move.

It felt like she’d come flying after him, but of course that wasn’t strictly true. Admittedly, she had stood in that pantry for a good five minutes, freaking out among the dry goods. And then, of course, it had taken her another twenty to extricate herself from her mother. There was also the detour to the movie theater for popcorn.

And, okay, there were twenty more in the middle there where she’d had to find Mason and tell him definitively what she should have told him earlier that morning. She hadn’t wanted to waste the time, but it seemed important that he know that they were, to in keeping with the Taylor theme, never ever ever getting back together.

She wanted to fully close the book on her old life. Say good-bye to the old house, the old love.

Because a totally clear head was necessary for the Hail Mary pass she was about to let loose. She was calling it Operation: Maybe You Can Have Everything.

Clutching her bucket of popcorn and shuffling along as the crowd moved like snails up the gangplank, she tried to figure out why she had been so frightened all this time to lay things on the line with Dax. The obvious answer was that she’d already had a declaration of love thrown back in her face once that summer. But that was only part of the truth. The rest of it was that even though she had been trying to remake her life, she’d fallen right back into the same old patterns, projecting everything into some vision of the future she’d arbitrarily fixated on. This one had been Amy Morrison, Fun Single Girl. She hadn’t stopped once to think that maybe, in her overcorrection, she was doing exactly the same thing she always did—programming her feelings instead of feeling them.

And what did it matter if Dax wasn’t the relationship type? What was the worst that could happen? She told him how she really felt, he rejected her, and they went back to being office enemies? It couldn’t be any worse that the last month without him had been.

She had missed him. God, how she’d missed him. She hadn’t even realized how much until all of a sudden he started appearing—at karaoke, at her house on moving day, at the white party.

The idea that he’d thought she was going back to Mason was impossible to bear.

She’d been trying to tell him she couldn’t make out with him in the pantry. Couldn’t be his casual fling. Because nothing about them was casual. She wanted all of him. Admitting that to herself was hard, because it meant that she would have to settle. Because she knew with certainty that no other man was ever going to measure up to Dax Harris.

Still, he deserved to know the truth.

Even more than that, she deserved to speak the truth.

The ping of an incoming text startled her—all this ruthless honesty was making her jumpy.

Come to the island.

A surge of adrenaline coursed through her.

Another text arrived.

Please.

It took her a long time to force her clumsy, shaking fingers to transmit her reply.

I’m on my way.



Amy saw Dax without him seeing her. Of course, he would have thought she’d been replying to his text from her parents’ house instead of from the boat and would not be expecting her this soon. As she drew near, he was just disappearing into Gary’s backyard. She stood for a moment, letting the cool wind blow against her overheated cheeks, and stared at his little house while she gathered her courage.

She knew then that this was why she was having so much trouble with moving, with the concept of home.