The Pact(89)

This is news to me but she looks completely serious. “Really? But you put your heart and soul into this store.” I gesture to all the little finishing touches and details that she put there herself. “Your love for this place is everywhere.”

“I know,” she says. “But I love the online store too. It’ll still be love, just in a different form, that’s all.”

I can’t help but stare at her over those words. She may be able to go from loving a brick and mortar store to loving one made of bytes and pixels, but I can’t go from loving her like this to loving her like a friend. It won’t be the same. I won’t recover.

“Linden?” she asks. “You’re getting all brooding again. Look, I’m not saying I’ll do it for sure. But I’d be crazy not to. With online, I can manage it by myself and if I need help, it’s a lot easier to hire someone for a warehouse, for packaging and shipping shit than it is to be in customer service. A lot easier. Hiring is a complete bitch. Plus I’d make more money with no leases or crazy expensive rent to pay. And you know, if you hadn’t pushed me to start looking at my options, I wouldn’t have thought of having an online store to begin with.”

She walks over to me and pushes a dainty finger between my brows. “Stop frowning. You look like you have something to say to me. Say it.”

I can’t do it. Not tonight. I need to know what I’m saying goodbye to before I say goodbye.

“I love you,” I tell her. I grab her face in my hands and peer deep into her eyes. “I love you so much. And these words still aren’t enough.”

Her eyes shine in the dim light. “I love you too, cowboy.” She takes my hand and puts it on her chest. “Right here. Two hearts.”

I close my eyes and rest my forehead against hers. I want to hold on, just keep holding on.

“Let’s do something special tonight,” I murmur to her. “Anything you want?”

“Anything?” she muses. She wraps her arms around my waist and stares up at me. “Well, you know I like to do you. I could do you special style.”

I smile. “I have no doubt about that. But before. What’s the appetizer?”

She licks her lips, thinking.

“Come with me.” I pick up the packages and take her by the hand.

Thirty-minutes later we’re high on Hawk’s Hill, overlooking the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. I used to bring chicks here when I was younger and they’d ooh and aww over the sights. Tonight, there is no one here. It’s cold and the wind is picking up, but it’s moving the thick layer of fog below so that every so often the red-orange span of the bridge appears before it’s clothed again up to the tips.

I bring out a bottle of red wine and two coffee cups I got at the gas station and pour us both some cheap merlot. We sit on a rock and watch the show. The view is as dramatic as it can get and the fog glows like a radioactive sun from the city lights.

“This is beautiful,” she says softly. I turn to look at her. She’s the one that’s beautiful. Her perfect nose, her expressive lips and those soul-baring eyes that still take my breath away. Nine years later, she still takes my breath away.

I grab for her hand and hold it tight.

We go back to her place later and make love. It is slow, passionate and intense. She cries when she comes and I feel like I’ve given her every part of me and I never want it back. It hers to keep.

She curls her body into me and I hold on even tighter.

In the morning I’ll let go.





CHAPTER TWENTY

STEPHANIE



Before I even open my eyes the next morning, I know something has changed. I reach over with my hand but already know that Linden isn’t in bed with me. The place where he was sleeping, the whole night pressed against me, isn’t even warm. He’s been gone for a while.

He’s never left without saying goodbye. He’s never left while I’ve been asleep. I start to panic, thinking maybe there was something wrong with him, that he’s sick, before I hear cupboards closing in my kitchen.

I release a deep breath and sink back into the bed for a few moments longer. He’s not gone. He’s here.

But even so, as I lie there, he doesn’t come back to the bedroom. I can hear him, clearly because the walls are so thin in this tiny place, puttering around in the kitchen but he never comes out. For some reason I end up holding my breath again.

Eventually I get out of bed and slip on the robe that’s draped over the laundry basket and step out into the hall.

For all the commotion I heard, I thought maybe Linden had made breakfast as he usually does. But there is nothing except a carton of almond milk and a half empty glass. And Linden, fully dressed in a thin black Henley that shows off every curve of his muscles, dark jeans and a furrowed brow. He’s leaning on the counter and staring at a blank space in front of him. His jaw is set in a hard line and the air around us feels thick and charged.