“Oh God, holy shit,” Charli screamed.
“You sound like you did in bed last night,” I said with a smirk.
It felt damn good to be an arrogant hunk for a moment. No way I would let her affection go to my head. She was the kind of girl you spent a lifetime loving and adoring.
I’d come straight to Charli’s apartment when I woke up and found her missing.
“Your door was open so I came in, but I’m going to lock it now. This is New York, you know.”
Charli scowled at me from her perch on the couch. “My mom slithered out after I begged her to go, and I didn’t have the energy to get up.”
I kneeled at her feet. “Charleston, about the ring. It was my plan to ask you when I flew here on a whim—”
“Shhh.” She ran her hand around my ear, curving my hair behind it. “It’s not the time right now. We’re figuring things out.”
“It’s going to happen. You feel that? It’s our destiny. Do you want that? Can you love me any way I am? Big or lean?”
She nodded and a single tear dropped onto her cheek. I kissed it away, taking a long inhale of the woman in front of me.
“Lay, I love you and your big heart. That’s the only way I see you. The only way I want to see you. This new outside is only a bonus, but the inside is the prize.”
I leaned in, wedging myself between her thighs, and tried to kiss her.
“But marriage is so big,” she said, “and this whole thing I just went through with my mom ... God help me, but it seems like her whole marriage to my dad was wrong. So we need to put the ring away. I need to understand why she thinks she made such an epic mistake.”
“For now,” I mumbled into her mouth and kissed her. “And you may never understand. That’s parents. We don’t always know why or how or when. Like mine. They were married a long time before they had me. Almost as if one day, they decided, ‘Holy shit, we want to be parents.’ Then they were too old to even enjoy me and who I became as an adult.”
“A wonderful man,” she said and her stomach growled, ending our moment.
“Come on. Let’s get food, and then we can go see where I can live in this massive city.”
“I’m leaving here,” Charli declared. “Heading west.”
We went out for breakfast and I still refused to believe she was really moving ... until she wouldn’t give up. Girl was stubborn, I’d give her that. She maintained she’d wasted too many years on her career track to be unhappy, and now she was “beyond happy.” Her words, not mine.
And she insisted she wanted to be happier where the sun shone and where she could wear “flip-flops instead of stilettos.” More of her words.
My girl was a very literal person.
A week later, I received an e-mail from Charli’s moving company. Her stuff was arriving in ten days, and she’d be here in eleven. She kept insisting she was going to find her own place, that staying with me was only temporary.
I disagreed, but I didn’t tell her that.
Charli was struggling with what happened with her mom, so I didn’t push. I knew she wasn’t leaving once she moved in with me, though.
Not to mention I had a few tricks up my sleeve. I laughed to myself as I let Harriette outside for a pee break. Oh yeah, I had a few tricks.
I nodded to the construction crew renovating the run-down garage behind my house. I never used the dilapidated thing, but soon it would be a writing studio for Charli. I was putting in new windows, hardwood floors, a kitchenette and bathroom, and painting the whole interior lilac. And she didn’t know.
That was only the first part of the plan.
Eleven days later, I went to the airport and grabbed my girl. Charli hurried down the escalator in her flip-flops and jumped into my arms at the bottom.
“Did you ship half of Manhattan to California?”
She laughed into my ear and slid down my body, leaving my chubby on display. “No, only a third. Now are you ready?”
“Oh, I am.” I grazed her wrist with my length.
