We’d never spoken about him going. He’d forwarded me a couple of emails that set out details of his departure dates but I hadn’t replied and he never mentioned it when we were face to face. I took a deep breath and tried to bury the thoughts of him leaving. Two weeks was plenty of time. Plenty of time for him to ask me to go with him.
“Next weekend we’re carving out a bit of the USA here in London and having Thanksgiving dinner at your sister’s, remember? You can’t tie me to a bed for Thanksgiving.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. I’d be very thankful if you were tied to the bed.”
I bit into his shoulder in response and he pulled me over his body. I wanted to ask him what happened next. I wanted to ask him if he thought we could do long distance. I wanted him to ask me to move to New York.
“What are you thinking?” he asked, brushing my hair away from my face.
I shook my head. “I was imagining being tied to the bed.”
I grinned but he didn’t. “Don’t bullshit me.”
I looked down at his chest and traced my finger across his hard muscle. “Not now. Not yet.”
He lifted my head up but I kept my eyes low. “Look at me, Anna.”
I wasn’t ready for the conversation about what happened next. I wasn’t ready for it to be over, either. I wanted to keep enjoying what we had. I wanted Ethan for longer than three months. This wasn’t how this was supposed to have gone. This was supposed to be the guy that helped me move on. This wasn’t supposed to be the guy I fell in love with.
I lifted my eyes to meet his and his gaze was dark, intense—as if they were trying to pull something out of me. “When?” he asked. “We have to talk about it sometime.”
I pulled my face from his hands and lay my cheek on his chest. “Soon,” I mumbled.
We haddinner regularly with Daniel and Leah—Daniel and Ethan seemed to hit it off.
The boys were having a game of pool before dinner in Daniel’s games room leaving Leah and I to catch up in the kitchen, pretending we were cooking, when Daniel’s housekeeper had done it all and we were just warming stuff up.
“So, I’m in love with him,” I said abruptly to Leah as she poked about in the oven.
She spun round to look at me. “You’re finally admitting it?”
“What do you mean ‘finally’?”
“Well, you’ve been in love with him since New York.”
“I’d only known him a week in New York.”
“Doesn’t mean you weren’t in love with him.”
Leah had turned into a hopeless romantic since getting together with Daniel. There was no point in arguing with her.
“I told him.”
She stared at me as she took a seat at the breakfast bar, nodding at me like a lunatic. “And?” she asked.
“And what?”
“Don’t be obtuse. Did he say it back? Ask you to move to New York? Did he propose?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, trying to come across cool.
“He didn’t say it back?” she asked, scrunching her eyebrows together.
“Yes, he said it back.”
“Well, that’s great. You’ve both finally admitted what we’ve all known forever.”
“Stop, Leah. There are no happy endings here. We live on different continents. Our lives are ondifferentcontinents.”
