Adrian reached for her hand and carefully curled his fingers around it. He tucked it under his chin.
“Yeah,” he said, and she could feel the vibrations of that single word all the way through her bones. She left her hand there, the back of it pressed against his throat. That small contact was grounding.
“I finished a still life this week,” he said after another moment.
As that was perhaps the least objectionable thing he could have done with his time this past week without calling her, she tilted her head to encourage him to keep talking about it.
“And I sold a painting.”
“That’s good,” she said honestly. “I’m so happy for you.”
“I signed back up at my old gallery. The owner managed to get a decent price for the first work—”
There was no way he couldn’t have expected her to focus on that detail, particularly thedecentqualifier.
“Really? How do you know?” Caroline exclaimed. “What were the comps you looked at? Did you do any kind of price analysis?”
“I... did not,” Adrian confessed. “I don’t actually know how to do that.”
Caroline sat up a little straighter. “I do, you know.”
“I thought you might. Because you mentioned it, just now.”
She looked at him suspiciously, but his gaze on her was soft and rueful.
“You should have called me,” she said.
He took a deep breath. “I know. I will next time.”
That was a simple statement, but in it were a lot of complex promises. He sat quietly as she unpacked and examined them. There would be a next time that he sold a painting. He’d call her. And he believed she could help.
It wasn’t everything she’d asked for. It wasn’t even an apology. But it fell into thezone of possible agreement, as her professors would have put it. Adrian painting again, optimistic about their future—that was in her bargaining range.
Caroline nodded, sniffed hard, and swept her hair back out of her face. She swung her legs around on the couch and draped them across his lap. Then she wrapped her hands around his bicep and leaned in so that her head was resting on his shoulder.
“Okay,” she said. She felt him exhale in a shaky rush. Caroline rubbed her face into his shirt, breathing in hiswarm man-and-Lava-soap scent. She didn’t know what things were going to look like now. But there was a slow, growing swell of relief suffusing her body because there was going to besomethingto look at.
“Do you want to learn how to make mille-feuille in Paris?” she asked, taking a shot in the dark. “Let’s just go. You can tell me what the best school for cream puffs is.”
Adrian chuckled, the sound a little pained. “Right now?”
“Do we have anything else we have to do?” she asked.
He turned his head and spoke with his lips against her hairline. “I told Tom I’d help him move this weekend. He possibly thinks I’ve been acting like a giant dick recently, and I think I need to correct that impression by helping him carry things into whatever godforsaken fifth-floor walk-up he’s rented.”
That wasn’t exactly an invitation to go with them, but she’d only ever gotten this far by asking for what she wanted. And she wanted to hang on to every small piece of this life she’d managed to build over the past few months.
“I’ve never been to New York,” Caroline said. “And I’m good at carrying heavy things.”
Adrian finally shifted until he could wrap his arms around her torso and haul her all the way into his lap. Her body felt like a melting ice cube as he cuddled her against his chest so tightly she could hear his heart thudding in time with hers. Relief made her soft and dizzy, and she closed her eyes to tip her face against his neck. “Sweetheart, all I want to do is something I know will put a smile on your face,” he said. “I’ll take you to see the Rockettes.”
Adrian didn’t get a turn behind the wheel until they had passed Providence on the ride back, and then onlybecause Caroline had finished the entire collected works of Taylor Swift and was finally ready to yield control of the radio in her Tahoe. They swapped seats at a gas station off I-95.
The highway passed through a featureless gray forest for this last stretch of the drive from New York to Boston, but Caroline smiled at him as he slid the dial to Providence’s classical music station.
“Is this okay?” he asked as he turned the Mendelssohn to a low rumble.
“Mm-hmm,” she said contentedly, balling up his coat under her head and leaning against the window as though she might fall asleep. “At least until we can pick up Kiss 108.”
