“You made a reservation fortonight?” she pressed, still suspicious.
Tom sucked on his pouty lower lip, thinking. Her stomach sank.
“Tom.”
“Well, we have a reservation for either January 5 or May 1 of this year, but American dates are so confusing to me,” he said, slipping into a deep Polish accent. “Why do you people put the month in front of the day? Makes no sense.”
She fought the urge to laugh. “You’ve never even been to Poland.”
“Nie mówie po angielsku, nie rozumiem cie.”
“You barely speakPolish,” she corrected him, cracking a smile in spite of herself.
“Like anyone who comes to check on us will know that! And anyway, I couldn’t find anywhere else with open rooms tonight. Do you want to sleep with the bees?”
“No,” Rose admitted. “Where are you going to sleep though?”
She looked around the cottage. There were a pair of love seats in front of the fireplace and a chaise lounge facing the entertainment center, but only one bed: a king tucked into a loft over the living area.
Tom’s small disappointed frown said that he’d thought there was some chance they’d both end up there, when Rose was one more casual forehead kiss away from having a giant snotty emotional meltdown about how confusing this was.
“I guess I’ll sleep on the chaise?” he said, making that eventuality sound distant and unlikely. He rummaged through the cabinets and pulled out a stack of plates for the fast-food burgers she’d brought home. “Sit down and put some food in your face, babe. You look like you’re about to fall over.”
She felt like it. She felt like she’d fallen down the stairs.
She wasn’t handling this well. This was not the grace and sophistication and gentle forgiveness she’d expected to offer him. But Tom also wasn’t what she’d expected.
Maybe he’d changed. Maybe he wasn’t the same person he had been at twenty-three. That thought was more painful than Tom’s frequent displays of familiarity, becauseshehadn’t changed. Sometimes she thought she would have liked to—it would have been convenient to want different things—but it felt sad and awkward to show up here as essentially the same person he’d left.
Maybe Tom hadn’t finished growing up when she had. There were moments when he seemed like a complete stranger. It was startling, because she liked what she saw. It was just harder to understand what he wanted from her now. She’d thought he just wanted to make it up to her, but the way he looked at her, the way he kept touching her…Maybe shecould figure out some way to navigate his movie star boyfriend and his Broadway lifestyle. She’d thought their lives were going to be a big adventure together. Maybe it was on her to figure out how to meet Tom where he was.
“We need to relight the pilot light for the water heater. It’s cold,” she mumbled around a mouthful of french fries.
“Right, right,” Tom said from the second love seat, patting at his pockets and coming out with a lighter. Which he should not have had on him.
When Rose glared at it, he held up a hand to fend off her remonstrations.
“I don’t want to hear it,” he said.
“Tom.”She dug in.
“I would never smoke around you. You’ve got asthma.”
“You should quit,” Rose said firmly.
“Why, is it bad for me?” he asked with pretend innocence. He blinked his wide brown eyes at her like he was playing the ingenue, but there was an edge to it.
“It’ll ruin your voice, it’s bad for the environment…I can’t believe you started smoking.”
Tom got to his feet and shot her a look of mild reproof.
“Maybe not every single coping mechanism you’d pick up if the love of your life tossedyouout on the street would be a healthy one, huh?”
Rose closed her mouth over a shocked breath, waiting for him to take that back. Obviously, she hadn’t been the love of his life. Obviously, she hadn’t tossed him outon the street, because he’d been sleeping somewhere else for the week before he left for good.
Tom stalked across the room and stood in front of her, pressing into her personal space. He put his hands on his hips, right over the loose band of his jeans, and stared her down, looming in a way that somehow emphasized the breadth of his chest. She was treated to the sudden, intrusive memory of that chest pressed against her cheek, the solid weight of his body. Heat suffused her face as she struggled to meet his heavy-lidded stare. He was standing too close, but that was probably the point he was making. She didn’t have any claim on him.
“Why smoking though?” she said weakly.
