The guys exited my apartment without another word, clearly unhappy with how that had gone. Tori dropped into her chair, looking like she lost her best friend.
“Are you okay?” I went to her side, putting my hand on her shoulder.
She shook her head. “I knew our perfect little bubble here would burst, I just didn’t think it would happen so fast. That Rick is too good at his job.”
“Well, you invited yourself to stay one more night, right?” I asked teasingly, trying to lighten the mood even though I felt like crying myself.
“Yeah.”
“Well, we’d better order some Lactaid then. We have a lot of pizza to eat before you go back to L.A.”
Tori
Isat alone in the front of the private plane, my bodyguards in the back talking quietly. Staring out at the clouds outside the window, I replayed everything that happened last night.
After I’d kicked Steve and Rick out of Hailey’s apartment, I’d tried to talk to her about our future, but she’d distracted me by dragging me into the bedroom and eating me out until I damn near forgot my name. Then we ordered pizza and ate it naked in bed, watching old episodes ofHey Vickyon her laptop.
“I’m getting a cavity watching this show,” Hailey grumbled.
“It’s a kids’ show,” I reminded her. “It’s supposed to be sweet.”
“It’s noScooby Doo,”she teased. “Now that was a good show. At least they were doing cool stuff like solving mysteries. Scooby is hilarious. Although you were cute…”
After we digested our dinner, we made love for hours, slow and gentle, staring into each other’s eyes before drifting off to sleep. We both woke up early, and in the pre-dawn hours, we finally talked about us.
“I want to see you again,” I said, tracing my fingers around her breast. The tip hardened, turning a darker pink.
“I don’t see how that’s going to work,” she said softly. “You live like fifteen hundred miles away.”
“We can fly back and forth on weekends.”
Hailey shook her head sadly. “We knew going in that this wasn’t going to work. We’re from such different worlds and have such different lives. I think it’s best that we just say goodbye and leave this with the good memories that we have.”
Her words hit me like a knife to the solar plexus.
“Are you saying you don’t want to see me again?” I asked, the hurt evident in my voice.
“Tori. If you lived in Seattle and had a normal job that didn’t require bodyguards and dealing with paparazzi, I’d be asking you to be my girlfriend. Hell, I’d be packing up a U-Haul andmoving in with you. But you don’t have a normal job, and there’s no scenario where a boring barista works in your glamorous L.A. life.”
When I started to argue, she pressed her finger against my lips. “Let’s just enjoy the time we have. Please.”
This time we made love with the desperation of people who would soon be separated. It felt like goodbye, but I was going to do my damnedest to make sure it wasn’t.
“I’ll miss you,” I said, staring into her eyes while I ground my thigh between her legs.
“I’ll miss you too,” she said, her eyes shining with unshed tears. “But I’m grateful for the time we had. I’ll cherish it. Always.”
I slipped out of bed before her alarm went off, gathering the bag I’d packed and heading downstairs to where my team waited in the alley, ready to whisk me off to the airport. But as I flew farther and farther away from Hailey, I knew I had to figure something out. This couldn’t be goodbye.
***
“You just need to woo her,” Pepper told me a few days later. “Every woman likes to be wooed.”
“Hailey’s different. She’s not like other women. She’s special.”
Pepper rolled her eyes. “I’m glad you told me that, because I didn’t understand that Hailey is special the first fifteen times you told me.”
Four days. I’d been away from Hailey for four whole days, and it felt like I’d lost a limb. In some part of my mind I thought – or maybe I’d hoped – that what I felt for her was some forced proximity crush. It wasn’t. I loved her more today than I did when I kissed her on the forehead and slipped out of her room before the sun rose.
