Gray gave me a droll look. “I hope you don’t mind ifIorder. I’m hungry,” he said with little-boy plaintiveness.
“Do what you want,” I said. “You always do.”
He leaned forward. The pink light in the bar was kind to him. He looked like he hadn’t changed at all, like the man I’d fallen in love with, like his author photo—that lock of hair falling onto his forehead, the top three buttons of his shirt undone beneath his blazer. “Thank you for coming.”
I blinked. I couldn’t remember him thanking me before. Maybe he had changed. A little. And maybe I was falling under his spell, into his lies. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, the way I always did. “What are you doing here?”
“Didn’t I say?”
“No.”
The server returned with our drinks. I was dimly aware of Tim coming in behind him, taking a seat at the bar.
“I came to see you.” Gray aimed the full focus of his dark gaze on me, the look that made me feel like the center of his world. “I missed you.”
The words pinged inside me. I would have given almost anything to hear them once. “It took you seven months.”
Longer, if you counted the confused, painful, lonely months after his book release, before Dublin.
I was totally counting them.
“I wish you knew how much I regret that,” Gray said with apparent sincerity. “I texted. But you never really responded.”
That’s what I’d come for, wasn’t it? His regrets. But he was still acting as if our breakup was somehow my fault. “You said it was over,” I reminded him. “You said we were through.”
“Because it wasn’t until you were gone that I realized how much I needed you.”
He’d always been good at that, I remembered. Using things I said as a springboard for his own arguments, turning my words around.
I gulped wine. “You were stifled by my domesticity, you said.”
He smiled ruefully. “That was before you deserted me. I’ve missed coming home to you and your little dinners. Eating in restaurants isn’t the same.” He signaled the server. “I’ll start with the oysters. And then the salmon.”
The man looked at me. “And for miss?”
I smiled and shook my head. “Nothing, thank you.”
He glided away again, like a butler in a movie.
“It was easy to forget who you really are when it was only words on the page,” Gray said. “But now that the movie is in production, I can actually see you, all that you are, all that you did, everything you meant to me. I don’t think I truly appreciated your funny, caring ways before.”
My blood pounded in my ears. I took another sip of wine. “I didn’t desert you.”
“Let’s not argue. Isn’t it enough that I came all this way to see you? You look amazing, by the way.”
I looked down at my wineglass, tracing the sweating rings on the table with my finger. All my life, I’d waited for someone to come back to me. To choose me. “Thanks.”
“Ireland must suit you.”
“It does.”
“Quite a change for you, working with that scary-looking woman. Maude, is it?”
“Maeve Ward. She was longlisted for the Booker Prize. And what does it matter what she looks like? You wouldn’t comment on her appearance if she were a man.”
He lifted his hands in fake surrender. “You’re right, of course.” He sat back against the leather banquette, assessing me. I resisted the urge to touch my hair. To squirm. “But enough about her. I want to hear about you. Tell me what you’re working on.”
Something dormant bloomed in me, responding helplessly to his interest, unfurling for his approval. “I’m reimagining the Kansas story.”
