By “no one,” she obviously means the media—the very thing that brought us together. And while the thought sounds pleasant, I can’t see it play out any other way.She once said everything happens for a reason. I didn’t believe her at the time, yet now it feels like one of those reasons was to bring us together.
“I think we would have never gotten to know each other,” I start. “You’d go about your life still hating me and thinking I was the man who spilled coffee on you. But I’d like to think you still made your compound, overcame your fears, and did what you set out to do.”
A weak smile forms on her face, and by the looks of it, I don’t think she really believes it. Like I said, baby steps. Her doubts are fewer now than they were before, and that's all that matters. They won’t disappear overnight.
“Me? I think I would still have found myself in a controversy over the spark incident. Maybe I would have landed the SkyWay Airlines deal if we had figured out the problem quickly. And my mom would definitely still be trying to set me up with her friends’ daughters.”
Her eyes soften at the mention of my mother’s friend’s daughters, but she doesn’t comment on it. She only meets my gaze as she says, “We have three months left in our deal.”
It’s a statement, but it almost feels like an open-ended question—one that sounds a lot like“where do we go from here?”
We’re almost through with this arrangement. We spent three months together, and we have the next three. The only problem is that, in such a short time, this girl has rooted herself in the deepest parts of my heart.
Six months had seemed like a long time, but now it feels impossibly short when I want much longer.
I don’t have the time to say any of that, though, when a dull roar grabs our attention. We both look up, the white glowof the stars broken by the flashing red-and-green lights of a passing plane. Vivienne’s breath stills in her lungs as another flies over. And then another.
They come two to three minutes apart, seemingly taking off from a nearby airport. And while she grew to be okay with the sight, I think the heaviness of her looming fears may be taking a toll on her.
Vivienne snuggles up to me, wrapping her arms around my neck as a single tear presses against my skin. “You know what I’ve always wanted to do?” she murmurs.
I look down at her, watching the sweep of her lashes against her heavy-lidded eyes. She seems at peace on the outside, yet I can’t shake the sense that something deeper stirs beneath the surface.
“What is it?” I ask in return.
“Sleep under the stars.”
I smile at the confession, passing my arm under her trench coat and sweater. My fingers run up and down her spine, tracing the curve of her back as she melts closer into me.
“We can make that happen,” I say, eliciting a sleepy smile from my girl.
We lie there in silence, time slipping away, the quiet broken now and then by the distant roar of a plane. It’s when tears darken her lashes that my previous suspicions are confirmed.
“Tell me a story,” she asks with a sniffle.
“What kind?”
“Something with a happy ending.”
Story time isn’t exactly my specialty, as I once was told by my three-year-old niece, but for Vivienne, I’d bend over backward to be good at anything she wanted me to.
“Does a fairy tale work for you?”
She nods against my chest, eyes still closed.
We’ve come so far—both together and in our personal lives—and I think it’s only right I find a way to give homage to that.
“Once upon a time, there was a prince who was relatively well known across the kingdom.”
“Was he a hot prince?” Vivienne pops open an eye to look at me. “I don’t want to hear this story if he’s not hot.”
I can’t help but chuckle.
“Extremelyhot. Don’t worry about it. Whenever the evil queen asks her mirror who’s the hottest of them all, a picture of his face pops up…followed by a wildfire.”
“Good.” Vivienne nods in satisfaction, her eyelids fluttering shut as a contented smile spreads across her face.
“Every year, he hosted a gala to showcase the villagers’ creations. He thought it was nice seeing people’s ideas come to life, but his mother, the queen, only hoped that the prince would finally find his one true match.”
