Mark shook his head and smiled. “Yeah, I thought of that. I’m not thrilled that I’ll have to hear about it from here to eternity, but I am thrilled that she will be so irritated.” He cleared his throat. “We’re getting off track. I meant she’s coming back to Peachtree Bluff for good.”
Now I shot up in bed, pounding head be damned. “What do you mean, ‘for good’? What about Florida? What about the sun and the tax rate and the single men?” I leaned over and put my head in my hands. “Oh, God,” I groaned. “This is the worst morning of my life. That settles it. We’ll move to LA. We have to move to LA permanently. I know you have a business here, but you’re smart and capable, and people have to import and export there, too.” I could feel myself getting hysterical.
“Emerson,” Mark said, now getting kind of hysterical, too, “we’ve been through this. I’m not moving to LA. My business here supports my mom and me, and I can’t take that kind of gamble with her future.”
“Can’t you just sell the company?”
Now I’d made him mad. I knew I would, but I couldn’t help myself. He got out of the bed and crossed his arms. “For the thousandth time, I’m not selling my company. I’m not moving away from Peachtree Bluff. My mother coming here doesn’t change that.”
I shook my head, incredulous. “Do you see this?” I asked, holding up my left hand. “This means that you have to learn to compromise a little. This means that sometimes you do what I want to do.”
“Moving to LA is not ‘sometimes doing what you want to do,’?” Mark said, making air quotes.
I could feel fury rising in me. It was a familiar fury, one that I had felt with Mark since I was fifteen years old. It was hard to explain how angry he could make me one minute and how the next minute I felt like I couldn’t live without him. “My giving up my entire career that I have worked my ass off for is not ‘sometimes doing whatyouwant to do,’ either.”
“I don’t get it,” Mark said for probably the ten millionth time. “I make plenty of money. Why can’t you be happy here? Why can’t we just stay here?”
Wow. We were so far off track now that this wasn’t even remotely about his mother anymore. That scared me a little. Because this wasthefight. This was the reason I hadn’t said yes right away. He’d said that we would work it out, that when you loved someone, you found a way to make it work. But he clearly wasn’t willing to give an inch, and let’s face it, neither was I. We had two months to figure it out, so we had to find a solution quickly.
“I just don’t get,” I said, for what was probably also the ten millionth time, “why you don’t get that I don’t want to be an actress because of the money. I want to act because it fulfills me, Mark. It gives me purpose and strength. It’s who I am. And I can’t do it here. I need to be in LA.”
“What about our kids?” he asked. “That’s why my mother’s coming back. She said that if you were always going to be flitting off to LA or making some movie, someone had to be here to take care of our children.”
That cut right to the heart of me, to my fear that maybe I was selfish. Maybe this dream of mine had clouded my vision to the point where I couldn’t see anything else. Maybe I was giving away too much of myself in exchange for reaching a level and attaining a life that, to be honest, I wasn’t even really sure how to know I had reached in the first place. But that dream was mine. And I was getting there. I wasn’t going to give it up now. I might not give it up ever.
“Hey, Mark,” I said, eerily calm. Then I yelled, “We don’t have kids! I might not be able to have kids at all!”
I turned my head to see a terrified-looking Kyle stop dead in his tracks in my doorway, his mouth open. “So sorry,” he said, getting ready to turn to go back downstairs. He held his hands up, each with a cup in it. “Ansley told me you were up here, and I, um...”
He gestured toward the stairs, but Mark brushed by him and said, “Don’t leave on account of me.” He looked back at me and said pointedly, “Her fiancé.You were the one she wanted anyway.”
Then he was gone, and I felt absolutely awful. Not hangover bad but existential-life-crisis bad.
I could feel myself blushing. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “That was awful.”
Kyle walked toward me and said, “What did he mean, I was the one you wanted anyway?”
I could have been reading into it, adding something that wasn’t really there, maybe even projecting a bit, but I could have sworn that he seemed almost hopeful when he said it.
I shook my head. “Oh, he meant because I was dying for a cup of coffee for this gosh-awful hangover.”
Kyle and I had never talked about that night in LA, never acknowledged it in any way. Of course, we recognized each other when I arrived in Peachtree Bluff and he was standing at my mom’s back door. But we never talked about the night we met, the kiss we shared, the secrets we swapped, the way we stayed up all night talking about our hopes and dreams. Nothing had ever passed between us that indicated to me that he considered that night remotely special.
He handed me the first cup. “Hangover cure,” he said. “Green juice with tons of lemon and cayenne.”
Then he handed me the second. “Black coffee. Hangover helpernúmero dos.”
“Thank you,” I squeaked out. “Hey, I’m really embarrassed that you saw that.”
Kyle sat down on the bed beside me. “Em, are you all right? Because you don’t have to do this, you know.” He paused. “I mean, I don’t want to overstep, but you are...” He looked down at the duvet cover, running his finger down my forearm just like he had the night we met. He looked me straight in the eye. “You are everything, Emerson. Don’t give away any of that to make anyone else happy. Ever.”
I couldn’t say why, but I knew it was the best compliment I had ever received, that contained within it was a meaning that I couldn’t comprehend any more than Kyle could verbalize.
I wanted to compliment him back, but I knew I couldn’t. Well, I shouldn’t. And I didn’t know what I would say.You are the weirdest, most wonderful man I know?You have always made me feel like I’m more than just what everyone else sees? None of that made sense. And were those even real feelings?
I knew I should defend Mark. It wasn’t his fault that he was in love with a hotheaded blonde who wanted her own way or that I was in love with a temperamental brunet who wanted his own way. We seemed to egg each other on, which sometimes seemed like a negative, but when it was for something positive, it was the very best part about our relationship. It made me know that we wouldn’t be bored. But I couldn’t explain all that to Kyle.
Instead, I sipped the hangover cure he had handed me and smiled at the way it burned when it went down. I noticed he had shaved this morning, which made him look younger. Before I could stop myself, I put my hand up and rubbed his smooth cheek. When I realized what I’d done, I blushed.
