“You look…” I sniff away the sting in my eyes. I can’t even say anything else.
“Really?” she says, hands on hips. “That good?” She cocks her head.
I nod, throat tight. “That good, Menace.”
Ava steps onto the little platform in front of the mirror, turning slightly so the seamstress can fuss with the train.
Her bright hazel eyes watch me through the reflection. “I always wanted you to find happiness, too, you know.”
I nod with a thin-lipped smile.
“Funny thing is, you already found it, and you’re just too careful to grab it by the reins.”
“This isn’t your average boy meets girl. It’s complicated, Ava.”
She spins around, long red hair fanning over her shoulder. “Of course it is. Love is complicated. But if you don’t take her, someone else will. She’s a catch.”
A hot, ugly spike of possessiveness shoots straight through me—fast enough that I have to lock my jaw so it doesn’t show. I have no claim on her. I know that. Doesn’t matter. The thought of anyone else stepping toward her…even imagining it, makes something primitive in me bare its teeth.
“See?” Ava reads me perfectly and arches an eyebrow. “You want her.”
I exhale through my nose, hard. “I’m a lot older…”
It’s a weak reason and not the real one.
The real one is fear. Fear if I let myself trust again, fall again, be totally devoted again, and it doesn’t work, I could ruin not just my life but also my child’s.
She puts a hand on her hip. “Enzo is older…”
I get closer to the truth. “And there’s a lot at risk for us if it doesn’t work out. A friendship is more important right now.”
“To her, or to you?”
Probably to her.
For me, the problem is more complex. Idowant her. I haven’t erased that fact. But when it comes to asking if we might just give us a chance, I can’t let her in, but I can’t let her go.
“She’s…” I rub a hand over my jaw, searching for the least pathetic answer. “She’s made it clear that her career and being a mom are her priorities. I don’t want to stress her out with a conversation about us.”
Fuck. Now I’ve admitted it. It’s official. I want more.
“I know I haven’t lived much out in the real world yet”—Ava sparkles like a fairy godmother on that pedestal—“but…a conversation about how much you care about her is going to stress her out?”
“When you put it that way, it sounds stupid.”
“Isn’t it though? I mean…I was being chased down by my captor and still…love didn’t feel like yet another thing that was making me stressed. It felt like the thing to relieve it.”
I smile softly. “Your case was different.”
“Was it?” she asks, but it’s more of a rhetorical question.
It wasn’t different for her.
She had a hairy predicament, too, more dangerous than becoming a mom. Ava was on the run, playing a secret identity, having to trust a man who was smart enough to figure her out…
I reach up and boop her freckled nose. “Where did you get your wisdom from?”
She rolls her eyes playfully. “Not you, apparently.”
