Her eyes flew open, and she twisted her head up to look at him indignantly. “Yousaid you didn’t want to have sex with me first!”
“It’s not that I don’twantto. I’m physically incapable right now. There’s a difference.”
She laughed and closed her eyes again as he leaned down to kiss the top of her head. After a few minutes, he nudged her head up with his shoulder and rolled her onto her side so they were spooning. He mumbled something into the back of her neck.
“What?”
He shifted his head. “Let’s go to New York. I want to.”
She rolled over so they were facing each other. She needed to make sure she wasn’t having some kind of auditory hallucination. “Really? You want to do the screening and everything? What made you change your mind?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I tried the ‘push it all down, pretend it never happened’ thing. That’s obviously not working out great for me. Maybe I just need to face it.”
Grey was silent for a moment, afraid she’d say the wrong thing, make him change his mind. “When’s the last time you were there?”
He closed his eyes and shook his head. “It’s been years.”
She hooked her leg over his hip and pulled him closer, nestling her face into the crook of his neck. He wrapped his arms around her tightly. “Maybe we could go for a week or two, make a real vacation of it. We could even rent a house in Cape May or something. You can show me where you had your first boner or whatever.”
He laughed and turned his head to kiss her. The oven timer beeped from the kitchen, faint but insistent. They both groaned as Ethan rolled himself back up to sitting.
“You stay there. We’ll do breakfast in bed.”
She shook her head, stretching her arms above her head. “No, let’s eat outside. If I don’t get up now I never will.”
—
IT WAS THEfirst crack in the foundation. Small, but unmistakable.
Grey hadn’t said anything to make him worry. She’d seemed almost too eager to forgive him. But as they sat together on thepatio, dousing his bland casserole with ketchup and hot sauce, the roiling unease he’d felt since he’d woken up only intensified. She saw him differently now. There was no way she didn’t.
He didn’t want to go to New York. The idea was still as unappealing as the first time Nora had floated it in his kitchen all those months ago. But he needed to make a gesture, something bigger than a mediocre breakfast, to prove to Grey that last night was just a fluke, that that wasn’t who he was anymore—even if he didn’t quite believe it. He could be better for her. Be brave. He could try, at least.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, though, being there with her. It would be an opportunity to get to know her better, to explore their hometown together, finally take a vacation that hadn’t been arranged by Audrey.
Something occurred to him.
“What about your family?”
She looked up at him, fork poised warily in midair. “What?”
“Would you see them? While we’re there? You never talk about them.”
She shifted uncomfortably. Too late, he realized that there might be something dark lurking behind her reticence. “You don’t have to, if you’re not—if there’s something—”
She shook her head. “No, it’s okay. I don’t even know why…nothing bad happened. We’re just…not close.”
He racked his brain for any information she’d let slide about them over the last few months. “Is it just your mom and your brother?”
She nodded. “Yeah. I never really knew my dad. Actually, that’s not totally true. When my show started airing, he tracked down my number somehow and tried to hit me up for money.”
“Charming.”
“I thought so, too. My mom is remarried now, I don’t knowmy stepfamily that well, but they seem nice. I think she’s happy. My brother lives in San Francisco, working at some app or something. He just got engaged. We see each other every few years, but we don’t really have a ton in common. That’s pretty much it.” She shrugged, but with a feigned nonchalance that indicated there was something she still wasn’t telling him. Ethan took a stab in the dark.
“Is it…does it have to do with you working when you were a kid, or…?”
She sighed. “Maybe. I don’t know. It’s complicated.”
