Rusty Nailed (Cocktail #2)(65)
Author: Alice Clayton

I was pissed. And scared to death that I’d never see Clive again.

When it was nearly dawn and there was no more pie, I decided to head home. When I walked out to the parking lot, there was Simon, getting out of his Range Rover and heading straight for me. Turns out I wasn’t the only one who was pissed.

“What the hell, Caroline? I’ve been driving around for an hour looking for you!”

“Get back in the car, Simon. I can’t talk about this right now.”

“You wanna bet?” he warned, standing in front of my car door.

“I really don’t want to do this right now.”

“I really don’t care,” he said, angling his body as I tried to push past him.

“Let me in.” I could feel the tears beginning, and if I started I wouldn’t be able to stop. “It’s starting to rain.” Dammit, Clive was out in this rain.

“Then we’ll stand here in the rain until you tell me what the hell is going on,” he said, crossing his arms and planting his feet. Then the sky really opened up, and big fat drops began to splatter everywhere. Yeah, those were raindrops on my cheeks.

“Come on, Simon, let me in,” I protested, trying to slip past him again.

“That’s funny. I was going to say the same thing,” he said, staring down at me.

And that did it. The dam broke.

“It’s too much, okay? It’s all just too! Fucking! Much!” It was all coming out; I was going full pickle.

“What’s too much?” he asked, confused. “And what the hell does a pickle have to do with it?”

I was officially losing my mind. “Ahhhh!” I screamed, stamping my feet and punching one hand with the other. “Simon, I can’t do it all. I literally can’t do it all.”

“Who said you have to? And what exactly is all?”

“I’m not f**king ready to be a full-on grown-up! You want a nursery? Christ, I just want to get laid on a beach in Brazil! You want to stop being a photographer? I just got offered a partnership, and I can’t turn it down! Because that would be ludicrous.” I stalked in a tiny circle, firing every pickle in my arsenal. “You went to one reunion and partied with the apostles, and suddenly, poof! You quit your job. And we bought this incredible house. And now you and Ruth are making plans. And f**king James Brown called me a decorator! Again! And his wife’s name is Krissy, and she’s got a bun in the oven and I bet their f**king nursery is just precious, so I told him you f**k me on the counter and—”

“Stop. Just stop.” Simon grabbed my hands in his and held them down at my sides.

“How in hell can I ever be enough? How can I ever be the wife and the mother that your mother was? How can I ever make a home for you as wonderful as the one that you grew up in? How can I be designer of the century and still have time to bake pies?” I wailed, letting out the sheer terror that had been bottled up for months. “And my cat’s gone, and I want him back,” I sobbed.

“I know, babe,” Simon said, crushing me to his chest as I cried it out in the rain. “I know.”

• • •

Five minutes later we were stuffed into a booth, sitting across from one another. We each had coffee, and I had a wad of snotty paper napkins in front of me. Simon had a face full of questions, but he was still here. So that was good.

“Okay, so . . . wow.” He dragged his hands through his hair. “You’ve got some things that you’ve been thinking about for a while, it sounds like.”

“Yep.” I sighed, stirring my coffee.

“I’ve got some thoughts now, if I may?” he asked.

“Yep,” I said, steeling myself for the worst.

“I realize that I might not have had many traditional relationships—but is what happened out there normal?”

I looked up from my fingernail study in surprise, to see the tiniest bit of a smile on his face.

“Caroline, I love the shit out of you. So calm down and just tell me what you need. No more holding back. And then I’ll tell you what I need, and we’ll figure out how to work it out.” He looked down, doubt now crowding out the tiny smile. “At least, I’m hoping we can work it out. If you want to.”

“I want to,” I said quietly.

“So let’s talk about it,” he answered.

And so we did.

I let every pickle fly, but without the yelling. It’s so much easier to talk when there’s no yelling.

It’s also easier to talk when you’re being brutally honest. And he was too, which I appreciated.

“I can’t believe you thought I was quitting my job. I could never stop doing what I do,” he said.

“But you canceled all those trips.”

“Yeah. But I was always going to head back out on the road.”

“But after the reunion, you—”

“You need to understand something. Going back east clarified some things for me, in a good way. I want a home again, and I want a family someday. That’s not going to change. And for the record, I’d never have a discussion with Ruth about something like that without first talking about it with you,” he said, taking my hand. “There’s a lot of things we probably should have discussed before we jumped into this house thing. I just got excited, I suppose. It’s something I’ve missed for a long time.”

“I got excited too. And I love the house, don’t get me wrong. There are just all these expectations that come with a step like this, and I guess I just got overwhelmed. I knew how much this meant to you, how big a deal this was for you. I just didn’t know if I could measure up to what you wanted.”

“I ran away from my past for years because it was too hard for me to deal with. Now I’m letting some of the good stuff back in. But the really good stuff is all with you, babe. The rest of it is just a pile of bricks. You want to get rid of the house? Done. You want to live in a hut on the beach in Bali? Done.”

“I think I said get laid on a beach in Brazil —”

“Done,” he breathed, his eyes dancing.

I looked at him, my dream boyfriend.

“I love that house. We’re not getting rid of the house,” I said, and leaned in. “And I do want a nursery—just not now. Is that okay?” I asked, suddenly very very serious. Jesus, this was big-time stuff.

“It’s more than okay. Who said anything about now, anyway?”

When I started to answer, he squeezed my hand and whispered, “Please don’t drag poor Ruth back into this.”