“Bad,” I agreed, barely recognizing my own voice. There was something thick in it.
“Okay,” he agreed, nodding, letting it drop. “You want to grab the sheets and pillows, and move out onto the couch, so you don’t get cold?”
“But what about…” I started to object, then trailed off when he stormed – I would say walked, but this man kind of always stormed everywhere – across the room, and started stripping the bed himself.
“Grab the pillows and flashlight,” he demanded, walking out into the darkness blind.
With that, I did.
To find he had set up a fire already, the light casting the whole living space in a warm, comforting glow and warmth.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said, watching as Gunner tucked the sheet and blanket under the cushion at the end of the couch.
“Well, your butler isn’t here; figure I should step in.”
“I never had a butler,” I insisted as he pulled the pillows out of my hands. “If I had, wouldn’t he have been in your paperwork you are so fond of?”
“Your exes weren’t,” he shot back.
“Because the paperwork asked for the names of any exes from the past three years.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, standing up, facing me, doing his arm-crossing thing that shouldn’t have been sexy, but I found it so anyway. “You expect me to believe you’ve been single for three years?”
“Believing implies there is something to disbelieve. Since it is a fact, there isn’t.”
“Three years.”
“Yes, three years,” I agreed, not realizing I mimicked his skeptical voice and arm-cross until he chuckled at me, dropping his hands.
“Fine. But Quin meant any kind of relationships with men. Not necessarily serious only. Relationships that never went anywhere. One-night-stands. Fuck-buddies.”
“The answer is the same,” I said, shrugging.
“You’re shitting me. You haven’t been fucked in three years?”
He made it sound absurd.
In my experience, most of the women I knew like me who owned a successful business, who were married to it because it meant the world to them, they barely had time to see their friends, let alone make time for men. Hell, I’d had dinner and drinks with a whole table of women like me, and we’d – after way too many bottomless sangrias – all compared brands and types of vibrators since none of us had been laid in so long.
“I’ve been building a business,” I told him, trying to convince myself not to be embarrassed. It was ridiculous to feel insecure that I wasn’t having a ton of sex.
“Last I checked, businesses close at a certain point.”
“Businesses never close when you are running them. I wake up at two in the morning to write down things to add to my to-do list.”
“Christ, duchess. You’re wound like a fucking clock.”
“I am going to assume that you think the cure to this is me having sex.”
His lips quirked up at that. “It couldn’t hurt, that’s for damn sure. But, actually, I was going to say that the cure is to take a step back. Which, well, is what life is forcing you to do now.”
“I am going to assume that starting over means I will have to work just as hard to get on my feet. Whereas before, I just had to stay on them.”
“Staying on them shouldn’t be quite as hard as it was in Manhattan.”
“I’m pretty sure the only place more expensive than Manhattan is San Fransisco,” I agreed. It was a fact I knew because I had done a lot of research in high school about where I would finally run off to once I was free of my parents.
San Fransisco was nice, bright, sunny. But not quite the right fit for someone like me.
D.C. Was too political.
Boston was a bit rough for my taste.
And, well, anyone who wanted to claw their way up the ladder, and carve a name for themselves in the world… they went to New York City. That was simply what you did.
So, with just a couple hundred dollars of birthday money from my grandparents in my backpack, that was where I went.
And never looked back.
Because, well, the city was made for people like me. The ones who were focused on their careers, on their growth, on their connections, and their aspirations. And, to be completely honest, money.
Money was a factor for me.
Because broke was something I knew the taste and texture of for a long, long time before I got to know what wealth felt like on the tongue and fingertips.
Maybe that was shallow, to want to be well-off.
But when you went to bed hungry more nights than you did with a full stomach, then you could lecture me about how empty my dreams were for life.
My life had been about chasing the comfort of a full bank account, something that would assure me that I would never again know the feeling of a gnawing stomach with no hope in sight for fullness.