Or maybe it would come out right, and it was a truth not worth making him face. And the truth was he’d been right. He wasn’t ready. Not for the magnitude of what I believed we could be. Of the kind of love we could share. Anything less than that was me giving up my life and career for him so I could hang out with his daughter twenty-four-seven and be available for occasional sex.
I may have fallen in love with him, but I wouldn’t give myself up for him. “You said it yourself, you need to be focused on Dauphine. I understand that completely. You and I, we are not … meant to be. It’s not like I came here for an architectural position, and we happened to meet where we could have a relationship based somewhere on more equal footing. No, I took a vacation from my own life to come and help you and Dauphine. And now the vacation is over. My real life is back home, waiting for me.” I shifted and climbed to my feet, wincing as my back protested. I’d have bruising, there was no doubt.
He climbed to his feet too.
“I’ll miss you, Xavier. I didn’t know I could fall like this. It hurts.” My voice shook. “And it’s lonely down here. And I need to go home.”
His silence was deafening, and the expressionless mask he wore, or what I could see of it in the dim light, was back. I realized now, he wore it when he was feeling things the most.
I squeezed his hand. “Goodbye, Xavier.”
Then I’d turned and walked back up to the house.
Chapter Forty-Seven
“So, are we sending Xavier Pascale a bag of dicks?” asked Meredith, eyes widening with feigned innocence as she closed her mouth over her paper straw. The Mexican restaurant in downtown Charleston was quiet for a Wednesday evening.
“Stop.” I laughed thinly. Then I frowned when I thought about Dauphine accidentally coming across a bag of candy penises. No. “He didn’t do anything wrong.” My fingers were making confetti out of the paper coaster.
“Apart from not seeing what an awesome creature he had in his grasp and letting you go. Nay, pushing you away.” Meredith set her drink down. “I’m just saying. You’ve been back three weeks. Stella, baby, you need your groove back.”
My smile wasn’t forced, but humor was just a foreign place for me. “I loved that movie. We should watch it tonight. Actually, let’s go home and put on PJs right now. Taye Diggs for the win,” I deflected.
She gave a saucy smile and flicked her hair off her shoulder. “He’s a tasty snack. And he follows me on Instagram.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“Does too.” She snatched her phone off the table top and swiped the screen. Then her phone came at my face so fast I ducked. “See?”
“Dude, I can’t focus on the screen when you’re trying to shove it up my nose.” I suppressed a laugh. Grabbing her wrist, I held her phone at a respectable distance. “What am I looking at? This isn’t Instagram.”
“I screen-grabbed the notification of him following me obviously, duh. That’s once in a lifetime shit right there.”
“Let me see his profile,” I teased. “Something tells me he also follows three hundred million other people.”
She pouted but held her phone away from me. “No, he doesn’t.”
“Does too.”
“Just because you’re in heartbreak-loser-ville, don’t drag me there too.”
“Gee, thanks for the sympathy.”
“I don’t have sympathy.” She leaned forward. “You could be boinking a smoking hot French billionaire right now, who literally asked you to stay for the hot sex by the way, and instead you came moping back home.” She picked up her paper straw and swatted my hand. “You don’t deserve the luck. Seriously. And we’re not going home to get into PJs.”
“Please?”
“No. I was by myself for weeks since you’ve both been gone. And then you were back with post-vacation blues, and no job, and refusing to go out. Now you have that job at the Charleston Historic Foundation, and now I have you here, we are staying out. We are having fun, dammit,” she ordered.
Saluting her command, I took a small sip of my cocktail. “Okay. Also, when is Tabs coming back? I can’t believe she’s been gone so long.” I needed to tell her what happened in person. All she knew was, after Dauphine’s kidnapping, Xavier decided they didn’t need to be on the boat anymore and no longer had need of someone to help since his mother was going to move in for a time.
“Between you and me, I think Tabs has hooked back up with her high school sweetheart. There’s something about going home after so long for a family wedding that feels an awful lot like a cable TV happily-ever-after movie.”
My jaw was hanging open, so I closed it. “No. She wouldn’t.” I racked my brain for all the high school stories we’d swapped over the years. “Would she?”
“And leave the big city for the one that got away …? Yes, I believe she would.”
“Are we calling Charleston the big city now?” I asked.
“Well, when you come from horse-country-Aiken, South Carolina, yes, Charleston is the big city.”
“But she has a business—”
“That she can run from anywhere.”
“Hmm. That’s a good point. But you guys have been looking at apartments by the yacht club. Tabitha seemed into it.”
“I think I was mostly driving that bus. I’ve been getting the feeling lately that she was homesick since her parents retired back to where the rest of her family is. And let’s face it, you weren’t into the idea of a move either. Anyway, you won’t even be living here by the end of the year.”
My eyes widened, and I choked on my drink. “Excuse me?”
She shrugged. “Just saying.
