The Love Coupon (Stubborn Hearts 2)

“I need to be with you.”

“If you think it’s cool to make me cry in a crappy airport terminal lounge, you suck.”

Oh God, he needed to touch her. His heart was thudding painfully against his ribs. “I don’t want to make you cry.”

“So go.”

“I want to be with you, all the times you need to cry and all the times you don’t.” Unlimited possibilities.

She closed her eyes. They were both thinking of Drew.

“No.” A violent shake of her head. “You want to be MD of Rendel and I want that for you. I’ll never forgive you if you miss your own promotion announcement.”

He put his hand out to cup her face, waiting for her to stop him. She dropped her chin but let him step in, bring their bodies together, take her other hand and lower his face to the top of her head, breathe the life he wanted and he was done waiting for.

She squeezed his hand tight. “I hate you for doing this. I was ready. I’d said goodbye.”

“I hate me too. I’m not ready. I will never be ready.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.” She pulled away and let his hand go. “You hate change. You think I’m some wild out-there thing and I’m not, I’m not. I wear suits the same as you do. We work in the same industry, we get paid for the same kind of job. I just seem wild to you because you’re this calm, steady, focused, organized, dependable rock.”

“Not so steady without you.” Not so rocklike, or focused, and rapidly reorganizing.

“We’re moving in opposite directions and we always were and that’s life.” She folded her arms, shifted her weight to her back foot. A symbolic distancing. “You don’t get everything you want.”

They did the same kind of work. They sold ideas. The hardest person to sell to was someone who did the selling. Someone who loved you without equivocation, who you’d hurt with your fear and reticence. Hurting yourself.

“I have a coupon that says that doesn’t have to be the case.”

“Oh, Tom, we’re all out of coupons.”

“The one I made for you doesn’t have any glitter.” He took his phone out of his pocket and sent her a text with an attachment. “I didn’t have the time to go old-school. It’s an electronic coupon.”

Her phone chimed, but she didn’t move to look at it. “I can’t play this game. It’s not fun.”

“It’s not a game, Flick. I love you. I want to be where you are.”

“You’d leave Rendel? Everything you worked for there, your apartment? Your life?”

No answer was stronger than the simplest one, or left less room for argument. “Yes.”

She slapped her hands on her thighs. “And what? Follow me with no job and no prospects and no fixed place to live? It’s reckless. You’d hate it. You’d get tired of me. It would be a disaster and you don’t believe in happy endings.”

“I changed my mind. I believe they exist. I want to have a happy ending with you. I love you. I’ll work all the rest out. We’ll work the rest out.”

“No. You don’t mean that. It’s just an emotional response. Brain chemicals unbalanced, hormones out of whack. We had an amazing time together. Really freaking good, but it was a distraction and it’s over. We both know a long-distance thing would be painful. It would drift and we’d end up worse off, disliking each other. I’m leaving. You’re staying. It’s best. That’s all there is to it.”

Not the best. A sad imitation, a shadow, a ghost of the life they could have. “I’m offering to go with you.”

She looked away. “Thanks, but that doesn’t work for me.”

He’d taught her to distrust his commitment. He’d used pie and sex and coupon excuses, rationalized their love like it was a variable element in a business plan. No refunds. No exchanges. Nontransferable. Jesus Christ, it was all meaningless without her. She was wild to him, fearless, and he needed that, but he had no way to convince her she needed him too.

“You should go, Tom. You’ll be late.”

Too late to save his own life. Numb, he reached for her and she came easily into his arms, wrapped around him, stopped his heart from exploding and held him together. He didn’t kiss her because that would cut too deep, but when she didn’t pull away first, he knew what it cost her from the way her body shook, and he let her go.

He stumbled past rows of seating, around groups of passengers and their carry-on luggage, only peripherally conscious of them. The coupon he’d made in the back of the cab, in one of those graphics programs on his phone, used a picture of a mountain track. It was summer and the colors deep and lush, the track well-worn and winding, going off into an unimaginable distance.