But I was done waiting. She needed to know that I didn’t expect her to wait forever and I wanted to take her on a damn date.
“I’m not perfect. I’ll be honest with you there. I work way too hard. I have no experience at being a good boyfriend. But I’d like you to come out to Los Angeles with me. If you can?”
“What would I do there?”
“Whatever you want to do. I’m not saying that you need to tie yourself to me or anything like that. You can live with me or I’ll pay for an apartment if you don’t want to. I’m actually staying with Spencer right now. But after our phone call, it felt like you didn’t know how I felt about you and I couldn’t stand the thought of that. I cherished out time together and I’d really like to take you on that date I promised you.”
“Are you going to your meetings?” she asked.
“Yep, three times a week at six o’clock.”
“Are you sober?”
“One hundred percent.”
“How did you know I’d be up here?” She started to get suspicious of the insider information I had to have received to know she was there.
“Your dad told me,” I smiled.
She moved closer to me and didn’t let go of my hand. A smile flashed across her face as she looked out over the mountain and didn’t talk for a little bit. I waited. I was in no hurry. I had all the time in the world for Cassidy.
“Well, if my dad already likes you…” she started to say.
I swept her into my arms and kissed her all in one, swift motion. She felt so good in my arms, like I had been missing a piece of me for months. We didn’t know what the future was going to bring for us, but we didn’t care. In that moment, all that mattered was that we were together and we were going to make plans together.
“Are you saying yes, you’ll come to Los Angeles with me?” I asked as I pulled apart from here briefly.
“Are you still a vegan?” She laughed.
“Nope, I like my meat now. Do you still have your tongue pierced?”
She stuck her tongue out at me and let me see the new, heart-shaped rod she had going through the mi
ddle of it. It was no longer a boring, silver color, and instead a brilliant red that matched her hair.
“Yep, I do, and yes, I’ll go with you.”
I pulled her even closer as our lips pressed together and she thrust her tongue with mine. We were going to have one hell of a time together. It didn’t matter what else happened in my life, I felt like if I had Cassidy by my side, everything was going to turn out just the way it was supposed to.
Epilogue
“Are you even putting clothes on at all in there?” I yelled from the hallway as I waited for Cassidy to come out.
“It’s a movie premiere, Erik. It takes longer to get dressed for this kind of thing. Stop worrying; we still have an hour before it starts.”
“I kind of need to be there on time, you know. I’m sure you look fabulous. Can we please just get going?” I begged her.
We had been waiting in the living room for over an hour for Cassidy to get ready. My father and brother didn’t seem to mind, but I was going crazy with anxiety that we were going to be late.
This was the first film that our movie studio had made all by ourselves. We had contributed to several films over the first year of our business, but this one was all us. So, if it did well, then we were going to be getting a ton of new jobs, but if it did horribly, we might lose all the money we had put into it.
“You really need to learn to relax,” my father said as he sat casually on the couch. “Women work faster if they aren’t under so much stress from you yelling at them.”
My dad was dressed in a black tuxedo that matched both my brother’s and my outfits. The three of us looked pretty darn sharp, if I did say so myself. Heath and I had already decided we were going to find a hot movie star and fix her up with our father. He deserved to have some fun in his old age, we joked.
“Heath, can you talk to Kelly and see if she can hurry Cassidy up?”
“Oh, hell no. Don’t bring my wife into this. I’m not getting on her bad side,” he joked as we all laughed.