Own Me Page 15

  Every single inch of her skin.

  “Adam,” she sighs when she pulls away.

  There are people milling around, but no one on this length of path. I don’t know how long that will last, and I don’t want to waste the coiled energy that’s unfurling through me after that kiss. So I drop to one knee.

  Maybe she knew. Maybe she figured it out the same second she noticed my tie in the parking garage. But she presses her fingers to her lips like she’s completely shocked. Whether or not she’s faking it, I appreciate that look. It gives me the loophole I need to push my courage through and take the box out.

  “Genevieve. I don’t deserve someone as smart and funny and beautiful as you are. I know that. I also know that, although you keep insisting this is a decision that benefits us both, I’m getting the better end of this bargain. You deserve nothing but happiness and love—even though I realize what we’re doing isn’t permanent, I want you to know that I’ll devote myself to living up to the honor of being your temporary husband. Will you agree to be bonded with me?”

  I open the box and she gasps, her eyes so wide I can see the spike of every eyelash.

  “Is that for me?” she gasps from behind her hand.

  I shift on my knee, pretty sure a piece of gravel is dislocating my knee cap. I don’t give a damn. I just want to hear her answer. “Yes. I know this marriage is for convenience, but it’s still the two of us committing ourselves, as friends. There’s no one in this world I’d rather be bonded with than you, Genevieve. Whether you say yes or no to me, it’s yours. But it would make me so damn happy if you’d say yes.”

  “Yes. Yes, of course, yes!” Her voice jumps on the back of a shaky laugh.

  I stand and pull her left hand to me. I feel like Marigold is leaned over some herbs in her store right now, chuckling like a white witch, because the ring slides on and fits Genevieve’s finger perfectly, like it was made for her.

  I’m tempted to ask if she’s seen this ring before, but she holds her hand out in front of her and squeals. “Adam! It’s gorgeous! This ring is absolutely perfect. Where did you find it?” Before I can answer, she takes a picture of it and then pulls me over, kisses me hard on the mouth, and positions her camera out for a shot. “It’s not official ’til it’s online, right?”

  “Yes,” I agree, because she’s happy and smiling, and she said “yes” when I was so damn scared she’d come to her senses and say “hell no.” No reason to tell her I don’t do social media or that I think it’s a stupid waste of time. If it’s important to her, I’ll white lie my way to happiness tonight. “Do you want to walk around some more? We have reservations tonight, but they’re not for a while yet. I hope you like steak.”

  “Who doesn’t like steak?” She takes my hand and threads our fingers together. The ring turns on her finger and digs sharply into mine, but she’s so happy, I keep my mouth shut.

  I realize there are a lot of things I never would have seen myself doing, but I’m more than happy to do them for Genevieve now.

  Like ignoring minor pain on my end to enjoy major happiness on hers.

  Or splitting a huge order of mashed potatoes—which I think are bland and have the consistency of wallpaper paste—just so I can watch her enjoy them.

  Or getting up in front of a restaurant full of people and slow dancing to Ray Charles’s “Come Rain or Come Shine” because it was her parents’ wedding song.

  When we get back to the car, Gen is giddy with excitement.

  “I guess when you met me, it was just one of those things,” she croons, and every drop of blood exits my head. I press her against my car, my body tight to hers, my hands splayed on either side of her hips. I watch her eyes go wide with raw need. For me.

  Or for the me she thinks she knows. The only me I can show her right now, because there’s only so much that’s safe.

  It’s either cold, hard facts or fiery sexiness. The middle, the “just right” place, is off-limits.

  “Are you happy?” I ask, not sure exactly why.

  Will she tell me the truth? What can I do to change things if she isn’t happy?

  “I’m with you, aren’t I?” She nibbles her bottom lip.

  A brisk pride erupts in me at hearing that. I beat it back down, because hope like that is worse than dangerous—it’s destructive. I can’t make this into what it isn’t.

  “Being with me isn’t any kind of recipe for happiness, and you know that.” I dip my head low, bury my nose in her hair, and take a deep breath. The way she smells makes me dizzy with want.

  “It is, Adam,” she says, her hands coming up and working through my hair. “I know I ragged on you for your flashcards and rules, but then you do something like this. Something a thousand times more romantic than you had to, just because.” She drags her hands down so her palms are pressed to the sides of my face and her thumbs brush over my cheekbones.

  “You know why the flashcards are important though, right?” I press, not sure if I’m treading where I shouldn’t dare.

  She sighs. I regret pushing her.

  “I know you think you’re doing this right, but there’s so much more to what we want…to what we have together than you could ever fit on a stack of three by five cards.” She tugs my face closer. “You can know where and when I was born down to the inch and the minute. But do you know what it feels like to kiss me just after you put a gorgeous ring on my finger?” she teases, her voice a sexy purr.

  “No. I don’t.” I dip my mouth down and run my lips over her neck. She leans back, lets her head fall, and exposes even more sensitive skin to my hungry mouth. “But I think it would be good…research.”

  She stops short and pulls away. Her eyes, so bright with excitement a few minutes ago, have clouded over. “Is that what this is?”

  “Is that what what is?” I ask, my words fumbling stupidly off my tongue.

  “You and me,” she says, hands falling to my shoulders before they slide, palms down, along my chest. “What we’re doing. Is it just some kind of weird social experiment you’re conducting?”

  “If this is some weird social experiment I managed to pull off, I’m going to have every anthropology and sociology major in the college begging me to mentor them,” I joke. She laughs, but it’s because she’s polite, not because she thinks I’m funny. It seems like she’s disappointed, and that hurts. Nothing in me wants to disappoint her, not for a single second. “Did I say something wrong?”

  Her smile is sad. “Not at all. Sometimes I get caught up in the romance of things, and I forget reality. It’s a bad trait. Bound to make me sad. I’m glad you’re here to cure me of that.”

  “I don’t want to cure you of anything,” I protest, but she’s not listening.

  She’s opening the door. Pushing me into the driver’s seat. Glancing out the window to make sure no one is watching. In one swift motion, she slides onto my lap and pulls the door shut. The interior of the car is silent, and she’s pressed on top of me.

  “Do you have index cards for this?” she asks, her voice husky.

  I shake my head. “I think this is one of those times it’s better to experience things. The way you like to.”

  “Good.” She sits more snugly on my lap, her body pressed against my embarrassingly raging hard-on. “I guess I can teach you something. Now, close your eyes.”

  I don’t even consider disobeying. She kisses my eyelids, a place on my body I never imagined as a central hub for erotic excitement. Obviously creativity isn’t my strong suit.

  “If the immigration agent asked me what I kissed like, what would you say?” she asks in a breathless whisper.

  “They wouldn’t ask that,” I say automatically. When she stops, I amend my answer. “If they did, I’d say I can’t conclude. That I need to conduct research. So much research.”

  She brushes her hot lips lightly over mine.

  “Do you think knowing my birth weight matters more than knowing what it feels like to have my mouth pressed to yours?�
�� she asks.

  I brush back, and that feather-light exchange is enough to make my blood race.

  “No,” I answer, because that’s the truth. “But it’s not up to me,” I explain, lamenting the fact that I can feel her body sag with regret when I say the words.

  “How about, right now, we pretend this isn’t about our stupid plan?” she suggests, her lips trembling. “How about we pretend this is…real?”

  My heart hammers, my palms go slick with sweat, but I don’t answer. Instead I press my mouth to hers, licking at the seam of her lips until she opens willingly, not like she’s acting—like she’s wanting. Like she’s as desperate for this as I am. She moans, and I slide my hands up her back. She gasps, and I deepen the kiss, letting my tongue tangle with hers as she rocks back and forth in an eager rhythm.

  “More,” she pleads.

  My hands find their way down the neckline of her dress, my index finger brushing under the lace of her bra.

  “More!” she cries, and my hands take full possession, tugging at her tits and rolling her nipples between my thumb and forefinger until they bead up.

  For me. Because of me.

  Before she can utter the word “more” again, I’m at her mouth, kissing deeply enough to force her moans and sighs directly over my tongue. My fingers bite at her, eager to make her cry out those things that let me know we make sense like this.

  Being sexual together is the one way we can circumvent the awkward reality of what we’re doing. When I kiss her, when I taste her, I know her in her most basic form. And I’m vulnerable, too. I allow her into a place I wasn’t sure I was ready to let anyone.

  Genevieve Rodriguez is making me a better person. She’s making me feel things, do things, want things I never expected to. She’s making me believe in the possibility of more.

  It’s exciting and completely, utterly terrifying all at the same time—and I realize I have to pull back. I have to keep the fact that I might be falling for my best friend to myself. She’s making herself vulnerable for me, because she’s loyal to the core. But she’s also nursing a wicked broken heart, and I have to realize that any attention she shows me is just rebound affection.

  Being bonded to her means I take care of her until she’s ready to find the person she freely chooses with her heart, not with strings or special circumstances attached. Logically, that person can’t be me.

  I refuse to take advantage of the woman I’m falling in love with.

  Chapter Eight

  Genevieve

  “Still time to back out,” Lydia singsongs in my ear as she sprays the tiny flyaways around my face into place.

  She grips the sides of her strapless black gown and tugs it up slightly. We didn’t have time to choose official bridesmaids’ dresses, so I just asked my sisters and Maren to wear black, since I thought it was a color everyone would have in her closet already, and it would make a nice, crisp-looking lineup.

  I realize now it looks like they’re in mourning. Also, Lydia’s juice cleanse has made her so thin she’s almost gaunt. The dress barely stays on her nearly nonexistent boobs.

  “I don’t want to back out,” I say through tight lips, looking at my reflection in the long mirror propped against a worktable.

  My simple white dress has great lines and a clean, fresh look. It’s airy and understated and nothing at all like I thought I wanted.

  I thought I wanted to wear the corseted, beaded, extravagant number, the one Adam told me to buy. After we walked out that day, he insisted I go back, take my sisters and mother, and pick anything I loved. He handed over his credit card—the one he uses only after carefully deliberating every purchase—and named a jaw-dropping budget.

  I went to the bridal shop with my mother and sisters, his credit card tight in my hand, and I found The Dress.

  The One.

  It fit like a glove, and looked like the designer had crawled into my head and taken notes on every detail I’d ever longed for in a wedding dress. It was also just under Adam’s extremely generous number. The sales girls all sighed and gasped and told me it was made for me and I better not even think about walking away without it, because it was clearly fate that led me to That Dress.

  I twirled around in it, eyed it from the front and back, fell in torrid, head-over-heels love with it, imagined Adam’s face when he saw me walk down the aisle in it…and then I thought about the very practical fact that I’d wear it exactly once. I thought about all the extra hours Adam would have to work to pay it off. And then I marched right to the winter sales rack—blinking back tears as I left my corseted, mermaid-style, perfect gown hanging, dejected, in the tiny fitting room—and I chose a different dress, deaf to my sisters’ objections and appreciative of my mother’s quiet respect and understanding.

  Marriage is compromise. It’s putting the person you’re choosing to be with above your own petty needs and wants.

  I like thinking the little girl in her mother’s lace tablecloth gets to wear her dream dress. Even if she’s settling for a stand-in groom.

  I wish I’d gotten up the courage to tell Adam the dress means nothing to me—that all I care about is the man standing at the end of the aisle. The man whose heart I’m determined to earn, the man who isn’t a stand-in for anyone.

  Adam is the man I want.

  Too bad there’s absolutely no way I can have him for good.

  I have to accept that what we’re doing really is a convenience for him, nothing more. I don’t fit into his successful life plan. I’m not the girl he dreams of taking home to his family. He told me that plainly. I have to keep myself from getting caught up in the romance that could so easily blind me.

  Maybe being in a green-card marriage is similar to being an undercover officer. You have to learn so much about the life you’re putting on like a cloak. You have to believe you’re a part of it, be so convincing you even trick yourself now and then.

  And then you have to remember not to lose yourself in the lies you created.

  I bite my lip hard to stop the tears, resolving to think of something else—anything else—to get through this ceremony in one emotional piece.

  Lydia drapes the lacy veil, passed down from my mother, over my hair and slides the bobby pins in. “Okay, but if you did, no one would care. I mean, you hardly know this—”

  “Stop, Lydia. Please, today of all days, just stop,” I plead. I’m stressed enough. I don’t need my sister badgering me on top of everything else.

  “Your dress is so lovely, Genevieve,” Maren sighs as she comes into the room. She looks gorgeous in her black dress, accented with splashes of pink to match my accessories. I manage to quirk a nervous half smile at my brother’s sweet fiancée, who—I know for sure—will make him beyond happy. “And Adam sent you this.”

  “Me?” I ask, as she hands me a white box with a pale pink ribbon tied around it.

  “We’ll give you a few minutes,” Cece says, squeezing my shoulders and kissing my cheek. She takes Maren and Lydia each by an arm and leads them out of the tiny room cluttered with surfboards and sand.

  Regret claws at my insides. I didn’t send Adam anything. Even though I’m sure this is something silly—I’m going to guess it’s the Darth Vader alarm clock he joked about seeing online when we went out for dinner the night before—I regret the fact that I didn’t think to send him anything. Even if this is a total gag gift, he did set up an entire, gorgeous engagement scene and slid the most amazing ring on my finger. Every time I look down at my left hand I’m still shocked by how perfectly me it is.

  I didn’t do a thing for him.

  I’m failing at being a thoughtful wife, and I’m not even officially a wife yet.

  I pull on the end of the silky ribbon and it slinks off of the box and onto the floor with a soft hiss. When I lift the lid, I see a white note card with Adam’s narrow, precise scrawl and, underneath that, a small bouquet of peonies.

  My breath catches in my throat, and I put my hand out to touch the petals, but
pull back just before I do. I kind of wish it was just some silly gift, because I’d roll my eyes and laugh. But I have no idea how to react to this, because it’s so not what I was expecting.

  I’m a little annoyed with myself that my first instinct was to underestimate Adam, especially because it feels like he’s gotten in the habit of overestimating me lately.

  I wanted peonies for the wedding. He knew that.

  I’d always pictured their delicate blooms lining the aisles of the synagogue as I walked slowly to the front, all eyes on me. When I imagined my ideal wedding, I also imagined picking out my perfect gown with my mom and my sisters, then agonizing over the perfect heels to go with it—which basically meant both had to be full of sparkles. And I’d hold a bouquet of peonies as I made my way to my groom, so sure and so in love that I wouldn’t hesitate, even for a second. I had replayed the same set of images in my head a hundred thousand times since I was a little girl.

  But the reality is, peonies are out of season, and we aren’t getting married in a synagogue or any other place of worship. We may have been able to put on a show for our families, but neither one of us felt up to the task of convincing a rabbi that we were in this for all the right reasons. We’re saying our vows out on the beach, down by Deo’s surf shack, in front of my family and a few close friends.

  It’s not like I want or need a grand wedding—but through all the planning, it’s sort of felt like nothing I dreamed about was in the cards.

  I set the box aside and read the note.

  Gen,

  I know that your first choice was peonies, and I wanted to make that happen because I want you to be happy, and I don’t ever want you to feel disappointed with the path we’ve chosen.

  I’m sort of glad that you couldn’t get the peonies, though. They’re beautiful, but they don’t represent who you are.

  They’re fragile and temperamental. They need the perfect conditions to thrive.

  You, Genevieve, are brave and full of life. You adapt to what’s in front of you.