Returning to the living room, she sat beside him on the loveseat, her thigh brushing his knee as she handed him his glass and tucked her leg up under herself, turning to face him. His hand on the back of the loveseat flexed and curled, knuckles brushing the ends of her hair. Clutching her wine glass, she asked the question that had been nagging at her since that morning.
“What happened with you and Chelsea?”
Derek caught a lock of her hair between his thumb and forefinger, rubbing the strands between the pads of his fingers before letting them fall. “Chelsea used to work in the same building as the label’s offices. She’s an attorney. A very successful one. At first, we would run into each other in the elevator in the morning. Small talk about the weather. The annoying security firm on the fourth floor who thought everyone was stealing their mail.”
He chuckled at the memory and Jo’s stomach sank. Jealous and babbling all in one day. She hardly recognized herself.
“One day I invited her out for a drink after work.” He shrugged. “It made sense. We both worked so much we didn’t have time to meet other people, and we made each other laugh.”
Another strand caught between his fingers, this time a gentle tug, sparks springing to life across her scalp.
“Mostly I think we were lonely and tired of being single. We had the careers, the success. Getting married was the nextlogical step.”
“And you loved each other.” The words were ash in her mouth.
“We did. But it was never a big love affair. No one writes songs about the people who get married because it makes sense on paper. We spent our honeymoon in the Maldives working side by side on our laptops on our hotel balcony. At the time I thought it was some kind of statement about how comfortable we were with each other, but now…”
“Now?”
He twirled that strand of hair around his finger, pulling it tight enough to sting. “Now I know loneliness doesn’t go away just because someone’s by your side.”
Jo’s heart thudded painfully with a recognition that ached like pressing on a fresh bruise.
He dropped her hair and drained his wine in one sip, his throat working as he swallowed. The clink of the glass as he set it on the coffee table echoed in the cavernous living room.
“We both knew it wasn’t right. We loved each other, but we’d never been in love. Chelsea wanted to leave New York, move closer to her parents in the Boston suburbs, and I… didn’t. We found out she was pregnant two weeks after the divorce papers were signed. I considered following her to Massachusetts, but…” He shrugged, his lips twisting up in a grimace. “We’ve made it work. But Annie’s getting older. She only has so many ‘firsts’ left. There’s so much I don’t want to miss.”
“You promised Chelsea this was your last tour,” sherepeated, the piece slotting into place, “so you can move closer to her and Annie.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed, his hand landing just above her knee, warm and heavy. She leaned her elbow on the back of the couch, her chin resting on her hand, eyes locked on the movement of his thumb as it swept along the sensitive skin on the inside of her knee.
“One of the perks of being part owner is I can choose where I work from. I don’t need to stay in New York.”
“It must be hard. To leave the City,” she said.
He looked up at her through his eyelashes, and she had the strongest urge to press her lips to the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. “Speaking from experience?”
“I only lived in Manhattan for a few months. I couldn’t hack it.” He tutted his disbelief, but she shook her head, barreling on. “I was barely eighteen and living in a model apartment on Fifty-First and Second. Eight of us in a six-hundred-square-foot two bedroom owned by a club promoter. We paid our rent by going to the club a few nights a week, looking hot to draw in a bigger crowd of paying customers. When I got mono and couldn’t keep up with the schedule, the promoter gave me an ultimatum: fuck him or get out. So I got out.”
His hand tightened on her thigh, a low rumble sounding his chest. “He took advantage of you.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time a rich man used his money to get laid. And I knew what I had signed up for. But I also knew the next face of Maybelline wasn’t being chosen from thegirls dancing on a bar in the Meatpacking District. I thought if I built up my portfolio with local gigs back home, then I’d be ready to go back and try again—without the sleazy club promoter.”
“Did you?”
She swallowed down her bitterness, all the dreams she kept locked in a box at the bottom of her heart that she’d never see come true. “There was always a reason not to. For a while, I was booking steady work in Providence and Boston, and I had my friends, the bar… I guess I thought I’d have more time, but then I turned around and suddenly I’m pushing thirty—”
He squeezed her thigh. “You’re twenty-seven.”
“For a model, I might as well be fifty.” She met his eyes and let the confession she’d held back from her friends tumble from her lips. “I haven’t booked a new modeling job in over a year. It’s too late. It’s not going to happen for me.”
He lifted his hand from the back of the couch to capture hers, bringing it to his lips. The soft brush of his mouth and tickle of his beard against her knuckles lodged a lump in her throat that she struggled to breathe around. She appreciated that he saved her the platitudes, the apologies and half-hearted encouragement. She didn’t want that from him.
And she didn’t want to talk anymore, didn’t want him to look at her and see someone who’d failed. She wanted more of his lips on her skin.
“Derek…”
He set her hand down gently against the couch cushion. “It’s late,” he said. But she heard the rejection he didn’t voiceall the same.