Page 56 of Love You Too

“Oh, you poor, misguided soul. No, I’m saying it because the woman hates me. Were you not there on the phone call I just heard?”

Ren grimaces, unable to deny the truth. He made the mistake of answering a call from his mother on speakerphone in the car just now, and she said some very not nice things about me. “I don’t like seeing you tied down, is all I’m saying.” Those were her parting words to her son. With me sitting right there.

“She says that about any woman she thinks I’m dating. If she opens aPeoplemagazine at the market and sees me in the same room as a woman, I get a text and a call and a letter from a carrier pigeon telling me not to get trapped. It’s not about you.”

“Does she really want you to be sad and alone your whole life with only a hockey stick to snuggle with on the bad days?”

“Of course not. But you have to understand—growing up, it was just the two of us. She wants me to succeed and live my dream. Shed worked hard for me to be able to afford everything to pursue hockey. She’s just protective.”

“No,myfamily is protective. Your mom is a human gargoyle, sitting on the roof, ready to scare off all prospective girlfriends. And I’m the worst of them all because I’ve trapped you for life with this baby. Wait until she hears about that.” I sound breathless, which makes me sound hysterical. The bigger my belly gets, the more the baby pushes on my lungs, and the more out of breath I get doing normal things like walking to the mailbox and now, apparently, talking.

“This is good,” Ren says, unable to prevent a smile from taking over, which makes me unable to stop looking at him.

“Why?”

“Get it all out now. Tell me all the ways you expect this to be horrible and get a good image fixed in your head. That way, when you actually meet my mom again, you’ll be pleasantlysurprised because it can’t possibly be as bad as what you’re imagining.”

“It can,” I say in a huff, not liking that he’s making light of my distress.

“It won’t.”

“It will.”

“Impossible. No one could hate the woman I love. I promise.”

All the breath leaves me in a whoosh that sounds like an impending windstorm. I turn fully in my seat to face Ren. “What did you just say?”

I wait for him to realize his misstep and backtrack. I’m giving him a chance to take it back and tell me he just meant that he likes me an awful lot. But he doesn’t. Instead, he levels me with a serious expression, his eyes lock on mine, and he nods. Then, slowly, a smile creeps across his face as though he can’t hold it back any longer. He takes my hand and holds it to his heart.

“I love you, Beatrix Corbett. I want to be very clear, so there’s no way to misinterpret my words. I. Love. You.”

My jaw drops open, but I think I’ve stopped breathing. The air in the car goes utterly still and silent. Except for the pounding thrush of blood in my ears—that won’t go away. He loves me? “You love me?” I say finally, allowing the Tetris blocks to drop into place in my head. Slowly, ever so slowly, so as not to leave gaps or misplace anything.

“I fucking love you.”

“Oh my gosh, Ren. I love you too. So much, but…but…” I smack his shoulder. “Why the heck didn’t you tell me that sooner?”

In classic Ren fashion, he seems baffled by my insistence on details. “Because it’s the most obvious truth there is. So I kinda thought you knew.”

The most obvious truth there is…

I keep quiet for the rest of the ride, digesting this newinformation. It’s reassuring, familiar, complicated. Because I have an obvious truth, too—I can no longer protect my heart from Dominick Renaldi. I gave it a valiant effort, but now it’s too late. I love him.

For the second time in my life.

CHAPTER 23

Ren

“Dominick! Over here!”

The shrill voice cuts through the air in a restaurant with its stone floors and industrial beams for a ceiling. In other words, the place is loud, but my mother is louder.

I follow the source of the voice, my eyes landing on a dyed eggplant shade of hair that I’ve never seen before. Interlacing Trix’s fingers with mine, I guide her through the Cheesecake Factory, noticing enormous salads, full-sized pizzas, and whole broiled chickens on the plates of the people in the room. Of course my mother chose this place. The menu is a fourteen-page book with every imaginable dish, but she plays this game where she can’t decide on one thing, so she orders two. Then she realizes she’s less hungry than she thought and has the waiter wrap everything up for the next two nights of dinner.

I’ve called her on it plenty of times and even offered to arrange a dinner delivery service for her because she hates tocook, but she won’t hear of it. She has her ways about certain things.

Trix isn’t wrong in her assessment of my mom, but she doesn’t need to worry. I won’t let anyone disparage Trix or make her feel like she’s in the wrong, least of all my own mother. But I’m still hoping the meal will go off without any drama.

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