Page 71 of Love Redesigned
She’d smiled then, her cheeks full of new color. “Yeah. Twins might be fun. But I’m kind of partial to brown eyes.” She’d pulled herself closer to me, reaching up on tiptoe to kiss me just beside my left eye. Her lips trailed a row of kisses down to my earlobe, and then across my jawline until she found my lips. Her hands moved to my cheeks and she’d kissed me right there in front of a homeless woman, a hotdog vendor, and a pair of teenagers who appeared to be high on something, but not so high to keep them from whistling at us when the kiss didn’t stop. We’d kissed so many times in our relationship. Every day. But there was an unexpected tenderness to that moment that I wouldn’t ever forget.
“One of each then,” I had said when she’d finally pulled away, my voice thick with emotion.
“It’s a plan,” she’d whispered back.
“Yo, Dani, we carving this bird or what?” Isaac said.
Dani gave her head a little shake, turning her eyes back to Isaac. Had she been remembering the same conversation? “No. I mean, yes. Just not yet. It has to rest first.” She pressed a hand to her forehead and closed her eyes. “I think I, um...I’ll be right back.” She pulled her apron off and draped it over a kitchen chair before sliding into the garden through the back door.
“What was that all about?” Isaac asked, looking to me.
I shrugged. “She’s probably just too warm from all the cooking.” I moved to the fridge and pulled out a bottle of water. “Maybe I’ll see if she needs this.”
“You better let me,” Chase said, showing up in the kitchen and reaching for the bottle. “I have a feeling you are not the man Dani needs to see right now if the goal is to cool her down.”
“Wait, what?” Isaac said. He watched Chase leave then turned his gaze on me. “Is something going on with you and Dani?”
“No,” I said quickly.
He narrowed his eyes like he didn’t believe my response.
“No,” I said again. “Nothing has happened.”
“But you want it to?”
I forced out a breath. “I don’t know. Possibly?” I sank onto a barstool and dropped my head into my hands. “But after what happened, I’m not sure it matters. I don’t think she’ll have me.”
Before Isaac responded, Darius pushed into the room and dropped a grocery bag full of butter onto the counter. He looked from me to Isaac, and then back to me again. “Did I miss something?”
“Just Alex admitting that he never stopped loving Dani. Did you remember to get some heavy cream?”
“Isaac, please,” I said, shooting a glance over my shoulder at the back door.
“She’s still in the garden with Chase,” Darius said. “You’re cool.” He sat beside me on a neighboring stool. “Is it true?”
“I don’t know. And that’s all I said earlier. I don’t know how I feel. Or how she feels.”
Darius nodded his head. “You know, you’re different now. So is Dani. You never know. Maybe different is what you both need.”
“You’re talking as if I didn’t make a monumental mistake. There are no guarantees here. Even if I did, hypothetically, want us to get back together, she likely won’t forgive me. I’m not sure I would if she’d done the same thing to me.”
Isaac leaned on the counter across from where Darius and I sat. “There are two sides to every coin, man. I was here those first few months after you left. You can’t tell me she didn’t do any damage to you. Any other employer would have fired you for all the moping around you did.”
I shook my head. “I was a coward.”
“And she had tunnel vision,” Darius said. “We all saw it.”
Isaac scoffed. “What? Dani focused? Driven to the point of madness? Narrow-minded and determined to reach her goal? Never.”
“Like I said,” Darius said, reaching out and placing his arm across my back. “You’ve both changed in the past year. Never say never, you know?”
After dinner, I stood in the kitchen alone doing dishes, happy to have something to focus on outside of my earlier conversation with Isaac and Darius. It wasn’t as though I hadn’t considered the possibility of Dani and me getting back together before. But I’d worked really hard not to let myself dwell on the possibility. Not when she was still committed to her LeFranc dream job. And not when I was positive that even if that one obstacle were out of the way, she likely still wouldn’t forgive me.
I wanted to believe I had changed, that we both had. But I wasn’t sure it was enough.
“Hey Alex, you got a minute?”
Dani appeared beside me, her eyes wide with excitement. She slipped a hand over my forearm. “Come here. I need to show you something.”
