Page 83 of Love Redesigned
Alex cleared his throat. “I think I’m okay. Thanks though.”
“You sure?”
I leaned my forehead against Alex’s chest and smiled.
“Yep. I’m sure,” Alex said, laughter in his voice.
“Cool. See you in the morning.”
As soon as Isaac’s footsteps retreated down the hall, I half-expected us to pick back up where we’d left off. But then Alex released my arms and took a faint step away from me, perching himself on the edge of the dresser.
I stood in silence waiting for him to say something, but he didn’t even look up. My confidence fizzled. What had just happened? Everything had felt so right and then in a blink, it was wrong again. “So I guess I should get to bed?” I finally said, my voice soft.
Alex met my gaze. There was warmth there, but also a distance I couldn’t quite define. He’d pulled away from me, and I had no idea why. “That’s probably a good idea,” he said gently. “We’ve got a big couple of days ahead of us.”
“Right.” I pressed my forehead into my hands, mortified to be so blatantly rejected. “Got it.”
Alex sighed. “Dani—”
“It’s fine. I get it. I was just feeling...and you were always...but you’re right. It’s a big day tomorrow. We should focus.”
Alex reached for my arm, tugging me toward him. He wrapped his arms around my back, and I settled in, resting my hands on his chest. “We were always good at this part,” he said, sadness tinging his voice. “But it can’t just be about that.”
The logical part of my brain knew that he was right to stop things. We still needed to have a conversation about what was happening. About what it all meant. About New York and Charleston and what a potential future together would even look like. But standing in his arms just felt so good.
I tilted my head up, willing him to kiss me again. “What if this is what I want?”
His jaw tightened. “This? Right now? Thismomentis what you want? Or I’m what you want?” He released me a second time, this time walking clean to the other side of the room. “There’s too much at stake for me to dothis,without an answer to that question. I can’t go through losing you again.”
So this was the conversation we needed to have? Right here, at midnight in some random hotel room in the Florida Keys?
“What do you want, Dani?” Alex asked again.
“I don’t know,” I said, desperation filling my voice. “Is that what you want me to say? My entire world has been turned upside down the past few months. Everything I ever thought I wanted, everything I spent my entire life dreaming about, it’s all different now. I can’t just make sense of it all right now, here, because you ask me to.”
“That’s not what I said. You take all the time you need. I think I’ve been pretty good about giving you space when you’ve asked for it. We kissed a month ago, Dani, and then we never even talked about it. All I said was that I couldn’t do this”—he motioned between us—“until youdofigure out what you want.” He ran a hand across his face. “No matter how much I want to.”
I moved to the hotel room door but turned back, one hand resting on the doorknob. “What doyouwant, Alex?”
He didn’t even hesitate. “I want you, Dani. You. Us. All of it. I never stopped wanting you.”
The next morning, Alex knocked on my hotel room door just after ten. “Morning,” he said. “You ready to go?”
I nodded, moving aside to let him into the room. “I think so. I didn’t get much sleep last night.”
His eyes spoke understanding, but he didn’t bring up our conversation from the night before, not that I really wanted him to. There was too much riding on the success of our day for us to get waylaid by another heart-to-heart.
“I can’t stop thinking about all the things that might go wrong.”
He moved like he meant to touch my shoulder, but then his hand dropped, and he shoved it into his pocket. “It’s all going to work out; I promise.”
There was no way he could actually guarantee as much, but I appreciated his attempts to assure me anyway. “What if we just leave?” I said, yielding to my fear. “Paige has a dress she can wear next week. She doesn’t need this one.”
“Is that really the only reason we’re here today?”
A part of me thought it actuallyhadbecome my only reason. After my fabric-induced epiphany with Isaac before we left, I’d been feeling more and more sure that I didn’t actually need a way back into fashion’s good graces. But the look in Alex’s eyes told me it wasn’thisonly reason. He needed to tell Alicio the truth about Sasha for personal, validating reasons, and I wasn’t about to prevent him from seizing the opportunity. Sasha reallywasa criminal. If we had the means to stop her? There wasn’t a good reason not to do so.
The plan was for me and Alex to head to the house that afternoon. Alex still had enough claim on the family, he assumed he’d have a place to stay in the house. He had a suite of rooms he’d always used in the past and since hehadRSVP’d, he felt pretty sure they’d left his rooms empty for him. Taking me as his date was the easiest way to hide me in plain sight, so to speak, and gave me a legit reason to be sleeping under the same roof as the wedding dress. The fact that we’d run into his family on Christmas Eve and had appeared to be together only cemented the likelihood of my acceptance.
