Page 83 of How to Say I Do
“Of course.” I kissed his cheek and turned to the security line, and I felt Wyatt’s eyes watch me go. He kept me in sight until I was all the way through. I blew him a goodbye kiss after, and he caught it in his hand, and then I had to run to my gate.
Three hours later, as soon as the plane’s wheels were squealing across the tarmac at LaGuardia, I pulled out my phone and called Wyatt. He answered on the first ring. “Noël?”
“We just landed. I had to hear your voice again.”
“Oh, I needed that,” he whispered. Behind him, I heard Peanut and Pickle, and the whistle that sometimes happened when a breeze blew through the barn just the right way.
Strange, wild emotions snarled inside me. I was at home and far away from it at the same time. I was back in New York. I was away from Wyatt. “I miss you.”
“We all miss you here. Peanut misses you lots. Ain’t that right, girl?” There was a snort, a snuffle.
The people around me rose. If I stayed on the plane, would it take me back to Texas? “We’re getting off. I’ll text you from the subway.”
It took an eternity to file out of the plane, and another eternity to trample down the concourse. My old grumpiness was back in full force, and all the sunny, warm feelings and the lightness of being that had settled inside me at Wyatt’s vanished in fifty feet of LaGuardia Terminal B.
I made it to the subway without turning feral, and squeezed through the crowd and found a strap to grab and four inches of room to breathe. I wiggled my phone out, put on my best New York happy face, and snapped a selfie. In the background, someone gave my cowboy hat a long side-eye, and another lady glared, pissed about my hat and my bag and my elbows sticking out. Welcome to New York.
Xoxo babe. Give Peanut one of those kisses from me.
New York in summertime was a unique experience, and not for the faint of heart. Movies fired up production, modeling shoots went into overdrive, and jet setters touched down for a night before dashing off to Milan or Marseilles or the Amalfi Coast. The city had a distinctive stench when the mercury rose: hot asphalt, the commingled cooking fats from a hundred bodega fryers, ozone from the subway, and a million bodies all hot and frustrated. I longed for open spaces and the clean, sweet smell of hay, or of Peanut’s breath, and of Wyatt, sweaty and disheveled and shy about it.
Gone were my simple, tender routines, my morning coffee with the sunrise and the roses, or Wyatt and my meander to the paddock to feed Peanut an apple and freshen the hay. I was back to my wild dashes: roll out of bed, slam a coffee, rush for the subway. Text Wyatt as I hit the ground running, first to the Calvin Klein shoot at dawn, and then to a meeting with the director on the movie set of the week. The screech of brakes and the rumble and racket of the taxis, the chime and clank of the subway turnstile, theclack-clack-clackof the models’ heels on the sidewalk. Sirens wailing, tires squealing. Old Crazy Fred trying to save souls from his street corner. The cost of a promise of salvation from Crazy Fred used to be one cigarette, but inflation hits even God, apparently, because now it was up to a pack.
New York, New York, home sweet home.
My mornings didn’t begin until I texted Wyatt, and I couldn’t fall asleep without ourgood night, sweet dreamsexchange. We told each other everything about our days. Wyatt was up to his eyeballs gearing up for the harvest, and every time I called, he seemed even more exhausted than the day before.
Grape harvesting depended on about a billion factors, he tried to explain: the sun and the sky and the sugar content of the fruit, the firmness and fullness of the grapes, and the gamble of another day. How long could the grapes hang on the vine before sweet turned to rot? A handful of hours or an unexpected rainstorm could ruin an entire growing season if the grapes began to ferment.
I rambled on and on about the designers I was chasing down for the Fashion Week parties, who were—right on fucking cue—changing their designs and leaping boldly into new inspirational eddies, shredding all of the old and ushering in the new.
I missed Wyatt relentlessly. Now that I knew what we could be, being without him for any stretch of time seemed out of the question. Why was I waking up alone, crammed into my rank futon and listening to the drip of the window AC twelve floors up when I could be in Wyatt’s arms? I could be burning the edges of his toast and washing his dishes, not forgetting to eat half a bagel when I set it down at a shoot to help straighten hemlines, only remembering it three hours later and half the city away. I could have been brushing Peanut, or testing the ripeness of the grapes in block 6, or teasing shade leaves into place over his tender petite sirah.
But I’d spent ten years building a life here. I couldn’t just up and leave. What about Tessa and Tyler? AndElite? And my partnership? If I walked away, what would I do? If I showed up in Texas nothing but five boxes of designer clothes and my sparkling attitude, what would I be bringing to Wyatt?
Wyatt and I planned for the future in oblique ways. We wouldn’t see each other again until Tessa’s wedding, and when we talked about when we would kiss again, or when I’d get to brush Peanut the way she really liked because—apparently—Peanut only liked how I brushed her now, it was always “at the wedding.”
Talking about after the wedding was trickier. After the wedding. After Fashion Week. After I was made partner. After the world knew about the Gran Cielo Viñedo, and after Tessa Yarborough’s celebrity touched Wyatt’s ranch. After, after after.
If I was being a reasonable, rational, and sane adult human, I acknowledged that Wyatt and I needed time to let this mature. I’d only known him since spring. We’d spent two weeks in total together, day in and day out. I had let the fullness of my personality and all of my glorious, brooding bitchiness fly, so Wyatt knew exactly what he was getting into. Remarkably, it seemed like he liked that. And me.
But Jenna had been with me for eighteen months, and she made me believe she wanted me, too. She’d made me believe she was going to walk down an aisle toward me. Thank God she hadn’t, of course, but her dropping me so suddenly had left a mark that still smudged my future dreams.
Yes, I loved Wyatt, and most days I believed he loved me back. But sometimes, when I was lying awake, frustrated about being alone and without Wyatt, or when I was bouncing on the subway, the clatter and rattle trying to unhook my soul, or when I was threading my way through the heaps of people bustling through Midtown, I’d wonder: could it last? Two weeks wasn’t a lot of time. Was it enough for him toknow? And be certain about me? What is “a lot” became “too much”… again?
It was terrifying to be so acutely in love. Celebrity bullshit was a known factor, but I had no idea what I was doing here.
We needed time. Time to love, and learn, and to grow whatever this was, and whatever this could be.
AndElitewas becoming a problem—a big one.
In fashion publications, the September issue is the main pivot around which an entire year orbits. A magazine can be judged entirely on the thickness and exclusivity of their September issue, and can live and die by the accolades or disdain from that month alone.
Elitewas holding an unheard-of forty pages in the dead center of their September issue for Tessa and Tyler’s wedding. The head of creative design and influence—who looked like she ground up caffeine pills into her espresso—had pulled me aside and vibrated through a frenzied explanation of how they needed way more details than they were getting. “The entire magazine,” she’d said, “is centered around Tessa’s wedding. The romanticism, the escapism. The culmination of a fairy tale, and the finale of a love story that proves Prince Charming is out there. We’re going to sell a billion copies of that issue because everyone gets swept up in a love story like that.” Her fingers had dug into my forearms like talons. “So weneedthe information, Noël. We have to line up the creative, the editorial, the accessories, and the advertisers, and it’s all got to be based around selling that love story. Get us the details, Noël. Get them now.”
The editor-in-chief took a more blunt approach in an email she sent to Harrison. Elitehas contributed $10 million to the Yarborough wedding. We have guaranteed, through Harrison Ltd., to be the sole and exclusive global distributor of Yarborough wedding publicity, and we require that you comply with this contract.
Which meant—after Harrison ripped me a new asshole on a long-distance call from Seoul, where he was checking out the surging South Korean fashion—that I had to talk to Tessa.
