Page 122 of Nothing Without You
Yet, I didn’t mind it one bit.
The sun was shining.
Christian was here.
I was happy.
Because Christian was here.
Not even fifteen minutes after I texted him, he was in my office with a barely contained smile and a well-needed coffee which wasn’t really coffee. I loved my sugary iced drinks no matter how much doctors told me I needed to cut it out if I wanted to get rid of my PCOS—that had to be a lie because it really didn’t do anything but make me mad and bloat.
Moonshine was a good forty minutes away from my building, so I was shocked when he arrived twenty-five minutes too soon.
Scratch that, I was surprised he even showed up. Notthat I didn’t think he would have dropped his work for me—a delusional part of me believed he would have done that.
He didn’t give me time to think, to breathe, to take him in.
Christian threw his coat onto the couch in my office, grabbed me by the wrist, and took me with him.
He told Umaima to cancel all of my meetings, who wasn’t helpful when she made kissy faces at me and then proceeded to drop her coffee all over the console. Christian didn’t let me move to help her, just kept dragging me and I really didn’t mind it.
Arun Klahan, Harry’s intern, smiled at me when he watched Christian manhandle me in front of everyone.
We formed a friendship of sorts. I wanted to make sure all the interns had a boss they knew about and a boss who cared about them.
Arun was someone who understood what it was like to feel outside of everyone’s conversation yet feel like the core of it.
His mom also made the best Hydrabadi food, and I was incessantly in love with it. It was information I chose to keep to myself because the last time I told Christian I was in love with someone else’s food (a couple of days ago when his neighbour brought me peanut butter cookies), he took it upon himself to make every kind of cookie possible.
The kitchen ended up in a disaster and he ended up with decent chocolate chip cookies. I gave him a pat on the arm and told him he did a good job.
Not every chef could be a baker and my husband was proof of that.
I’d be caught dead before I ever told him that though.
“Christian,” there was a smile in my voice. “Everyone’s looking at us.”
He didn’t stop, taking two strides at a time. “Good, let them know that I’m taking my wife out on a date.”
A date?
Butterflies flapped their wings in my stomach. Newly hatched ones tried to fly and fell over and over again.
I braided our fingers together and without hesitation, Christian tightened his hold.
“You never asked me out on a date,” I said once we got outside and away from everyone’s prying eyes. Brooklyn Bridge stood tall and daunting to our right, people buzzed left and right but all I could see was my husband.
His hair whipping around in the wind and his smile so bright and so blinding, I was filled with the sudden need to kiss the daylights out of him. He wasn’t acting like himself—or whatever version of himself he’d created for the world.
Right now, he was Christian.
MyChristian.
The one I’d fallen in love with when I was just a girl.
The one who’d fallen in love with me when he was just a boy.
It was stupid to think that when I’d fall in love with every version of Christian—even the one that would never fall for me.
