Page 30 of Husband Material
“Gage, what are you doing here?"
Giving you my heart.
Still, her face couldn't decide whether to be surprised, happy, or both. She looked a little shocked.
Taking both her hands into mine, I said, "I'm here for you."
11
“What are you saying?" she asked quietly.
Under the view of those candid, expectant eyes, there was only room for one thing. The truth.
"I'm saying that I'm not fine with leaving things as they were." I held her gaze. "Or ending things—ending us. I don't know how, but I do knowwho. For me, it's you, Gi. As soon as you left and I found your poem, I understood that I don't want to live without you for even one more day—"
She stopped my words in their tracks with two fingers to my lips.
The wind had stopped blowing. All was still as though we needed the calm to speak.
"There is still so much you do not know about me, Gage." She was guarded, but truthful. I could live with truth, though. The truth would get us to where we needed to go together.
I raised her hand that was still clasped in mine to my lips and kissed it, breathing in the sweet scent of her skin, knowing relief for the first time in days. "But I've got time." I winked and gave her a grin hoping she remembered.
She bit on her bottom lip as a pretty smile bloomed on her face. "I think you've used that same line with me before."
"It's a good one…and if it works…well, then I'm using it on you, Frenchy."
She laughed softly. "Wouldmon beau surfeurlike to come to my flat?"
"Oui."He would very much like to come to your flat. He would very much like for you tocomein your flat, too.
* * *
Her Parisian flatwas close to how I'd imagined it. From the old limestone walls to the eclectic interior. A bed with tie-dye sheets of teal-blues, lime-greens and canary-yellow, and presiding in the center of the room, her easel.
I'd never been in her room in Charleston, now that I thought of it. It'd never really crossed my mind because when I wasn’t working—and God, had I become an excellent delegator—we'd spent nearly all our time together at the beach house or on the actual beach. Her sketching while I surfed. But being here, in the place where shelived, seemed far more intimate than I could've asked for.
She flopped down on her bed and gestured for me to sit.
I sat beside her.
The silence in the room was keen. Giselle clasped and unclasped her hands, wrestling with something painful within herself.
Every atom in me burned to say something, to console her. To tell her whatever she had to say was safe with me.Iwas safe. That the strength of my love for her wasn't something that some dark new revelation would extinguish. Even if I wanted to feel differently about her, I couldn't. I understood that now.
One glance of her wretched face indicated that right now my part was to stay silent. This was Giselle's choice, and her fight to fight, her story to tell.
Finally, she spoke.
"I went to Charleston to get away."
She drew her fingers through her hair, and when they caught a snag she ripped them free, shaking her head in frustration. She let out a tortured sigh, as if finally accepting the imperfect narrative she needed to tell.
"Henri and I met when I was sixteen, at a time when my mother was dying of cancer, and I was angry at having to lose her. A few months was all it took for us to form a bubble between the rest of the world and ourselves. I moved out, I dropped out of school. We had the most insane lives, like in a storybook."
A bitter smile I wanted to kiss away until she was back to her usual carefree happiness marred her beautiful face, but she had so much more to say. And…more importantly, for her, I had time to listen.
"Dancing and partying and drinking all night. It was all such brilliant fun that I almost didn't notice what was happening. How my friends were dropping away. My life. My art." She shook her head. "He started stealing to support us, and he got pretty good at it, I guess. The years blurred together, and our bubble shrank and shrank and shrank. Until there was nothing left for me but him. Until our lives were so stifled and limited that we had no choice but to hate each other. He became irritable and tyrannical, blowing up at any wrong thing I said." She closed her eyes, her lower lip trembling as if she were experiencing it in this very moment. "The first few years, I tried to leave. That was the saddest part of all. Wherever I went, whoever I stayed with…he would somehow find out. He would know. Every time he showed up with his grim apologetic smile, familiar kind eyes, and I figured it was a sign. That someone who fought so hard for me could not possibly be wrong."
