Page 84 of Sleeping with Her Enemy (49th Floor 2)

It’s better with her around.

He couldn’t get his father’s voice out of his head

When Dax thought about love, which wasn’t often, he always assumed it was an anachronism. Something his parents had, but not something that had survived into the modern world. Even if it was worth the risk—which it wasn’t, Allison had taught him—who had time for that stuff anymore? Everything moved too fast. There was too much irony buzzing around for modern, urban people like him to look up from their atomized, work-fueled existences, and find love.

Love was his father making his mother beef stroganoff every Sunday for forty years, even though he hated it.

People didn’t do that anymore.

Or so he’d thought as he’d hightailed it down to the ferry docks after having fled the party like he was Cinderella.

Except…

Once he could breathe again, and as the ferry had built up a head of steam, he started to imagine life without Amy. Not just life without sleeping with Amy, but actual Life Without Amy.

It’s better with her around.

He’d thrown back his head then, and he had actually laughed at the blue sky above. Dax liked to flatter himself that he was an intelligent guy. But Jesus Christ, it had taken him long enough to get his head out of his ass. To realize that Amy wasn’t Allison.

By the time the boat docked, he knew a bunch of things with certainty. He knew that he would make Amy Morrison beef stroganoff every single goddamned day for the rest of her life if she wanted him to. He would eat peanut butter cups at the movies. He would trade in the millionaire-mobile and fold himself into her stupid little toy car every time he needed to go somewhere. He would memorize the stats of every single one of the Jays’ pitchers.

He’d spent the past fifteen years thinking he wasn’t looking for a relationship?

Fuck that.

The idea was as radical as the one he’d had years ago—more so, even. The stakes were higher. That had been his job. This? This was his life.

He picked up his phone.

Gary had better be home.

…

Amy juggled her popcorn bucket as she waited impatiently in line to board the ferry. She hoped she wasn’t too late.

Too late for what? It wasn’t like he was going to marry someone else this afternoon.

It was more that she had to do this before she lost her nerve. Being New, Fearless Amy was hard. She was fairly certain she was going to get her declaration thrown back in her face and her heart shredded.

But she had to try. She had to be honest. She had to go after what she wanted.

Because that’s what she was about now.

She just needed this goddamned ferry to move.

It felt like she’d come flying after him, but of course that wasn’t strictly true. Admittedly, she had stood in that pantry for a good five minutes, freaking out among the dry goods. And then, of course, it had taken her another twenty to extricate herself from her mother. There was also the detour to the movie theater for popcorn.

And, okay, there were twenty more in the middle there where she’d had to find Mason and tell him definitively what she should have told him earlier that morning. She hadn’t wanted to waste the time, but it seemed important that he know that they were, to in keeping with the Taylor theme, never ever ever getting back together.

She wanted to fully close the book on her old life. Say good-bye to the old house, the old love.

Because a totally clear head was necessary for the Hail Mary pass she was about to let loose. She was calling it Operation: Maybe You Can Have Everything.

Clutching her bucket of popcorn and shuffling along as the crowd moved like snails up the gangplank, she tried to figure out why she had been so frightened all this time to lay things on the line with Dax. The obvious answer was that she’d already had a declaration of love thrown back in her face once that summer. But that was only part of the truth. The rest of it was that even though she had been trying to remake her life, she’d fallen right back into the same old patterns, projecting everything into some vision of the future she’d arbitrarily fixated on. This one had been Amy Morrison, Fun Single Girl. She hadn’t stopped once to think that maybe, in her overcorrection, she was doing exactly the same thing she always did—programming her feelings instead of feeling them.

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