Chapter 21

PRESENT DAY

I plop my butt down at the train station and wait for the ride home to chocolate and wine and a comfy bed, though I’m not sure how much sleep I’m going to get tonight. What a mess I’ve made of things. What a bogus Valentine’s Day. I lean back on the bench, staring up at the ceiling and contemplating going to Alec’s place instead of my own. But if he doesn’t show up tonight, then I’ll be beyond devastated and have to live with the image of him and Rian together, replaying over and over and over until I need rehab.

My phone goes off in my pocket, and I laugh at myself because I forgot to put it on silent when I set out after Alec and Rian. If I’d followed them instead of coming here, I’d have been found out in a second.

I squeeze my hand into my pocket, expecting a text from Liz letting me know whether she’s got a bun in the oven, but my heart skips three times when I see Alec’s picture and the message he’s sent me.

Redo.

He wants a redo, but of what? I want a handful of them. I want to rewind and relive and change my answers and give us all that time that’s now lost.

“Theresa?”

I swear I’m imagining it. I actually check my phone to see if I’ve accidentally called him and put him on speaker. Nope, he’s standing an arm’s length away, sliding his cell into his pocket. I fumble around in my head for the right words. The ones I’ve been aching to say to him all night are fighting to get off my tongue.

But in the end all I can manage is “W-why? How?”

He lets out a small chuckle. “Huh?”

My eyes shut and I shake my head. “I didn’t expect to see you here.” I take a breath and chance a look at him. His snow-bitten hair is disheveled, his jacket is unzipped enough for me to see his neck and his five o’clock shadow, and his dimple is showing slightly. He’s perfect.

“You’re perfect,” I whisper, then feel my face flush ten thousand degrees of red. But he doesn’t seem to have computed the hushed confession; his eyes are looking at me but his mind seems to be somewhere completely different. I see his fists move in the pockets of his jacket, and he shifts his weight from one foot to another.

“You’re here,” he says, not acknowledging my word vomit. “What…what are you doing here?”

I stare down at my well-broken-in boots. “All sorts of crazy things.”

He chuckles in a confused sort of way but lets it go, taking the open seat next to me. His arm rests on the bench, one of his legs crossed over the other. He’s bouncing in his seat, as jittery as if he downed a triple-shot espresso before making his way here. He can’t seem to talk to me…me. The smell of someone else’s perfume mixed with Alec’s mouthwatering scent wafts in my direction, and I hate that this night happened. He’s probably nervous about telling me that he kissed another woman and that it may have blown whatever we had out of the water. His thumbs are twiddling, twiddling, and my phone is a deadweight in my hand, pulsing with the word “redo,” making my heart and head throb. Alec is saying something. His mouth is moving and he’s looking at me and I’m nodding like I understand. But then the words fall off my lips, interrupting whatever conversation he started.

“You left. You left me in the middle of the night and I think I know why.”

Whatever word Alec was on in his sentence floats off into oblivion, his green eyes becoming as wide as the moon.

“Why do you think I left?”

I throw him an arrogant look. “Men are notorious for not seeing the obvious signs women send.”

“Crying is a pretty clear-cut sign,” he argues with a tilt of his lips.

I jerk back, letting my mind float into the perfect night we shared, trying to see it from his perspective, but I’m completely unable to. My mind was so far from reality that night, so caught up in bliss.

I let out a small laugh. “Crying wasn’t a bad thing in that scenario.”

He drops the arm resting on the back of the bench and shifts to face me, his knees bumping into mine.

“When is crying a good thing?”

“Ever heard of a happy cry?”

“You were hysterical.”

“I was hysterically happy.”

He shakes his head, amusement and confusion mixing in his eyes. “You had me thinking you regretted it before it was even over. I left for you. So you wouldn’t have to face me in the morning. Face your…mistake.”

I twist on the bench, pulling my leg up to press it flush against his thigh. Frustration tightens the corners of my mouth. “I was giving you a sign, Alec.”

He lets out an equally frustrated sigh. “Well, then, what did this sign say?”

I grab his twitching hands, holding them tight in my grasp. I’d ask him to look at me, but I never have to do that with him.

“I’m ready. I’m not just ready—I’m ready for you. I asked you to be in the damn auction so I could bid on you. I had three grand in my pocket tonight to tell you with some grand gesture what I’ve been holding back.”

“You want me for another night?”

“I want you every night.”

The confusion drowns the amusement in his eyes, and worry lines form on his face. Without thinking, I reach up and smooth his brow, then trace his jawline with my pinky. His mouth opens a smidge, as though breathing through his nose is just not going to cut it right now. This may not be the grand gesture I was hoping for, but I can’t keep it in any longer.

“I want to redo everything. Every moment I’ve had with you. I want to rewrite my dialogue, give you everything I should’ve given you in the first place instead of handing it over to that prick I was dating, or any of the pricks in between. I want to go back to that first night you said you loved me. I want you to say it again so I can say it back. And don’t think this is because I saw you strip on that stage tonight, because I can tell from that look on your face you’re thinking that. And don’t laugh right now—I’m being serious!”

He hides the smile with his hand as he rubs his chin, but his shoulders are shaking with silent laughter. He brings our hands up to his mouth and presses a kiss to my knuckles.

“I don’t want to go back that far,” he says. “I don’t want to redo any of it. Everything I’ve done for you and with you? You couldn’t pay me to change that.”

“But you called a redo. You said I could have one redo for anything I wanted, and I want one for each event since I met you. That’s not too much to ask, I don’t think.”

He chuckles, his fingers turning in my hand to link together with mine. He’s not shaking anymore. He’s not nervously clenching his fists or bouncing his legs, and I can see a warm light brightening the green of his eyes. It’s like a weight has toppled off our shoulders, for both of us.

“I just want to redo something I said to you,” he says. “I’ve wanted to take it back for three weeks.”

My heart stops. It would be just my luck that he’s asking to redo that night—the only one I’d rather not redo.

“You were right,” he says, and I wildly shake my head back and forth, whipping my already messy hair into an even more tangled state.

“No…I was wrong,” I tell him. “So very wrong. Right now I’m right. I need to redo everythi—”

He puts his fingers up against my lips with a stern look, and my shoulders drop in surrender.

“There was a night when I helped wash your dishes. You remember?”

“There were a lot of those, Alec.”

That makes him break, a half grin cracking his face. “Well…I asked you if you were sleeping with Jace.”

“Oh yeah, the night you had a giant brain paranoia fart.”

“You said you wouldn’t sleep with me because it’d mean something.” His breath catches a little and I watch his ears redden. “You were right. For three weeks I’ve been trying not to let you see just how much that night meant, because, hell, it was the best night of my life. And I’m the schmuck who just left you. I left you alone, and damn it, I’m sorry. You’re right—I shouldn’t have left at all, even if I thought I had a good reason for it. Even though you were crying.”

“It was happy crying!” I say, gripping his shoulders and shaking them in mock anger. He laughs and takes my hands in his again.

“Look…the real reason I left…well, I’ve never been able to forget why I love you, and I was in danger of saying it out loud again. Over and over again, and I didn’t want to deal with the pain that you wouldn’t say it ba—”

I slam a hand over his mouth so that his I love you doesn’t get lost in the rest of his sentence. Those were the words I was afraid I’d never hear from him again.

“You still love me?” I ask, my voice a breathless, blissful whisper amid the noise of the train station.

He nods, and I let my hand drop slowly from his mouth to the collar of his jacket. He still loves me, even after all this time, all these years, even this disaster of an evening, and I start to wonder if fate really is on my side after all.

He takes hold of the hand I have on his collar and locks his eyes with mine. “If I’d have told you that night, would it have changed anything?”

If he’d said it, it just would’ve made that night more perfect than it already was.

“We probably would’ve gone for round two.”

His smile is something that should be on a GQ cover, melting my insides and filling them up all at once. I can hear the train pulling into the station, and he presses his forehead against mine quickly before helping me to my feet.

“I think I love you,” he says with a wiseass grin that takes me back to my apartment just over a year ago. He’s giving me my redo.

“I think I love you too.”

His dimple twitches, and he reaches out for my waist. I trip my way over to him, heart palpitating in the rhythm of the song I wrote for him, and I’m trying to erase my smile, but I can’t, so when his lips meet mine, I swear all he gets is teeth at first.

His hands dip into my jacket pockets as my arms wrap around his neck. He tastes like friendship and love and forever, and I want this moment to last just that long. But his lips pull away, and I watch as his brow furrows. He looks down at my jacket pocket and pulls on the long, red scarf I stuffed in there earlier. The corner of his mouth twitches up.

“You stole this from me.”

My jaw drops in mock shock. “I did not. I won that fair and square.”

I poke him in the dimple. He pokes me in the side. We poke and laugh and redo yet another night, another moment, this time in equal parts love and friendship. He tosses the scarf over my head, lets it drop to my waist, then uses it to pull me in even closer. His breath is warm and good and everything I want in this moment, and whenever I ease forward into a kiss he leans back, like two opposite sides of a magnet.

“Kiss me, damn it,” I tell him.

He grins. “I’m just making sure nothing is going to interrupt us.”

I bite back my smile, debating whether to tell him about my role in the events of the evening. But he closes the gap between our lips, bringing me into another one of the purest and most perfect redos of my life. Maybe I’ll save it for him as a bedtime story.