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After a few awkward minutes where I try not to make eye contact with the glaring guard and chauffeur, Bill and Rhett return.
“So where are we going?” Bill asks me.
Victory!
“The Javits Center,” I say.
“We’ll meet you there,” Rhett adds, already walking toward the illegally parked motorcycle.
The ride to the Javits center should be easier. But with Bill secured and Rhett driving the speed limit, I’m only freed up to think about the conversation that’s awaiting us on the other side.
What am I going to say to Rhett? What will he say to me?
He’d come to my building looking for the Alencars. He’s done nothing so far to indicate that he wants to get back together. I need to stay cool and collected, don’t come on too strong. For all I know he’s moved on completely, and I’ll just end up embarrassing myself.
The Javits Center comes up way too quickly.
The convention has been well underway for hours. Attendees linger outside in fantastical costumes, chatting and taking photographs.
Rhett parks the motorcycle on the sidewalk again, this time out of sight of any security guards.
“You’re going to get that towed,” I remark as we dismount.
He smiles slightly. “That’s fine. Mother technically owns it now, and she doesn’t care if it’s impounded.”
I blink, surprised. I want to ask, but something holds my tongue. Suddenly I’m more nervous than I’ve been in any job interview, at any board meeting.
That “something” is affecting Rhett too. Before he had seemed unflappable, but now? Now he’s suddenly very interested in a giant robot that’s clanking by us toward the convention doors.
There are benches lining the building, and we head to one wordlessly. But even once we’re seated I have no words.
Rhett, on the other hand, finds his tongue.
“It’s good to see you,” he says.
“Where have you been?” The words escape me, a mix of relief and exhaustion at finally being able to ask the question that had consumed me all these months.
Rhett meets my gaze. “I was in the country,” he says. “Small Town, South Carolina. I was fixing cars there.”
The image comes readily to mind. Rhett in a sleeveless shirt, digging under a hood, a country song on the radio beside him. And was there a girl? A denim-shorts-wearing, apple-pie-making, horseback-riding country girl with a drawl and a laid-back Southern attitude?
Someone like Rhett.
Someone he could be happy with.
He reads the question in my eyes. “There hasn’t been anyone else,” he says.
Relief floods through me. So much so that I don’t respond fast enough and he reads my silence as guilt.
“It’s okay,” he says quickly. “It’s been a long time. I didn’t expect—”
“I’ve thought about you every day,” I admit.
So much for cool and collected.
But Rhett looks thrilled. That bewitching smile spreads slowly across his face, and then we’re speaking over each other.
“I was way out of line.”
