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Or yes.
Or…something.
Instead, I stood there stunned by the fact that he’d asked at all. Like he thought we could be more than some reckless mistake.
“Will you at least think about it? You don’t have to give me an answer right now.” He smiled. “In fact, I’m pretty sure you might not be capable of giving me one. It looks like I shocked the shit out of you.”
That made me smile. “You did indeed.”
He took my hands and swung them back and forth at our sides. “Just think about it. Okay?”
I took a deep breath and nodded. “I will. But I can’t think straight in your presence. So I need some time alone to consider it. When I’m with you, all I want is to be in your arms.”
Rafe smiled. “So maybe it’s not that hard a question after all. I think you might already have your answer.” He brushed his knuckles along my cheek. “I’m going to go and let you get ready for your day. But I’ll leave my door unlocked. If you decide to give us a shot, come home to me tonight after work.”
CHAPTER 29
I missed my stop.
And damn it if it wasn’t the most humid day this summer.
By the time I realized what had happened, the train was already pulling into the next station. That meant I had a twelve-block walk back to where I should have gotten off, plus the two blocks I normally needed to hoof it. I’d been so deep in my thoughts, I was lucky I didn’t wind up in a train yard somewhere.
“Two weeks.”
“Be my girlfriend.”
“Give us a chance.”
Rafe’s words had been on repeat all day, looping through my mind while I answered emails, half-listened in meetings, and stared at pages of a manuscript without reading a single word.
Today’s mid-July humidity was thick, sticky, and made the city smell like hot asphalt. The whole way home, I’d told myself even considering what Rafe had proposed was crazy. Calder would know. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually. He’d see it in my face, hear it in my voice, or sense the shift before I could explain it away.
Then again…wasn’t I already screwed? Did it really matter if it was one night or two weeks? You didn’t measure the sin by the number of times you crossed the line. It was only important that you’d crossed it at all. Once or one hundred times, nothing would erase the fact that I’d betrayed my boyfriend. Again. And if that was the case, maybe I owed it to myself to stop pretending I could slip back into the life I’d had with Calder. And maybe I owed it to Rafe and me to see where things could go, see why I hadn’t been able to keep away from him.
By the time I made it to the brownstone, my shirt was stuck to my back, my hair had frizzed, and my heart was pounding for reasons that had nothing to do with the extra walk.
When I reached the second floor, I took a deep breath and knocked before I could lose my nerve. The door swung open almost immediately, and I blinked. Rafe stood there in a pair of khakis. Khakis.
He had a white button-up dress shirt tucked neatly into them and a leather belt completing the ensemble. His tattoos were covered, and his long hair was tucked beneath a baseball cap. He looked more like a guy who worked in finance than the free-spirited artist I knew.
I stared at him. “Is it…Halloween?”
He looked down at himself for a moment. “You like it?”
“I’m confused by it.”
“This is Commitment Rafe.”
“I’m sorry…what?”
He stepped aside so I could enter, which I did, hesitantly.
“Commitment Rafe. You know, mature, dependable, the guy who washes his clothes before he runs out of underwear so he doesn’t have to go commando.”
“Go commando—”
“Today I read a self-help book on making relationships work.”
