Three Hard Lessons (24 page)

Dominic’s face contorted into disbelief. “And that’s why you don’t do love?”

“I’m just giving you the setup here, Dominic. Give me a fucking minute.” God, I could not be more uncomfortable right now. “Once I hit high school, I was all confused by affection and attention from guys. I craved it. I, like, needed it. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Yeah.” He sounded sad for me, but I didn’t want his pity.

“My sophomore year at Northwestern, I met this guy named Ian. We hooked up at a party, and then again a week later. . . And suddenly we were dating.” It didn’t seem like Dominic was going to let me sit up, so I put my cheek against his chest. “I don’t know how or why it happened, but I fell in love.”

“Wait a minute—”

“Yeah,” I said. “I lied to you about that.” I let him digest it for a moment. “Ian was a total mindfuck. One day he’d tell me he loved me, and the next he’d blow me off. I always got over it and took him back. He said he loved me and I
needed
that.” Just recalling it now made the old anger burn again.

“He went home to Texas during Christmas break, and I couldn’t get ahold of him, like he fucking ceased to exist, and he comes back at the beginning of the spring semester acting like nothing happened. He just wanted to pick up right where we left off.”

My brain was getting that hazy, tipsy feeling. Thank god. The words were coming easier now.

“I told him to knock that shit off. He said he loved me, and I was the only girl for him, and he told me all the lies guys say when they want to keep getting pussy.”

Dominic’s mouth dropped open. “Payton, that’s not why—”

“I bought it all. There wasn’t a shred of doubt in my mind, so when I found the engagement ring a week before spring break, I was so happy.”

My statement hung in the air.

I would remember that moment forever, the shock and excitement as I opened that blue velvet box.

“Oh, shit.” Dominic’s voice was hushed. “The ring wasn’t for you.”

“Nope. He’d gotten his high school girlfriend pregnant over Christmas break. I had to hear about it from his roommate when Ian didn’t come back to school. He never answered any of my calls.”

A shift went through the body holding me. “Where’s this fucker now?”

“It doesn’t matter, and I don’t fucking care. That week when I thought he was going to propose and instead he vanished? It destroyed me.” The only person I thought truly loved me, abandoned me. “I don’t do love. It’s just a lie.”

Dominic’s hand curled under my chin and forced my eyes up. “No, it’s not. I love you. That’s real.”

I stared into his eyes. Since Ian, I’d become the human lie detector, and I didn’t see any tell that Dominic was lying, but my damaged heart refused to accept it.

“Please stop saying it.”

“Goddamnit, you are the most frustrating girl . . . Okay, yeah, you had a really shitty experience a long time ago, but we’re going to get past it.” He’d said
we’re.
Like this was his problem now, too?

And, what the hell? Did he not think I’d tried to get past it? There had been Joel, and a few others, and I’d felt nothing with any of them. In fact, before Dominic, my fucked up relationship with Joseph was the closest I’d gotten to love with a man. My manager certainly didn’t love me, but I knew he at least cared about me.

Dominic pulled me into his lap and wrapped his warm arms tight around me. “Now that I put it out there, it’s out. Get used to hearing me say it.”

“Then get used to not hearing it back.”

I didn’t argue to try to stop him, because Dominic did whatever he wanted. His hands started at the base of my neck and slid up gently until he had my face cradled in his palms, him just a breath away. The pad of his thumb brushed over my lips, pausing at the center.

“I love you.”

The thumb slipped away and was replaced by his kiss, the same one he’d given me at the club. He’d kissed me then as a man who’d waited a year to kiss, but this time it was worse. This was a kiss he’d waited his whole life to give. One that tasted like love.

My eyes stung and I turned away.

“Are you . . . crying?”

I blinked and glared at him. Whatever was going on with my eyes dried up. “No,” I spat out. “I don’t cry.”

A short laugh came out of him. “You know,
saying
you don’t do something? That doesn’t actually make it true.”

I rolled my eyes and crawled off of him. “You better watch yourself. Your truth serum made me sleepy and bitchy.”

He turned off the light and curled up around me like he always did, but I felt him all around me now. Like he was tattooed to my skin.

“Thanks for staying,” he said. I don’t know if he meant through the holidays, or the fact that I hadn’t bolted from the apartment when the L word came out.

“You’re welcome,” I whispered back. “Merry Christmas.”

Every morning before he left for work, it was the same. He’d take my face in his hands, brush his thumb over my lips and tell me he loved me. That thumb would slide out of the way just as he replaced it with his lips to kiss me goodbye.

It snowed my final week in Tokyo. The city was more beautiful with the fat snowflakes drifting down to melt on the neon. My ticket home was for Monday afternoon, and as the weekend approached, the familiar panic crept in. I didn’t love this place. I’d gotten more homesick in my five weeks here than my entire semester in Amsterdam. But I didn’t know how I was going to get on that goddamn plane.

He’d been late getting home this whole week, cutting deeper into our remaining time together.

“I was hoping we could go to Kyoto for the weekend. You want to?” Dominic asked over dinner on Thursday.

“Well, yeah.” When else was I going to get the chance to go there? “What did you have in mind?”

“We could stay at a
Ryokan
. It’s like a traditional inn so you get the full Japanese experience. I’ve wanted to stay at one, but it’d be weird to go by myself.” Something suspicious flashed behind the aqua eyes.

“Okay, sure, but what’s going on with you?”

“Maybe I made reservations for us already. There’s a really good one that has an
onsen
.
You know what that is?”

“Yeah, a hot spring.” But the weird expression continued on his face. “That’s not what’s got you nervous, though.”

He gave me a tight smile. “You’re not going to like this next part.” He leaned back in his seat across the dinner table from me, massaging a hand on the back of his neck, giving me a view of the bicep flexing under his T-shirt.

“Out with it.”

“The place I booked, it’s supposed to be really great.”

Okay . . .?

“Because it’s so
traditional
.”

I wasn’t sure what he was getting at, but he delivered the word with so much weight it made me nervous. He sighed, and locked eyes with me.

“The bad news is I changed your last name. The good news is it comes with jewelry.”

My chair squealed as I pushed back from the table and shot up. He leaped to his feet, too.

“Calm down,” he said. “It’s just for show. They won’t take an unmarried couple.”

My heart slammed in my chest and I ripped my eyes away from him. He wanted me to pretend to be his wife. I didn’t hear him come over. It was the thick arms that circled my waist that announced his presence.

“You’re asking way too much.” I said it quietly.

“It’s a lot, I know.” He pressed me against him so my face was buried against his T-shirt and I breathed in the scent of cedar and soap. “I’ll make it worth it, I promise.” A hand smoothed over the back of my head, angling me to look up at him. “I mean, if you fake marry me,” he teased, “you get half my stuff in the fake divorce.”

I pushed out a weak smile to mask the terror inside. Not terror at this idea of pretending. I’d always been a good actor. It was that the idea of actually marrying Dominic someday – it didn’t make me feel empty inside like it had with Joel. Instead I stood in Dominic’s arms and felt lightheaded.

“Okay, so say I do this. What makes you think,” I whispered, “that I’d take your last name? That’d be moving back in the alphabet.”

“Too late.” He grinned and looked thrilled I’d sort of agreed to it. “I already registered us as Mr. and Mrs. Ward. But go ahead and tell me you don’t
do
name changes. It’ll be fun.”

“Asshole.”

He laughed and lifted me up, causing my legs to fold around him. He stormed toward the bedroom. “That’s no way to talk to your fake husband, Mrs. Ward.”

Shit. That sent tingles down my spine. “Maybe you should put something in my mouth to shut it up then.” I slipped a hand between our bodies, rubbing him. “Like this.”

He gave me a wicked, dark look. “I’ll put that wherever I goddamn please.”

Fuck. I might just love him after all.

chapter

TWENTY-ONE

Dominic only made it twenty minutes into our six-hour train ride before asking about the rings. He’d dropped a wad of yen on the table Friday morning, along with a ring made out of paper he’d taped together for sizing, and tasked me with picking them out.

I glared at him as I dug the box out of my purse. I’d gone into a jewelry store and bought two simple silver bands, one for each of us, then bought a gaudy cubic zirconium ring at one of the tourist shops. Trying the rings on had been difficult, but I didn’t suffer the full-out meltdown until after. I’d sat in a coffee shop like a zombie for over an hour, weighing my options and forcing myself to face the fact that I was leaving Japan soon. Leaving him.

He couldn’t go back to America. My half-joking request for him to come home with me had been met with a wall of silence and an unreadable look. Slowly his expression filled with concern. “To where we’d both be out of jobs?”

No, that wasn’t an option for him. He had another year left on his contract.

I almost dropped the box with my sweaty hand. “Hope it fits,
darling
,” I said.

Dominic ignored me. He took the larger of the two bands, and I followed its quick descent onto his finger. How could he be so comfortable with this?

“It fits. Your turn.”

As I stared at the band on his left hand, my breath caught. A sign that he belonged to someone. To me. It was sexy. Wait, no, I didn’t like this. I grabbed my rings and shoved them on my finger, then balled my hand into a fist, dropping it out of view. I expected the ring to feel like it weighed a ton, but it didn’t.

We watched out the window as we raced through the gorgeous countryside filled with cedar trees and rice paddies. Dominic’s hand rested on my knee, and as we barreled through a tunnel, the light glinted on the new band on his third finger. My eyes were drawn to it like a moth to a flame. What was wrong with me?

It was late afternoon when we arrived in downtown Kyoto, and took a taxi that wound through the city that seemed just as sprawling as Tokyo and yet more intimate. There were temples everywhere, and less neon.

The exterior of the
Ryokan
was a two-story building with a wooden-carved gate. A woman greeted us at check-in, and escorted Mr. and Mrs. Ward to their guesthouse. We followed a path through a perfectly manicured winter garden, over a tiny red footbridge, and into our private bungalow.

My eyes went wide as she showed us the space after we’d removed our shoes. The interior was classic Japanese with the tan matted floor and paper doors. The back wall of the room was all glass with a view of our own private garden courtyard. In one corner, two narrow mattresses sat side by side on the floor. They were called futons here, not the fold-and-fucks from college that word typically brought to my mind.

A glassed-in room was located in the corner opposite the futons, the bamboo shades drawn up to give us a view of the large soaking tub. The woman explained in English that dinner would be served in our room at seven.

“This must have cost a fortune,” I said to him after she’d gone. “This place is beautiful.”