“I don’t want to know.”
She sighs. “Won’t you tell me about her, Landon?”
Rachel. Rachel. Rachel. Her name dances through my mind, as well as the green flash of her exquisite eyes, her sweet voice, her smile, her laugh… I want her, and I don’t want to share her with anyone, much less Ava.
Rachel.
It feels as if when I left her outside her apartment on our return to New York, I left a part of myself with her.
Goodbye, Landon!
There was so much I wanted to say to her, and yet so little I felt I could say.
Why was it so hard?
Why did it feel like she was shutting me down and pushing me away whenever I tried to risk…opening a door to something more than just sex?
“Landon?” Ava prompts.
“I’ve got to go, Ava. I have work to do.”
“Landon!” There’s a pout in her voice.
“Talk later,” I say firmly, ending the call. Then I place the box back in its package and call for Tony, giving him instructions to send it back to Rachel.
As soon as he confirms the package has been delivered, I place a call to her, waiting—almost nervously—for her to answer.
When her voice comes on the phone, it’s distant and impersonal, yet it fills me with an acute longing.
I want you.
I focus on the topic I’ve chosen for this conversation, the jewelry. “Don’t even think of returning them,” I say without preamble. “I’ll just send them back, and I can do this all year.”
Fight me, Rachel. Give me a reason to prolong this interaction, because I can’t bear for it to end.
“Are you there?” I ask when she says nothing.
“Landon.” Her tone is patient, but all I hear is her voice, and all I can think is how I want to hear it up close again. “I can’t keep them,” she says. “We agreed they were a loan.”
“And now I want you to have them.”
“It’s not enough that you want me to keep them,” she says. “Maybe you always get what you want, but this time—”
There’s a wavering in her voice that I can’t bear, a ghost of hurt that somehow comes through the phone. I want to reach across the space between us and fix it.
If she’ll let me.
“Rachel…” I sigh. “Stop. I don’t carry expensive jewelry around in case I need to give gifts to random women. I bought them for you, because I thought they would look great on you.” It’s the truth. I also want to know she has something of mine, a reason to think about me, no matter what happens. I pull in a breath. “And contrary to what I said to you a long time ago, I don’t always get what I want.”
Her reply, when it comes, is characteristically stubborn. “I’m not going to keep them Landon.”
“Okay,” I concede, though it’s not okay at all. I’m not willing to accept defeat, not on this as well as losing her. “Why don’t we talk about it then, face to face?”
“I don’t think…”
“Let’s have lunch,” I persist. “I’ll come to you. Is that okay?”
There’s a long silence. “It’s fine,” she says finally. “I’m free at one.”