Page 89 of The Law of Attraction
“See? I love that you call me on my bullshit.”
She shook her head. “You hate my sarcasm.”
“No, I fucking love it. When I showed up at the airport, I was expecting you to be all meek and crestfallen and spend the whole week shooting silent recriminations at me like a kicked dog. I didn’t expect you to stand up to me like you did. I’d never seen that side of you before. The more you challenged me, the more it made me want to poke back, to bring out more of that fire inside you.”
She didn’t know what to say. None of this sounded like any better starting place for a relationship. She’d thought she was the broken one of the two of them, but it turned out they both were. How were they supposed to navigate all this baggage?
Adam looked down at his messenger bag, which he was clutching like a life preserver. “But I understand if you can’t forgive me for who I was. For how I treated you and everyone else. You didn’t deserve it.” His fingers worried at the buckle on his bag. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s better to quit while we’re ahead—while we can still part friends.”
She’d thought it was what she wanted to hear. It was exactly what she’d been saying and thinking. But it hurt more than she expected to hear him actually agree with her. “I mean…with our jobs, I just…I don’t know.”
He looked up, and when his eyes met hers they were defiant. “I don’t give a shit about my job. I’d rather have you than this job.”
It was like he’d dropped a stun grenade into the middle of the room. All Olivia could do was blink at him, dazed, as her ears filled with a ringing sound.
Adam dug around in his messenger bag and pulled out a yellow notepad, which he thrust into her hands. “This is what I did at work today instead of my job.”
“What is it?” she asked, too disoriented to focus on the handwritten black scrawl on the top page.
“It’s a list of everything I like about you.”
“But…” She thumbed through the pages of the notepad. “Every page of this is full.” Page after page, every single line was covered in his cramped, messy handwriting.
She heard the apartment door close and looked up. He’d left. Just handed her this ridiculous, wonderful, unbelievable thing and then walked out without a word.
She stood rooted in place as she flipped through the notepad, reading the exhaustive list of things he liked about her, which ranged from the silly to the unbearably sentimental.
Your sense of humor
Your cute butt
The way you swear
Your brain
How much you care about your job
How much you care about so many things
That you play D&D
Your eyelashes
The sound of you typing
When you steal my food
The smell of your hair
The freckle by your left eyebrow
The way your eyelids flutter when I touch you
Your big heart
That you’re smarter than anyone else I know
That you’re smarter than me
