Page 183 of The Path to Loving Him
“Yeah, might even dance for you.”
“You’d never,” she scoffs. “The day you dance naked for me is the day . . . hell, I don’t even know because it would never happen.”
“Why do you say that?” I ask. “I’d dance naked.”
“You are such a liar.”
She snuggles in close, and I’ll be fucking honest, I’m not the kind of guy who would dance naked, but if it made Gabby smile, if it made her laugh, hell, I’d do it.
“Might do it for the right smile,” I say.
She squeezes my arm. “Well, I’ll keep that in mind. But back to your request with your bedroom. What is it?”
“Oh right, your perfume. I want you to spray my room with your perfume.”
“Seriously?” she asks.
“Yeah, seriously. If I can’t have you in my room, I at least want to smell you.”
“My, my, my. Look at you, Rowley. It almost seems like you’re really into this relationship thing.”
“When it’s with you, I am.”
“I think we got too much,” I say as I stare down at a porcelain horse in my hand that I just unwrapped from its protective tissue paper.
Gabby comes up behind me, places her arm around me, and chuckles. “You’re the one who got the horse. That was not on me.”
I point at the embroidered horse throw pillows on the couch. “And those, whose idea were those?”
“Those might have been me, but they look so cute in here, and Mac is going to love them.”
I let out a sigh and place the porcelain horse—that I got for seventy percent off probably because no one else wanted it—on the coffee table. “If you had told me ten years ago I’d be decorating my purple house with horse decor to appease a four-year-old, I would have told you, you lost your mind.”
She laughs. “But it’s adorable, and there are not many horse things, only a few.” Gabby pulls out a throw blanket with mini horses on it, causing me to raise my brow at her. “Really, there’s not that much?”
“Okay.” I chuckle and then unload the rest of the bags, putting everything on the coffee table. “At least the area rug is horse-less.”
“Which I’m still upset about because I really was in love with that green area rug with the mini brown horses all over it. It would have been so cute.”
“It would have been absurd,” I reply. “I can get on board with the throw pillows and the blanket, and even the porcelain horse, but the rug is where I put my foot down.”
“Such a shame. It could have been a real eye pleaser.”
“That rug was not an eye pleaser.” I pick up a plant and hold it out, unsure what to do with it.
Gabby takes it from me and places it on a side table along with the modern lamp that she picked out that I actually liked. “What do you think?”
“I think I’m grateful that you’re here because I never would have picked half of this stuff.”
“I’m glad you asked. I love doing this.”
“Well, I feel useless.”
“Why don’t you move that toy shelf over between the windows and start filling the cubes with Mac’s toys.”
“Now that I can do,” I say, loving the simple task because placing plants and hanging pictures with Command Strips that Gabby insisted I get does not seem like something I’d be good at.
“Is Mac spending the night at Hattie and Hayes’s house?”
