Page 66 of You First
“I won’t be driving?”
“Tomorrow night, you’ll be driving. Because this is not a date. You’ll be driving me to the place I want to go for dinner, and you’ll be joining me because asking you to wait in the car while I eat ahi tuna steak and crème brulée would be exceedingly rude.” He kept going despite her increasing giggles. “When we do go on a real date, you will not be driving. Even if I have to hire a chauffeur.”
Her giggles stopped then because she wouldn’t put it past him to do just that. And date or not, she’d get to be with him tomorrow night. Meredith had no idea how they were supposed to negotiate this strange and evolving relationship, but she wasn’t about to say no to time spent with him.
“Okay. Bonefish. Tomorrow night. Not a date. Got it.”
His look of mock authority became one of genuine pleasure. “Perfect,” he said, smiling.
Their eyes locked across the expanse of the bed. They looked at each other for longer than they should have, but Meredith couldn’t bring herself to look away. Gazing into his eyes was indulgent, and she was greedy for it. She took what he gave, and the feeling of being seen, of being fathomed, poured through her, filling her all the way up.
But with each passing second, Gray’s look grew more heated. And she felt each scorching degree. To save them from themselves, she needed to cool it down.
“H-how many times have you been to Paris?” she asked, almost panting by the time the banal question came to her rescue.
Gray blinked, seeming to find his grounding again. “Three.”
She tried to keep her mouth closed and show the least amount of surprise. Butthree?
“Wow. All since your first book?”
“No.” Gray grabbed one of his pillows and stuffed it under his head. “I did go once after my second book was published. That was part of a European book tour. The time before that was a summer abroad after my junior year of college, and my first time was when I was fourteen.”
This time her jaw dropped. “You went to Paris when you were fourteen? Jeez, the furthest from home I went at fourteen was to vacation Bible school.”
He laughed. At least she’d made him laugh. He may have said she wasn’t simple, but next to Gray Blakewood, she totally was.
“I was with my family. I wasn’t negotiating Paris by myself.”
A family trip to Paris. People really did that. It sounded amazing. “Your whole family went?” she asked softly.
Gray nodded. “I was fourteen, Bax was twelve, and Cecilia was only nine. I don’t know what my parents were thinking. The jetlag made us all cranky, and on our first day, Cecilia had a meltdown in Notre Dame. They had to ask us to leave.”
Meredith found herself laughing along with him, even as his eyes turned wistful.
“It had to get better after that. How long were you there?” Now, she reached for one of his pillows. Meredith tucked it under her head and curled onto her side to face him.
“Two weeks,” he said, grinning. “It got better, but I think as a family we liked to retell the awful stories. Cecilia used to love to remind Bax about how he’d puked in the tour bus on the way to Versailles.”
“Oh, God, no,” she said in horror.
“‘That’s what you get for eating nothing but crepes,’ she told him — that morning and a thousand times after,” Gray said, his eyes slanting to the left, pulling him into the memory. “Bax insisted it was carsickness, and he proved himself right — in his own mind, anyway — by eating a steady diet of banana and Nutella crepes the rest of the trip.”
The story made her laugh, and watching her, he laughed until the bed shook. Even with his head nestled in the pillow, his eyes lit with humor, their blue sparkling and making her short of breath. Gray was such a beautiful force and so full of life. He made her feel like pure helium.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
HE CAUGHT HISbreath and wiped his eyes, shaking his head. “My God, I haven’t laughed about that since she died.”
He said it so easily, but as soon as the words were out, his felt the weight of all they’d lost. Again. His brows pulled together, and he struggled and failed to keep his smile aloft.
Meredith’s eyes, forever gentle, held his. “How did she die?” Her voice was soft, but in asking, Gray knew she was brave, and he didn’t mind the question.
“She killed herself. Sleeping pills.” He said it fast so his throat wouldn’t close, but that didn’t stop the agony of the memory. That Sunday morning when a hole opened in the universe.
Meredith’s hand made a fist under her chin, and she squeezed her lips together. “I’m… so sorry,” she offered, never taking her eyes from his. This, too, he knew was brave. Only a handful of people he knew could manage it. And the strength of her gaze made him want to say what he’d never said to anyone.
“You know what the worst part is?” he asked her, ready to search her face for judgment. Meredith gazed at him a moment before shaking her head. “I had no idea what she was dealing with. She was always the most fragile. She was the one we looked after and protected, but I had no clue what was really going on inside her head.”
