Page 65 of Devotion
“Come. Their ice cream is good.”
I got out of the car because he was right and because mint chocolate was on the chalkboard menu and I was weak.
He got plain vanilla, which was both predictable and weirdly endearing. We sat in the mismatched chairs and ate in silence. The evening air was warm and nobody recognized us, nobody took photos, and for the first time since the contract started, I wasn’t performing. Neither was he.
He took a bite of his vanilla. Then, casually, with his eyes still on the street, he asked, “Who was that?”
“Who?”
“The man at the hospital. The one who kept trying to put his hand on you.”
His face was neutral. His eyes were not. There was heat behind them, the same territorial heat from the hospital with Dominic, except this time he was doing a worse job at hiding it.
“My cousin’s husband,” I said, looking down. “Owen. He chased after me before Elspeth. Never seemed to understand that I didn’t want him then and I definitely don’t want him now.”
Christopher took another bite of vanilla and said, very quietly, “Prick.”
I laughed. A real one, surprised out of me.
I raised a brow. “Are you jealous?”
“I don’t get jealous.” He cleaned a drip off his thumb. “Jealousy implies I feel threatened. I don’t feel threatened by a man who wears loafers without socks.”
“You noticed his shoes?”
“I notice everything. It’s a professional habit.”
“Mm-hmm.” I took a lick of my mint chocolate. “A professional habit. That’s what we’re calling it.”
He ate his ice cream and said nothing, which was an answer all by itself. From the corner of my eye I caught the edge of something on his face that he was working very hard to flatten. The fact that he was failing made something warm and reckless bloom in my chest.
We sat there while the sky went orange and the streetlights came on. The shop owner, a round man with a mustache and a flour-dusted apron, came outside to wipe down tables and said something in Spanish about what a beautiful couple we were. I translated for Christopher. I wasn't fluent but I could understand a bit.
“Tell him I agree,” he said.
I did not translate that. My face was already warm enough.
“Why did you say that?” I asked, without looking at him. “About me being capable.”
“Because it’s true.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“I wanted to.”
I asked the question that had been sitting in my throat since we left the hospital. “Why did you come with me? You could have stayed home. Let me handle my own family.”
He looked at me. “Because you’re my wife.”
It landed differently this time. Not like a contract term. Not like a line from a script. Like something that had come out before his brain could catch it and edit it into something safer.
“Contract wife,” I said, gently.
He shrugged. “Still counts.”
We looked at each other. The ice cream shop’s colored lights reflected in his eyes, the evening was warm, his face was close, and for one held breath I wasn’t thinking about contracts or kiwis or closet floors. I was just looking at him and he was just looking at me, and the world got very small and very still.
Then he looked away, back to his vanilla. The moment broke, because neither of us was brave enough to hold on.
