Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 74730 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 374(@200wpm)___ 299(@250wpm)___ 249(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74730 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 374(@200wpm)___ 299(@250wpm)___ 249(@300wpm)
“I don’t love you,” she says, “but I absolutely love giving you shit sometimes.”
I roll my eyes.
“Don’t you ever get tired of taking life so seriously all the time?” She steps out of her leather sandals and loops them over her finger. “Do you ever laugh? Do you ever joke? Do you ever stop jogging and working and supplementing long enough to actually enjoy yourself?”
“Do you care?”
“Obviously or I wouldn’t be asking …” She eyes the hall. “Want to watch a movie? I feel like we could use something funny to lighten the mood. You have TVs here, right? I’m pretty sure some of the art hanging up around here are actually TVs, but it’s hard to tell which ones.”
“Of course I have TVs.” My family made their billions by owning one of the largest media conglomerates in the world. Aside from running various newspapers and magazines, we’ve got a plethora of news stations as well—all details that Campbell is well aware of. “But it’s too late to watch something anyway.”
She blows a breath between pursed lips. “It’s eight thirty. There are kids who stay up later than you.”
“I go to bed at nine every night. You know that.”
“I thought you weren’t working tomorrow? Aren’t we having brunch with your parents and Oliver?”
“Nothing wrong with staying on schedule.” I climb the stairs, heading to our room, and she follows. “Do you even have a schedule? What do you do with all your free time?”
“Fair question.” She grabs a cerulean blue satin pajama set from the dresser drawer I designated for her and I head into my closet to change. When I return, she adjusts her pajama top and skillfully maneuvers herself out of her bra without revealing a thing. “Seeing how I just graduated from grad school a couple of months ago and our wedding is in less than six months and I’ll be moving here, it’s pointless for me to get a job. I stay busy with volunteer work and helping my parents’ staff with some projects around the house. I spend quality time with friends and family. I read. I watch movies. I don’t know if you’re insinuating that I’m lazy or unmotivated because I don’t have a schedule, but I’m just playing the hand I’ve been dealt.”
“I insinuated nothing.”
We meet by the sinks next.
“What are you going to do when we have kids and they’re not on your schedule?” she asks as she lathers a pump of face wash between her palms. “Don’t kids have their own schedules?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.” I run my toothbrush under the water before squeezing a minty stripe across the bristles.
“Do you want babies?”
Her question almost makes me choke on my toothpaste.
“Or is it just an obligation you have to fulfill?” She splashes water on her face, eyes squeezed tight as she feels around for a towel. I retrieve one from the drawer and place it in her hand. “Thank you.”
“I can imagine myself as a father.”
She dries her face. “That’s not what I asked.”
“Does it matter?”
Campbell rolls her blue eyes to the back of her head. “Every time I ask you a question, you either deflect it with another question or act like my question wasn’t important. If it wasn’t important, I wouldn’t ask. I’m trying to get to know you here.”
She’s not wrong.
My whole life I’ve never had to answer these kinds of questions. It’s a luxury I’ve taken for granted, I suppose.
“It’s intimate,” I tell her after spitting out my toothpaste and rinsing the sink, “having access to someone’s innermost thoughts and feelings. I don’t think we’re there yet.”
“We have to start somewhere.”
Campbell folds her used towel and sits it on the counter before angling her body to me. Her nipples are standing at full attention, all but poking through her thin top thanks to the icy blast of AC and chilled marble floors cooling the room. I do my best to keep my eyes on hers, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t sorely distracted.
“We’ve had twenty-four years,” she says, grabbing her toothbrush. “And I still feel like we’re strangers.”
I cross my arms, waiting as she brushes her teeth and proceeds to talk to me with white foam around her mouth like a rabid animal—except it’s kind of … cute.
The women I’ve been with in the past, although it was always in a casual sense, were always so self-conscious and insecure. One would always wake up earlier than me, run to the bathroom to fix her hair and makeup and gargle a capful of mouthwash, and then climb back under the covers thinking I didn’t notice.
Another woman was so embarrassed that she started her period and bled through her white jeans while we were out dancing that she blocked my number afterwards. When I ran into her a month or so later, she pretended like we’d never met.