impossible to tell.
“It sure changes how you look at the city, doesn’t it?” Bella said from next to me.
I nodded. “No trash on the streets. No cracks in the buildings. From here, it all looks… peaceful.”
“You forgot about the no people shouting at each other. No horns honking, no ambulances screaming by,” she said wryly. “That’s what makes it look peaceful.”
I laughed. “You’re not wrong. But even with all that, I don’t think I’d ever want to live anywhere else.”
“Me either,” she said. “This city has always been home. Even at its loudest and most obnoxious.”
Our voices had turned soft as we talked about it, our eyes hazy on the distant city, and it occurred to me then that if we were a couple—if we were even people who were considering becoming a couple—I would have reached down to take her hand, or slid a finger through her hair to tuck it behind her ear, or put my hand on the small of her back, or something.
Instead, I flexed my hands, telling them sternly to behave, and then stuffed them into my pockets just to give them something to do.
We weren’t a couple, and we never would be.
This was business. Nothing else. And I had to remember that if I was going to get through it in one piece.
Chapter 24
Ethan
“Where to now?” Bella asked when we got back down to the ground level and found ourselves out in front of the statue. “Are you going to take me to the Empire State building?”
I snorted. “Honestly, I think one view of the city is enough for the day.”
When I looked at her, I noticed that she was trying to smile at the joke—but also looked a little green around the edges. Like maybe she needed to sit down rather than go running off on another adventure.
“Actually, I was thinking food and sitting down for a little bit,” I said slowly, wondering if she was going to go for it… or knock me over the head for thinking she couldn’t hack it. “A deli?” I suggested.
She looked… relieved. Like I’d read her mind.
And just for that, I gave myself a pat on the back. Because I thought I was getting to know Bella Mayfair well enough to say that she didn’t get impressed easily—but when she did, it meant something. I put that on my list of Important Life Accomplishments, and promised myself that I’d have another opportunity to impress Bella, soon.
Ten more, if I could do it. Twenty. Thirty. However many it took for her to stop looking at me with such suspicion, and start looking at me like someone she actually liked.
From there, life started to feel like… Well, a whirlwind is the only thing that comes to mind. I took Bella to a deli and found out that she would actually kill to get honey-baked turkey and Swiss cheese sandwiches with extra pickles on the side—and that wasn’t because of the pregnancy—and that cheesecake was one of her favorite things in the world.
So, of course, I had to take her to the restaurant that was famous throughout the world for its hundreds of different sorts of cheesecake. I did that the same night—after giving her an hour to go home, take a nap, and freshen up.
And after that we started going out every weekend, picking a new sight to see every time we planned an adventure—though honestly, it was usually me picking a sight and then telling her that was where we were going.
For a native New Yorker, Bella sure didn’t know much about the city, though I assumed that was partially because she’d had to become an adult so early that there had never been much time for playing. And as native adults, we tended to forget how much our city held. Forget the things that the thousands of tourists showed up for every day.
We were also, I thought, both spending far too much time in our respective offices to ever stop and take a look around; remember that there was a world out there that didn’t include work. And though I didn’t do it intentionally, I started trying to break us both out of that rut.
For the babies. Not because I was enjoying the hell out of every second I got to spend with her, and certainly not because I was storing up every glimmer of a smile she handed me. I was doing it for the babies.
We did go to the Empire State Building after all,