In A Fix - Mary Calmes Page 0,97

and my legs were longer. He carried thick, heavy muscle on his carved, compact frame, so I was limited to a few shirts and sweaters. I needed the rest of my stuff to arrive so Dallas and I could match a bit better. I wanted us to look like we fit.

“I like the suits,” he told me, knocking me up against the new Toyota 4Runner, with all the bells and whistles, I had just bought. “You look gorgeous in ’em.”

He was biased, but that was fine with me. I was relieved when my wardrobe boxes showed up the next day. Dallas was thrilled. When he realized I was watching him hang up my clothes in his closet, he stopped and looked at me.

“What?”

“You’re the one humming,” I informed him.

He shrugged. “Before your things started showing up, even with buying the new mattress, you could’ve come to your senses, said what the fuck am I doing, and gone back to your old life. But now,” he said, lifting the hangers with a variety of shirts on them, “it’s a pain in the ass to leave me. You’d have to pack again.”

“Packing won’t keep us together,” I assured him.

“It certainly can’t hurt,” he teased me, strolling into his walk-in closet. He was whistling a moment later.

It was endearing to see how happy he was. Seeing my clothes hanging across from his made my heart stop just for a moment. Big leap of faith I’d made, and it was still hard to wrap my brain around the fact that I’d been the one to say yes, let’s try. Some days it was odd to think how much my life had changed so very quickly.

When I called and told Ella how seamless, though surreal, the transition was, she said it was the universe sending me good vibes.

“Clearly you were always supposed to be with Dallas,” she said, and I could practically hear the eyeroll over the line. “Imagine what would happen if you actually listened to your gut now and then. All this back-and-forth would be unnecessary.”

That was true, but was it even remotely possible?

“I don’t mind the back-and-forth that your mind does,” Sergio said, walking around the office I was going to lease on the 900 block of North Green Valley Parkway in Henderson. “It was always sort of comforting not having to come up with the counter to whatever it was you’d throw out there. You do devil’s advocate better than anyone I know.”

But was that a good thing?

“Right now you’re thinking, is that a good thing?” His right brow quirked as he regarded me. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

He knew me, and I knew him, and everything I thought I knew about myself, in my heart of hearts, was wrong. I was not as cold or removed as I had always assumed.

“Yeah, okay,” he said, rounding on me, holding out his hand. “I need a change, and you’ve never steered me wrong.”

“No?”

He shook his head slowly as I took the offered hand. “This is gonna be good.”

And he knew it was, because I was on the adventure with him.

At dinner to seal the deal, Sergio brought his wife, Beth, with him, who bit her lip when we all toasted and clinked our glasses together.

“You okay?” Dallas asked her, reaching across the table to take hold of her hand.

She clutched his back. They had hit it off immediately. “I just—he’s needed a change and…I needed him home and—” Her gaze collided with mine. “I don’t know why you were out of his life for so long, but I’m so glad you’re back,” she said shakily, eyes filling.

“Thank you,” I said from across the table, giving her my hand to squeeze as well.

“Stay here, okay?”

When I nodded, I felt Dallas’s hand under the table, slipping to the inside of my thigh, the hold just as possessive as always.

He leaned in and whispered roughly in my ear, sending warm breath down the side of my neck. “Yeah, what she said. Stay here.”

There was no question.

The therapist that Dallas started seeing also treated Montez, and she was, in fact, the person who referred him. Dr. Leung asked for me to come along on his third visit. She was older, with threads of silver in her short black bob, and she got right to the point, which I liked. She was going to help him, and it was going to be hard work, but between the way he talked about me and his family and friends, and