should just get over myself and move on. Is that what you’d like to hear?” I hated my tears, and after one fell, I sucked the others back in. “Please ignore my crying. I don’t like it, and I’m just over a day from having run away from my wedding. I’m not quite myself yet. I don’t have my defenses in order.”
He was so quiet, I wondered if he’d say anything at all. Finally, he shook his head. “Just tell me to fuck off.”
“What?” I finished my cheese, barely tasting it. And the waiter came by and set down the salad.
“Tell me to fuck off. I deserve it. I ruined your lunch. I took away all that joy you had going with the cheese. Go ahead and tell me to fuck off.”
I stared at him. “I don’t tell people to fuck off.”
“You should, you’d feel better.” He took a bite of his salad. “I do think about opening a vineyard or taking over one that is failing. I do love red wine. And whisky. But I don’t want to run or own a distillery. Well, maybe I could be part owner of one. Something like that. I don’t want to have anything to do with the day-to-day workings.”
He’d clearly thought about this, and it was distracting enough to listen to him that I took a bite of my salad and was able to taste the food without choking on all the bile our fight had brought up. “When do you see yourself doing that?”
“When I retire.”
Well, that told me nothing. “You’re thirty-eight. Virile. You are fit like you could win a marathon right now. I don’t know your health history, and please, over lunch, don’t give it to me. But you could be a billionaire, right? If you get that money my dad may have hidden somewhere. You could retire right then and there. So, this could be your second act, and it could be very soon.”
“I don’t know if I’ll ever retire. I like working. It’s what I do. I like weekends when I can take them, like today. Quick breaks to have fun, and then back at it. I think the vineyard thing will be one of many things I will do in so-called retirement. I may be even busier then than I am now.”
It was really interesting how he saw his future. That wasn’t how I wanted things for myself. Sure, I was too young to worry about retiring now, but in the future, I did want someone to stay with me when we were older, raise the kids together, watch them as grownups living their own lives. Laugh. Travel—assuming the other person could manage the language barrier—and have fun with.
I did want to stop.
He wanted to know what I wanted to do with my life right now, and all I could think about was what I wanted to do with it then. What did that say about me?
We finished eating and eventually made our way to his motorcycle without any interference. After putting on my helmet, he handed me the terrible sketch we’d had done, and I held on to it while we drove through traffic. I would have loved to squeeze tight to him, to put my head down on his back and close my eyes, just letting myself feel the speed and the wind. But I held on upright instead. We weren’t in a real relationship. It was almost businesslike, and coworkers didn’t squeeze each other intimately like that.
The ride home was so much less fun than the one there. Still, I’d spent the day in Paris, and I hadn’t had a terrible time. Parts of it had been really fun, and I hadn’t anticipated that at all. I’d call it a win. Small incremental steps until I figured out what to do next so I never landed in this position again were the best I could hope for.
I’d lie so that maybe someday, I could tell the truth.
Yep…it still irked me and probably would for a long while.
We got off the bike at his home and made our way inside. He stopped me when I would have turned to go into the guest room. “I have a tendency to blow things up when they’re going well. Friendships. Shit like that. I had fun today. I hope you did, too.”
“I did. Until lunch.” Since I was trying for honesty, I let that just come out instead of trying to shield him from hurt, which