Touching the Billionaire - Holly Jaymes Page 0,49
was thinking the same thing earlier. Perhaps it has something to do with needing balance. We went from one end of the spectrum to the other. From calm and quiet and seemingly boring to frenetic and loud and sometimes overwhelming.”
“It’s a good way to put it. I wonder where the balance is in between? Where you could have something not as quiet as here, but not as loud as New York?” she pondered out loud.
I looked over at her. “Are you unhappy in your life in New York?”
“No. But sometimes it’s nice to take a breath for a minute, don’t you think? Maybe I should buy a house out here. Maybe that’s the answer.”
“I think that’s a good idea.” I wondered if maybe Nadine was starting to think about leaving the single life and moving into something with more commitment and more stability, like a house in the country. Was she thinking about a future with her boss?
“Do you think your boss boyfriend would like it out here?” I asked.
She glanced at me with a smirk. “That’s not what this is about. Besides, I’m still not sure that marriage is a good idea.”
“Why not?” I asked, even though I had an idea about her reluctance. Our parents could scare anybody away from marriage.
“Well, we’ve seen both sides of the spectrum, right? We’ve seen Gran and Pop-Pop with their tremendous marriage and partnership in life. But the other side of that is our parents who must’ve loved each other at some point and now can’t stand each other. The statistics are like fifty percent of marriages don’t make it. The question is, how do you know if you’re making the right choice when you get married?”
“What do you mean?” I wasn’t quite sure where she was going with all this.
“Well, there must be some kind of way to figure out if a couple will make it or not. I mean we’ve all met people who probably shouldn’t get married, but there's a good number of people who on their wedding day are in love and plan to be married forever, and then somehow, a few years down the line, everything falls apart. Why does that happen and how do you not know in the beginning that it could happen?”
“I think a lot of people know that it could happen, they just don’t think it will be them.”
“Right, they go into marriage thinking they’re going to be like Gran and Pop-Pop and then they don’t. So how do you know? I mean there must be some test or something people could take to know.”
She’d been thinking about this quite a bit, which made me think that her feelings for her boss boyfriend must be pretty significant.
“I suppose that’s where faith comes in,” I said. “And if you talk to Gran and Pop-Pop, they would probably have some secrets on how their marriage has worked for so long. It’s probably something related to respect, communication… I don’t know. I mean I don’t have the answers but certainly, their success probably has less to do with how they felt on their wedding day and more to do with how they feel every day of the marriage, how they treat each other, and how committed they are. Mom and Dad didn’t have that, or they lost it. Or maybe they just didn’t want to try anymore.”
Nadine didn’t say anything for a minute. As we came through a clearing, the pond opened up in front of us. She stopped for a minute as she gazed out over the landscape of central New York State. Most people who thought of New York thought of the city, but New York had lots of other wonderful areas to it, including wooded, secluded areas like this.
“Well, that then brings us to the question about situations in which one person is willing to do all that work but the other person isn’t,” she finally said.
“Are you saying that you’re willing to work, but you don’t think your boss boyfriend is?” I asked her, hoping that she wasn’t getting offended or annoyed at me for my questions about him.
She looked at me. “Actually, it’s more the other way around. I think he’d be willing to take the chance, but I don’t know that I can.”
There was something that made me feel really sad, and at the same time, I knew exactly what she was saying. I was sure that I would probably feel the same way if I ever wondered about being