Shopping for a Billionaire 3 (5 page)

Steve is, instead, my “date.” He keeps calling it a date, and I keep calling it,
well,
nothing
. We’re at a local Mexican joint where all the food is homemade and delicious, but coated with cilantro the way my mother puts on mascara. Three layers deep and with a
ruthless efficiency few can master. At least none of the cooks poked my eye out while applying it.
 

“If you’d been there it would have been awkward, Steve,” I say in a no-nonsense voice, though I reach forward and pat his hand. That’s such a patented Marie Jacoby gesture that I freeze and snatch my fingers away as if I’d been burned.
They say you turn into your mother as you age. Kill me now.
 

Weird. It’s so weird to realize how much of your parents seeps into you unconsciously. Pretty soon I, too, will wear nothing but yoga pants and use push p
o
wder to fluff up my t
h
inning hair while talking incessantly about Farmington Country Club weddings and my
dildo collection
.

A
nd if I
ha
d married Steve, that pretty much
would have
summed up the next three decades.
I shudder again and shove a fried tortilla chip in my mouth to stifle a groan.
 

“Why
would it have been awkward
?” he asks, one corner of his mouth turned up in what I assume is an attempt to give me a seductive smile. He looks like
t
he Joker, minus makeup.

I chew fast and swallow hard.
“Because De
cl
an and I were on a date.”
Do I really need to spell out the obvious?
 

“
Got a problem with two men at once?” he says in a guttural tone I’ve never heard from him.
 

“
What the hell is wrong with you?” I bark. “And ewwww, who wants two men at the same time?” One is hard enough to handle. If I want two men at the same time then one of them can change my oil while I have sex with the other one. Now there’s a fantasy.
 

Steve just laughs and says,
“I thought you
two
weren’t dating.” He uses both hands to pick up his drink, which is a strawberry margarita the size of a bucket. You could host a pool party for toddlers in there.
 

I cock one eyebrow and try not to sigh. “You caught us kissing at the restaurant two weeks ago.
We’re
dating
.
”
My voice is firm and kind of flat, the way you talk to a pollster during a presidential campaign. Like you want to be nice and do your duty, but c’mon—let’s get this over with so you can go off and spin this conversation to your advantage in the most sociopathic way ever.
 

“That doesn’t mean you’re dating.” He
takes three enormous swallows of his drink and sets it down, salt coating his thin upper lip. Steve then
unrolls the silverware from the yellow cloth napkin and shakes the cloth onto his lap.
His hands are steady but something is off. Why am I here again?
 

Whatever ambiguity I felt when Declan and I dined with Steve and Jessica is gone. Long gone, and now replaced by apathy. Something even less than apathy, though. A growing annoyance that ma
k
e
s
me see Steve is part of my past. Not my future.

The clarity makes me ache for Declan right now. Of all the times to be in New Zealand, frolicking with Hobbits.
Hobbits have nasty feet. My mind drifts to the podiatrist visits I have to complete later this week.
 

“I don’t routinely shove my tongue down the throat of people I’m not
dating
.” The words slip out before I even deliberate whether to say them.
If Amanda were here she’d be cheering. A few weeks ago I’d have never challenged Steve like this, but a few weeks can change
everything
.
 

He pauses in mid-movement, nostrils flaring, then he’s the one who sigh
s
. “I’m not sure I know that for a fact, Shannon.” His eyes snap up and catch mine. The look he gives me is hard and accusatory.

“What
is that supposed to mean
?”

“
I think you’re dating him to make me jealous.”
 

Thunk.
That’s the sound of my jaw falling through the earth’s crust, magma, core, and splashing into Declan’s lap in New Zealand.

“You think I’m—”

“It’s brilliant!” He takes a long draw off his drink. “Seriously. Making sure you pick the same restaurant where I’m with Jessica. Using Jessica’s online presence to help boost your profile—”

“What?” Where does he get that from? I want to be tweeted about by Jessica Coffin about as much as I want to
suck on Steve’s toes. “You think I’m jealous of you and Jessica and I’m dating Declan McCormick to…to…what?”
 

“Get me back.”

A deeply wheezy sound emerges from my throat as the tortilla chip I shoved in there lodges itself in the worst way possible. I’m not in danger of choking to death. Just gagging in pain until the offending object moves out of the way.

Hmmm. That kind of describes Steve, actually.

The tortilla chip cracks and goes down (and no, that doesn’t describe
me
), and with a big swig of my water glass I finally look at him with tears in my eyes from having my throat lacerated by a completely innocent piece of food.

“You think I want you back?”

He takes a big chip, dips it in the salsa, bites off half, and double dips. That’s right. He just offended Jerry Seinfeld and the crew with one bite.

“Of course you do. it’s been a year, you’re still single, and you’re here. With me. On a date. So—it worked.” He spreads his hands
magnanimously
, as if accepting defeat for some battle I didn’t know existed. “You win.”

“I win
what
?”

“You win
me
.”

“I don’t want to win you! I never win anything! If I’m going to win something, it should be an all-expenses paid trip to Puerto V
a
llarta or a Kia
Optima
, not an
all-access pass to be the slobbering, under-appreciated girlfriend to an
over-important fleshbag who thinks I’m inadequate and who has an ego bigger than his
penith
!”

Well, now. Who knew that was in me?
He doesn’t seem offended, though. More worried that other people heard me, but not actually upset by the content and meaning of my words.
 

“You’re not the woman I thought I knew.”

“You mean the woman you
rejected
.”
I reach for my own bucket of sugar and alcohol and take a few gulps of liquid courage. Mine is a cranberry margarita, which sounded way better when I read it on the menu. It tastes like a cough drop mixed with Love’s Baby Soft perfume.
 

“‘Rejected’ is such a harsh word.”
Steve splays his massive hands across the table and stretches forward, as if he wants me to hold hands. Nope.
 

“No
kidding
it is. It
hurts
.”
 

Our eyes lock and I realize
that just like I don’t understand why I’m here,
he
has no idea why he
i
s here. For the past week since I got out of the hospital he’s hounded me to get together, and now he’s got me. All my attention, all my focus.
But he has no idea what to do with me.
 

“
And that’s why you don’t reject a woman like Shannon. Ever.”
 

The growling voice comes from behind me and I literally jump in my seat about three inches, falling back down onto the hard wood with a jolt that spreads up from my tailbone and through my eyeballs. Which are currently locked on Steve’s shocked face.

He
is staring at a point behind me, above my head.

I whip around, knowing that voice, and my breath catches in my throat. Declan’s standing there, a day’s worth of stubble peppering that strong chin, his business shirt unbuttoned at the top, no tie, and he’s delightfully rumpled,
his grey suit wrinkled in all the right places, pants tight and tailored to fit like a glove
. He looks like he just spent the entire day in motion, and as my eyes take him in he looks at me greedily.

His hand slides along the bones of my shoulder, cupping the soft skin at the back of my neck, and his lips find mine for a gentle, polite kiss that makes me throb everywhere. Sexting last night wasn’t enough. Never enough. I swallow hard as he pulls back, the scent of
him full of
sweat and cologne and soap and
home
.
 

“Hi,” he says to me, eyes claiming mine. Steve clears his throat.
Steve who?
 

“Good to see you, Declan.” Steve stands and offers his hand. Declan completely ignores him, his eyes boring into mine, hand on my neck like he’s drowning and touching me is the only way to breathe.

“Hey,” Declan finally says in Steve’s general direction.

“We were just talking about—” Steve starts to say, but Declan interrupts him.

“How you rejected Shannon.” Declan’s words are granite. Iron. Platinum. Take the hardest element and multiply it by every time Steve told me I wasn’t good enough and you come close to Declan’s voice.

I
feel like I’m in a bubble.
My skin is tingling and burning with exposure. People don’t talk to each other like this in my world. We aren’t direct and clear with our boundaries like this. We don’t make declarations like Declan, firm “no” statements that Steve is flat out wrong for trying to shame me—rather than
me
being wrong for whatever he’s trying to shame me over.
 

That invalidation is the greatest sin.

I’ve been taught to joke my way through discomfort. To let people cross my internal lines because that’s fine—they love me, and besides, maybe it’s okay.
No big deal.
Ha ha
, laugh off that feeling in the pit of your stomach that says this is wrong.
Hee hee
, go along with the joke at your expense because pointing out the truth will make everyone
else
uncomfortable.
 

With Steve, I kept thinking all those years that if I could “just” change enough to stop his newest criticism, then I’d be perfect. If I could “just” be on edge a
l
l the time and try to guess what my next misstep would be in his eyes and stop myself before I transgressed, then he would be happy with me.

If I could “just”
learn to live life according to mixed signals and constantly shifting expectations
…which meant I would never, ever be good enough.

Ever.

A jumble inside me feels like shattered glass being moved and realigned with great care, like reassembling a broken mosaic to put it back in place with the least damage possible.
Declan has armor I cannot imagine wearing. He has a core that knows who he is and what he wants without the reflection of others. No mirrors pointed back at him telling him to internalize what everyone else thinks of him.
 

If I hadn’t touched him, kissed him, joked and teased and played with him, I would think he was a god. But no…he’s flesh and bone and real and authentic and…

Mine.

And I am enough for him. Enough as is.

More than enough.

And that is true even without Declan.

“
I—” Steve is speechless. Declan’s godlike status just went up a notch, because Steve’s bloviating is hard to stop, like trying to stop Mom from getting up at 2:30 a.m. on Black Friday to stand in line at a big-box store and come home with a television bigger than the height of our house because “It was only $39.97! and they gave me a free coffee!”
 

“Come here,” Declan sa
ys
, pulling on my hand.
He’s crossed oceans for me. Cut meetings short. Slept in airplane seats designed for children who aren’t tall enough to ride rollercoasters.
His pull le
aves
no question, no opportunity to argue. I’
m
going with him, and Steve’s nostrils flare.

“What are you doing?” Steve ask
s
. He d
oes
n’t ask, though—the words c
o
me out in a livid monotone. Years of dating and he’d never shown jealousy toward any other guy, even when we’d been at nightclubs and someone grabbed my ass. No protectiveness, no possessiveness, no sense that he was upset that I was someone else’s hand candy, objectified and easy for a grab that meant nothing and everything at the same time.

A
ll those years of being his…
what
? What was I to him?

“I’m taking Shannon,” Declan sa
ys
in a tone that
i
s the mirror opposite of Steve’s—full of passion and infused with feeling. His words
a
re measured but the meaning behind them
is
n’t.

She’s mine. You fucked up. Go away.

Wait. Those were the meanings behind
my
words, actually.

Declan pull
s
a wallet out of his back pocket, his other hand firmly holding my elbow with a grip that
i
s not unpleasant. He tosse
s
two twenties on the table and with a gentle nudge turn
s
me away from Steve, who
sits
there, impotent, staring gape-mouthed at the cash.

Declan’s steps
eat
the floor between where I’d been sitting and the main door, my legs like tingling rubber bands as I work to match him. The way he just treated Steve ma
kes
my brain buzz. It was so…rude. So…macho.

So…
right
.

“Thank you,” I sa
y
as he pushe
s
the door open and a burst of sunset explode
s
before my eyes, feeling returning to my legs, my lips, my body. As the steps t
ake
me away from a man who had never cherished me, never seen me as anything more than a tool, I fe
el
my body fill in.