“Halston!” I yell again, only this time she hears me.
Turning, her eyes scan the airport until they land on me.
“What are you doing?” she yells back, turning and shoving past annoyed travelers as she runs the wrong way down the escalator. I wait. And she returns to me, her eyes wild, her forehead covered in lines. “How did you …? Why are you …? What is this?”
“Thank you for the book,” I say.
Her arms fold as she lifts a single brow. “You chased me down like some cheesy scene from a romance novel just to thank me for a book?”
Chuckling, I reach for her, unclasping her arms because she doesn’t need to be so defensive.
“I read your letter,” I say.
“Okay …”
“You still love me.”
“You act like you didn’t already know that,” she says. “Pretty sure I made that abundantly clear the last several days.”
“You never stopped,” I add.
“And your point is what?” She checks her watch, but it’s pointless because I’m not letting her get on that plane. Not until I have my answer.
“I just need to know,” I say, “if you loved me that much, if you loved me so much you waited for me for five years … why did you betray me?”
Her expression jerks, and she takes a step back. “Betray you? What the hell are you talking about?”
“The night of the dance,” I say. “You called me from the hotel. You were drunk. We had a fight because you wanted to be with me, and I refused. You were upset with me, and you hung up. The next day, your uncle barged into my house. He knew everything. He knew everything we’d ever talked about.”
Her full mouth is shaped in an ‘o’, her eyes squinting. “I … didn’t tell him anything, Ford.”
Hooking my hands on my hips, I tuck my chin. “This makes no sense.”
“Why would you think I …” Her words trail. “All these years, you thought it was me?”
Her hand trembles as it stretches across her heart.
“I told you I would never … I gave you my word,” she says. “The night of the dance, I didn’t come home. The next morning, Uncle Victor flipped out, taking away my phone and my computer, telling me to pack my bags. Bree went through my phone. She saw your email, the last one you sent. Then she went through the Karma app. Long story short, she showed my uncle and told him she suspected it was you, and the next day, I was sitting on a plane, flying to New Hampshire for boarding school. I never knew what happened to you. I never knew he confronted you.”
“Confronted is a bit of an understatement.” I release a heated breath, my jaw tensing. “I didn’t know his proof was nothing more than a teenage girl’s assumption. He made it sound like he knew, like he had damning evidence.”
“Sounds like Victor.” She rolls her eyes. “What did he say?”
“He demanded my resignation, told me he’d personally make sure I never set foot in a school again.”
Her hand raises to her mouth. “Everything you worked for, just … gone.”
My lips press together.
“No wonder you’ve spent the last five years hating me,” she says. “I’d have hated me too.”
Halston steps into my space, her hand reaching toward my cheek, brushing her fingers tenderly against my skin as her electric eyes soften on mine.
“I’m so sorry, Ford,” she says. “You didn’t deserve that. You were nothing but professional. I was the one who kept pushing, begging for more.”
“What’s done is done.” I inhale the faded scent of her sweet perfume, my gaze focused on her rosebud lips.
“It’s all the same, though. It’s still my fault you lost your job—your career.”
“I could have kept you at a distance, but I didn’t,” I say. “You may have pushed the line, but I was the one giving you slack. Neither of us are completely at fault here. Neither of us are innocent.”
“I hate that you thought it was me who told him. Breaks my heart,” she says. We linger here, the buzz of a busy airport filling the silence. “So what now? Where do we go from here?”
“I say we take it one day at a time.” Cupping her sweet face in my hand, I angle her mouth toward mine, grazing my lips across hers before claiming them as my own. “What are you doing tomorrow?” I kiss her again, my thumb pressed beneath her jaw and my fingers threaded along the nape of her neck. “And the day after that?” My lips dance with hers, our tongues skating, her minty taste invading my senses. “And how about the day after that?”
Her kiss turns into a smile, and she slinks her arms over my shoulders, rising on her toes.
“You want to go somewhere?” she asks. “Catch up on the last five years?”
“I’d fucking love that.” I slip my hand around hers as I take her carry-on and lead her to the nearest exit. We find a cab and ask the driver to drop us off at a little park by the water, just outside Sag Harbor.
“So, tell me about your travels,” she says as we walk along a little path lined with nothing but blue hydrangeas. She stops to pick one, lifting it to her nose. “Where did you go? What did you do?”
“Everywhere,” I say. “And everything.”
Halston elbows me. “Specifics. I want to know everything I missed. Except … you know, girlfriends and stuff. I don’t need to know if you fell in love with someone else.”
Clearing my throat, I squeeze her hand. “There was no one.”
“Yeah, right. I find that extremely hard to believe. You’re fucking gorgeous. I’m sure you were dripping in international beauty queens everywhere you went.”
“Was kind of hard to focus on other women when I couldn’t get the last one out of my head,” I say, glancing down at her. She looks up through her long, dark lashes. “I never wanted to admit it, but I was still hung up on you. Being with anyone else just didn’t appeal to me.”
Halston cups her hand over her eyes to block the sun, smirking. “Same here.”
“Really? You went to college—I presume—”
“I did,” she says.
“And you never hooked up with anyone? Dated anyone?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “No one. I kept looking for someone exactly like you, thinking if I couldn’t have the original, I’d settle for an imitation. Turns out you’re the only damn one, Ford.”
“That’s probably a good thing. I don’t think the world could handle two of me.” I laugh. “How was boarding school? I had no idea they sent you away. Honestly had no idea what became of you after I left Rosefield.”
“It wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be,” she says. “I mean, they made us wear these awful uniforms and we had these ridiculously militant schedules and they made us take etiquette classes that were probably better suited for a housewife in the 1950s, but I secretly kind of liked it.”
“No shit?”
“Yeah. There was no Internet. The house was at least a hundred years old. It was like traveling back in time,” she says. “And for the first time, I felt like I had a place that was mine. It was just a room that I shared with a roommate, but it wasn’t a foster home. It wasn’t my aunt and uncle’s guest room. I had heat and running water and warm meals. Honestly, the hardest part about it was not being able to pick up my phone and message you. I had some major withdrawals those first few weeks.”
I chuff. “Same. I was pissed at you. But every night, I’d dream about you, and I’d find myself reaching for my phone in the dark, wanting to hear your voice one more time.”
“I can’t even count how many dreams I had about you.” She presses her cheek against my shoulder for a moment, like she can’t go more than a few minutes without touching me, checking to see if I’m real, if this moment is real.
“How’s your family? You still keep in touch with anyone?”
Halston smirks. “Well, Bree flunked out of Northwestern her sophomore year. Turns out when you raise your daughter like a Puritan, it doesn’t exactly prepare her for the real world. She got one taste of freedom that first semester, and it brought out the wild child in her.”