Thanksgiving night, I was on the couch eating ramen in my pajamas with Clive, watching reruns on Food Network of Ina’s Best Thanksgiving shows. It was like disaster porn; I couldn’t look away. Now that I’d saved the day for another family, I could wallow. And wallow I did.
Which is why my wallow was so surprised when Clive began to pace at the front door, seconds before Simon came in.
I looked at him, covered in November rain, his eyes warm.
“I didn’t want you to spend Thanksgiving alone,” he said, shaking off the rain. “And maybe I don’t either.”
I burst into tears for the second time in twenty-four hours.
He just picked me up off the couch and settled me into his lap, his North Face getting my PJs soaked. He held me, soothing me, running his hands over my back and making little circles on my shoulders.
“You . . . are . . . the best . . . boyfriend . . . ever!” I wailed, wiping my nose on my arm. Clive ran in and out of Simon’s legs, threading himself as close as he could get without appearing too needy. Hell, I was idling at needy, ready to downshift into pitiful.
By the time my sobs tapered off, I was shivering, the chill from the rainy night moving into my bones.
“Come on, sweet girl, let’s get you changed into something warm,” he said. Reluctant to be set down, I clung to him. So he stood with me wrapped around him in front, and walked us back to the bedroom.
“I can’t put into words how happy I am to see you, Simon. I really can’t,” I whispered, arms tight around his neck.
“I missed you too,” he answered, trying to set me down on the bed, but I was fighting him. “Babe, let’s get you into some dry clothes.”
“Kiss me, please,” I asked, pulling him down to me.
He kissed me. And I kissed him back, needing to feel him. I wrapped my arms back around his neck, around his back, under his North Face, needing skin. He rocked against me, needing it too. “Caroline,” he groaned, pulling back to look into my eyes. That made me tear up again, just seeing his face so unexpectedly close to mine.
When you were in a long-distance relationship, of course you made the most of the time you were together. But sometimes, it was the unexpected that really made the difference. The unexpected emotions you were hit with when you saw that face, looked into those eyes, felt those lips. The unexpected reminder of why you fell in love with this person could hit you so powerfully. And this was that time.
I memorized his face, felt every line and every pattern, drew his temple, his nose, his dimple, the bow of his lip, drew it all with my fingertips and memorized it once more.
“I love you, Simon. Love you, love you, love you so much,” I chanted as he laid me down, peeled the clothes from my body and his own, and entered me.
He groaned my name, answering my cries with his own, loving me sweetly. And when my orgasm crashed through me, it was wonderful and secondary to what this was.
He was here with me. Not photographing pilgrims.
chapter eleven
The time between Thanksgiving and when we left for Philadelphia flew by. I was always at work before everyone else, and almost without fail I closed the office every day. I put out fires, I trained Monica, I even did payroll a few more times. It was crazy, hectic, impossibly frantic. There were days when I barely saw daylight, ate every meal straight from the microwave, and the only time I sat down was to pee. And even then, I was reading e-mails. Please, like everyone doesn’t bring their phone to the bathroom to read?
And through the crazy, the hectic, the impossibly frantic life that I was leading, I was getting my shit done. I was not only handling it, I was actually now ahead of the curve. I’d turned some kind of time management corner and was holding my own. I walked not with a drag but with a bounce; I rushed from meeting to meeting and job site to job site with a renewed sense of purpose. I was tired, but I was happy in a weird way. I was getting the swing of things. I was still stressed, but it was a good stressed.
I was ahead of schedule on the hotel project, and I was even able to start working on a few Christmas projects. If you were very wealthy, you didn’t do your own Christmas decorating—heavens, no! You hired it out. Initially I thought that with Jillian being gone I’d need to contact some of the other design firms we were good neighbors with to farm some of it out, but I couldn’t do it. I needed to make sure that everything at Jillian Designs functioned the same way as when Jillian was actually in residence. So I slept less. And got to work on decking the halls with boughs of Red Bull.