The Hot One

That earns me yet another kiss.

As we leave, with his hand in mind, my heart stutters. For a moment, it feels like a skipped beat. Like fear. How have I let myself fall under his spell again so easily? But then, as I loop an arm around his shoulder and absently rub, kneading the knots as he moans his approval, the answer is clear.

I believe in healing. It’s my job, but it’s also my mantra.

I try to repair ailments for a living. I like to think I’ve healed the wounds inside me.

Through forgiveness. Through moving on. Through letting go.

Now, I’m letting go in a whole new way as I fall again and more wildly for this daring, cocky, funny, caring man with a mullet, a big mouth, and a heart of gold.

I’m not sure I ever forgave my father for leaving us. But he’s my dad. He was supposed to stay.

With Tyler, I have a chance to forgive in a way I never could with my dad. To move beyond the past. Looking back, I can see I made mistakes, too. I didn’t always open my heart when I should have. Sometimes, I kept my fears too close to the vest. I put up walls from time to time.

And just as he has a new chance with me, I have a new chance to be the person I want to be. As we walk through the New York evening, hand in hand on our way to a wig party, I thread my fingers more tightly through his.

I take a breath.

Shore up my heart.

Prepare to say something I haven’t told a soul. Not Penny, not Nicole, and certainly not my mom. “I’m trying to find my dad.”

My chest pinches and my throat squeezes.

Tyler slows his pace and meets my gaze. “Yeah? How’s that going?”

His tone is so normal, so measured, so wonderfully calm, that it eases the pain of some of the shards and splinters inside me. “I hired a private detective. I wanted to see where he is. If he’s still married. If he has more kids.”

“What did you find out?”

“He’s in Canada.” With each sentence I utter out loud, I feel lighter and freer. As the sounds of the New York evening clatter around us, from cabs screeching by, to buses slogging fumes, to the click-clack of harried New Yorkers, I enter my happy zone.

It’s a little bubble with this man who adored me once upon a time and seems to yet again. He makes me feel like all my heart is safe with him—the happy parts, and the scarred parts, and the ones that are still healing, too.

“He’s still married.” I add, “But I’m waiting for more info.”

“What will you do when you get it?”

We stop at the crosswalk as the light turns red. I turn to him and shrug. “I honestly don’t know. Contact him, I suppose? See how he’s doing? What he’s up to?”

Tyler nods and bends to dust a soft kiss on my forehead. “Let me help you when you get the info.”

I pull back to meet his gaze. “Help me?”

“Anything you need,” he says, the look in his eyes so earnest and caring. “There’s nothing I want more than to be there for you if you need me. If you need a shoulder to lean on before, during, or after that call, you know where to find me.”

And I float.

My sexy ankle boots are hoverboards, and I rise up and up and up on a cloud of sweetness and bliss. I don’t know what’s going to happen with my dad, but this man wants to be by my side. And that means something to me—something real and true.

Soon we make it to Gigi’s home, and she throws open the door, inviting us into a swirl of music and laughter and appetizers and delicious culinary scents. Her home is awash in brightly colored heads, too. She’s donned a rainbow-striped wig herself, which she affectionately calls her Rainbow Dash hair, after one of the My Little Ponies. She introduces us to several of the friends and family stuffed inside her brownstone off Amsterdam Avenue.

There are women with Afros, some with 80s perms, and one with a green wig that looks as bright as the Emerald City. A man wears a woman’s strawberry-blond TV anchor cut, and another man has a 1970s Anchorman-style mop top. This party is a festival of color and style and lots and lots of locks. It’s an homage to survival and to life.

We nibble on appetizers, and we drink champagne, and we toast with Gigi to kicking cancer’s ass. Soon, Tyler and I find ourselves in a little nook of the kitchen.

“I won an awesome new deal at work,” he says, then tells me about one of his clients and how he pulled off a big contract.

I raise my glass. “You’re amazing. You take these chances and they pay off.”

He nods. “My cousin calls me Bungee Jump Tyler. I’m owning the nickname. Carving out my niche as one helluva daring attorney.”

Something occurs to me. Something I haven’t thought much about before, but now I’ve got to know. “If we’d stayed together before, do you think you’d be one helluva daring attorney?”

He tilts his head. “Why do you ask?”

I lean in closer to him as an idea takes hold. “I just wonder—if we’d stayed together would we be doing what we’re doing right now? Maybe we wouldn’t be.”

He raises an eyebrow and nods, as if considering it. “You think so?”

I hold my hands out wide. “Who knows? Maybe you wouldn’t have gone into entertainment law. You love what you do, but maybe if we’d stuck to the path we mapped out, maybe we’d be on those same paths still. Maybe we wouldn’t have taken the chance to diverge and try new things?”

“Like a new branch of law for me and a whole new career for you?”

I bounce on my toes, energy coursing through me. “Look, I didn’t like our breakup, but maybe we were supposed to break up so we could become the people we are. I’m so damn happy to not be a lawyer and instead do massage for a living and run my own business. And you—you’re practicing a type of law you didn’t even plan to go into.”

“And our split let us come back together as the people we are today. Like, this is how we’re supposed to be with each other?”

“And with ourselves, too. Maybe we needed to be pulled apart to become our better selves.”

He sets down his champagne glass, loops his arm around my waist, and tugs me close. “Delaney,” he says, his voice raspy, “what you just said is another reason why I’m not just crazy for you.”

He takes a beat, and I study his face, trying to understand what he meant. “Not just crazy for me?”

“I’m not,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s way more than that, angel. It’s so much deeper. I’m in love with you all over again.”

I melt into his touch and breathe out words I haven’t said since him. “I’m so in love with you, too.”





23





Tyler



* * *



Ask me a few weeks ago if I’d be riding in my elevator, molded to Delaney, kissing the hell out of her.

The answer would have been a blank stare.