The Unhoneymooners(57)

“ ‘Quietly soak up—’?” He stops, shaking his head. Ethan holds up his hands in a request for a temporary cease-fire. “Can we just get dinner? I am starving and have no idea what’s going on here.”

? ? ?

PERHAPS UNSURPRISINGLY, DINNER IS TENSE and silent. Ethan orders a salad, I order a salad—clearly we do not want to have to wait long for our food to arrive. We both avoid alcohol, too, but I could honestly use a few margaritas.

Once the waitress leaves, I pull out my phone and pretend to be incredibly busy, but really I’m just playing poker.

Obviously, I was right: the sex was a huge mistake, and now we have five days left together. Should I suck it up, pull out the credit card, and get a room for myself? It would be a huge expense, but it might allow the vacation to continue to be . . . fun. I could do all the activities left on my bucket list, and even if it’s 30 percent as fun as doing it with Ethan, it’s still 100 percent more fun than I’d be having at home. But the idea that I may be done with the particular brand of Ethan-hassling fun I’ve been enjoying so far is a bummer.

“Olive.”

I look up in surprise when he says it, but he doesn’t immediately continue. “Yeah?”

He opens his napkin, sets it on his lap, and leans on his forearms, meeting my eyes directly. “I’m sorry.”

I can’t tell if it’s an apology for lunch, for the sex, or for about a hundred other things he could probably stand to apologize for. “About . . . ? ”

“About lunch,” he says gently. “I should have focused only on you.” He pauses and runs a finger over a dark brow. “I wasn’t at all interested in having drinks with Sophie. If I was withdrawn, it was because I was hungry and tired of running into her.”

“Oh.” Everything in my head seems to come to a standstill, words momentarily on hiatus. That was so much easier than getting a new hotel room. “Okay.”

He smiles. “I don’t want things to be weird with us.”

Frowning, I ask, “Wait. Are you apologizing so you can have sex with me again?”

Ethan looks like he can’t decide if he wants to laugh or throw his fork at me. “I think I’m apologizing because my emotions tell me I need to?”

“You have emotions besides irritation?”

Now he laughs. “I don’t think I registered that I seemed to be quietly enjoying her jealousy. I won’t lie and say that it doesn’t bring me some pleasure that she’s jealous, but that’s independent of how I feel about you. I didn’t mean to seem preoccupied with Sophie after we’d just been together.”

Wow. Did some woman text him that apology? That was fantastic.

“She texted me earlier, and I replied,” he says, and turns his phone around so I can read it. The text says simply, Gonna pass on drinks. Have a nice trip. “Before you got back to the room. Look at the time stamp,” he says, and points, grinning. “You can’t even say that I did it because you were mad, because I had no idea you were mad. Finally, my cluelessness comes in handy.”

Our waitress slides our salads down in front of us, and now that things are better between us, I regret not getting a burger. Forking a piece of lettuce, I say, “Okay, cool.”

“ ‘Okay, cool,’ ” he repeats slowly. “That’s it?”

I look up at him. “I mean it: that was an impressive apology. We can go back to being rude to each other for fun now.”

“What if I felt like being nice to each other for fun now?” he asks, and then flags down the waitress.

I narrow my eyes at him. “I’m trying to imagine ‘nice’ on you.”

“You were pretty nice on me earlier,” he says in a quiet growl.

“See? I knew you apologized just to have sex with me again.”

At the side of the table, a throat clears. We both look up to see that the waitress has returned.

“Oh. Hi. That was timely.” I wave to her, and Ethan laughs.

“Can we get a bottle of the Bergstrom Cumberland pinot?” he asks her.

She leaves and he shakes his head at me.

“You’re going to loosen me up with alcohol now?” I ask, grinning. “That’s one of my favorite wines.”

“I know.” He reaches across the table, taking my hand, and my insides turn warm and wavy. “And no, I’m going to loosen you up by refusing to fight with you.”

“You won’t be able to resist.”

Bending, he kisses my knuckles. “Wanna bet?”





chapter thirteen

As Ethan chatters easily throughout his meal and into dessert, I stare at him, working to not let my jaw fall open too frequently: I don’t think I’ve seen him smile this much, ever.

Part of me wants to pull my phone back out and take a picture; it’s the same part of me that wants to catalog every one of his features: the dramatic brows and lashes; the contrast of his bright eyes; the straight Roman line of his nose; his full, intelligent mouth. I get the sense that we’re living on a cloud; no matter what I tell my head and my heart, I worry I’m in for a rough crash landing when we fly home to Minnesota in a matter of days. As much as I fight the thought, it keeps returning, uninvited: This can’t last. It’s too good.