Avoiding Intimacy (Avoiding #2.5)(59)

Chyna hated sounding like the poor, little rich girl, but she had never put herself out there before long enough to let everything fall apart. It was an eye- opening experience to…fail.

She heaved in a deep breath and entered her apartment. She stopped in her tracks at the living room. How had she forgotten that she was tearing the place apart? She and Frederick had gotten into a lover’s spat last week, and the place was still only halfway back to normal. She had threatened to take it back to its earlier form of distaste, but now, it felt dramatic.

Staring at her messy apartment only made all the fresh memories wash over her.

What had she been thinking?

She had a lot of work to do.

As she waited for Adam, she placed the take-out in the refrigerator and did something she should have done a long time ago. She walked through her living room and back into her massive closet.

Hanging in the back, hidden behind hundreds of other garments, was the million-dollar dress.

She removed it from the hanger and carried it back into the living room. She grabbed an empty box from her latest purchase that was discarded on her floor and placed it on her black leather sofa.

She smiled forlornly at the dress as she fingered the precious material. That part of her life was over, and it was time to let go of the past. She sighed heavily, letting it all out.

Carefully folding the dress, she placed it into the box, sealed it, and wrote Marco’s address on the shipping label.

Once she mailed it tomorrow, that would be the end of it.

Satisfied with her decision, she went about actually cleaning her apartment before Adam’s arrival. It wasn’t dirty.

She still had housekeepers after all, but she was tired of the clutter in her life. She took the bamboo blinds and a few other random environmental pieces she had acquired on a whim and hid them in a side closet. She would get rid of them properly later. She grabbed a stack of old framed black-and-white photographs from the same closet, happy to place them back on the wall where they belonged.

The collage she had built over years from collecting pictures of obscure locals finally came back into shape. She hung up the next one, adjusting it to make sure it was straight, and then grabbed one of the last pictures. As she stood up and glanced at the picture, her breath caught, and she nearly dropped the picture.

She had completely forgotten that she had brought back framed photographs from Milan. When she had returned to New York, she had been furious for even using all that space in her suitcase for them, so she had hidden them in that closet. She was a collector, and even then, leaving the pictures had seemed like a waste.

But, staring at the pictures now was a reminder of what she had given up by leaving. She sighed, tracing the outline of the frame. Maybe she needed them now to remember how far she had come.

The first one that she was holding in her hand was of the Naviglio Grande canal. All she saw when she looked at it was a blue Bugatti. She placed it on a nail in the wall, wanting to cling on to the remaining happy memories of Milan. The second one was from the coast in Genoa.

She didn’t remember which day Marco had taken this one. She just remembered the happiness of spending time with people whose company she enjoyed. That one followed suit, and on the wall, it went. The final one she picked up was a photo shoot she would forever remember.

It was taken from the window of Marco’s bedroom with the city skyline captured perfectly. He had hated it because it blurred around the edges, but she loved it because it illuminated the stars.

She swallowed hard, deciding she couldn’t hang that picture. It wouldn’t be right. She had left her star in Italy, and now, she looked at a new night sky. Marco had made that as blatantly clear as her letter, and she was returning the dress.

Her last link to him.

The picture was replaced back into its hiding place in the closet where it belonged, and she finished up the rest of the cleaning. When the doorbell rang an hour later, the place wasn’t a hundred percent back to normal, but it was as close as it was going to get by herself. She had threatened to tear it apart to upset Frederick, but all she had done was put it back together herself. She needed to do that to the rest of her life now.

Chyna opened the door and immediately burst out laughing. It felt good. “Is that Chinese?” she demanded.

Adam shrugged, clearly not understanding her laughter. “I thought you might be hungry,” he said with a weak smile.

She rolled her eyes with a smile on her face. “I am. Come on,” she said, walking through the foyer and into the kitchen.

Adam followed behind her and placed the food on the island just as she pulled Chinese take-out from the refrigerator.

Seeing that they had ordered the same thing, Adam burst out laughing as well.

“Guess we both wanted the same thing.”

“Well, yours is still warm,” she said, snatching a box of rice and some chicken concoction out of his hands. “So, I’m calling dibs.”

“I assumed so,” he said, taking a seat on a bar stool and popping open his own take-out boxes.

Chyna ripped open the chopsticks provided and dug into her meal. She was surprisingly hungry after such an exhausting day. Oh yeah, she hadn’t actually eaten her salad during her meeting with Cassandra. No wonder. Had she had anything today?

They ate in silence for the most part.

He chatted briefly about work, and she told him about Alexa’s plan in Atlanta.