Lucas’s voice was impossibly low when he answered, “You’re stunning. You remind me of a flower. A beautiful rose.” My breath caught. “You blush like one, too, Rosie. It’s so fitting. So… goddamn gorgeous.”
And I… I wasn’t okay.
The way this felt wasn’t normal. The way my heart raced and my body pulsed with need, longing, yearning for him, couldn’t possibly be normal.
It couldn’t be. And if it was, I didn’t think I could take it. It was too much.
But Lucas had said that; he had called me beautiful. Said I was stunning. In two different languages, and I… knew he’d meant it. I knew it in my bones.
The way I feel has never been more real, I thought.
But I couldn’t allow myself to acknowledge that out loud. Because tonight was supposed to be research, an experiment—our last experimental date—and now I knew I was at risk of having my heart broken. It could happen tomorrow, when I returned to my apartment, and I wouldn’t see him every day. Or it could happen in a matter of weeks, when he went back to Spain.
I let out a breath, the sound rocky, unsteady. “Thank you.”
Lucas’s head reared back slowly. “Thank you?”
I averted my eyes, and as much as I didn’t want to stop looking at him, I did. “Yeah. That was very deserving of a grand gesture kind of night.”
Because that was what tonight was about. Phase four, the grand gesture.
Usually, in novels, it came after a black moment, after feelings are put to the test. But in this case—being this was nothing but an experiment—that hadn’t made sense. So, we’d jumped ahead.
Lucas didn’t answer, not for a while. He just looked at me, his lips curled into the smallest smile he’d ever given me.
Reaching for my glass of wine, I mused over what to say, finally settling for something that had crossed my mind, but I had never asked. “Can I ask you something, Lucas?”
“You know you can ask me anything.”
“You never talk about Spain.” I was trying my luck here. He didn’t want to talk about his injury, or whatever had happened to him, I knew that much. But I couldn’t stop thinking about him going back. “You’ve only talked about Abuela. Or Taco.” I paused. “You know, the plan had been to fly your grandma here. With Taco. But she said she’d had enough of New York when she visited Lina a couple of years ago. She said everything’s so big here it gives her chicken skin? Charo wasn’t able to translate that.”
“Piel de gallina. Goosebumps. That just means that it gives her goosebumps.” Lucas let out a chuckle, but his heart wasn’t in it. Then, he said, “What do you want to know, beautiful Rosie?”
Everything. “Do you miss home?”
“Yes and no.”
I shifted to the edge of the stool, my knees moving into the space between his. “What do you miss about it?”
He seemed to deflate at the question, so I placed a hand on his knee. Encouraging him. He pressed his thigh against mine in response. “I miss… my life. How my life was before. Some days I wake up thinking I’m back in time, and my head starts pondering what beach I can drive to before the crowd gets in. Then I remember.”
“You remember what?”
His gaze zeroed in on my fingers as they rested on his knee. “That I’m not there anymore. That I’m no longer myself.”
“Lucas?” I said, and whatever he heard in my voice made him retrieve my hand from his knee and take it in his. “Why come here? Are you running from something? From whatever happened?”
He brought our hands to his mouth and placed his lips on my wrist. “I’m not running, ángel. Some days I’m not even moving.”
ángel. My heart pounded. “What do you need?” I asked, because whatever that was, I wanted to get it for him. “To feel like you’re moving forward again.”
His gaze searched my face. “I don’t know, Rosie. And that’s what scares me the most.”
Something in my chest broke for him. The need to make it better growing by the minute. “I’ll take your hand,” I told him, tightening my grip around his fingers. “And keep you moving. Until you figure it out.”
And I’ll take that ángel, too. And keep it.
Keep it for when he left, and I had these memories instead of him.
He didn’t speak, not right away. Then, he said, “I hope you’re ready for your grand gesture.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO