Page 51 of The Pleasure Contract

She told herself that hadn’t been a kind of vow, no matter what it sounded like.

And so they told each other stories as August fell inexorably toward September. First it felt like they were filling in the gaps. But then, as Bristol kept going on another date and another date after that, it became something else.

Less filling in gaps, more talking about who they really were. What they thought and felt. What her mother had told her in Ohio. What his sister had told him in Vermont.

But it wasn’t all old paths and new beginnings. Bristol learned that the best-dressed man in New York had always hated dressing up for formal events. If it was up to him, he told her, he’d spend his life in jeans and a T-shirt far away from the public eye.

“Then why do it?” she asked, leaning in close over a rickety little table in the Vietnamese place. They kept coming back. “You can do whatever you want, can’t you? I thought that was the entire point of being you.”

“In order to get the kind of backing I want for my various projects, I have to know how to play the game,” he replied. He shrugged. “I don’t mind it as much anymore.”

“But surely—”

“And besides,” he said, his expression intent, “it’s my responsibility to not be my father. I can’t do exactly as I please. I have an obligation to use the money he made and squandered for good. If I have to wear a suit to do it, that feels like a small price to pay.”

Bristol reached across the table and took his strong hands in hers. She held his gaze.

“You could never be your father. You never, ever will be.”

And it was tempting to say she would be right there to make sure of it, no atom bombs in the vicinity, but she swallowed it back.

She took him to a baseball game. She took him to a crowded, raucous movie theater to see the summer blockbuster hit and to enjoy all the patrons on their phones, people talking back at the screen, and an impromptu popcorn fight.

“That was an experience,” Lachlan said when they left, slinging an arm over her shoulders as they walked out into the warm, dense streets. “But I’m not sure I could tell you what that movie was about.”

“The point of actually going to a movie theater to see a movie is the communal aspect,” Bristol informed him. “It’s not to enjoy the film so much as the crowd.”

“Noted.”

“Just think,” she teased him, “we’ll make a New Yorker out of you yet.”

One night they were stuck on the subway somewhere beneath the East River. The Brooklyn-bound train was packed and quiet enough as everyone simply waited to move again. They were standing in the middle of the car and she found herself smiling up at him, up beneath the baseball hat he wore crammed down on his head to hide his face.

He was Lachlan Drummond and he could have flown them to the Maldives tonight if she’d asked but was instead on a stopped subway car like anyone else. Because she’d wanted him to do this. Whatever she asked, he did.

Like they’d flipped their entire relationship upside down.

Her stomach flipped a few times as the truth of that settled in.

But Bristol didn’t want that truth. She pushed up on her toes, overwhelmed with the night they’d spent at a piano bar in the West Village, surrounded then and now by people who didn’t know who he was, and kissed him.

It had been three weeks. Three long, torturous weeks, and she didn’t understand how she’d done it. How she kept herself from tasting him the way she wanted to—so badly she woke up in her hot bedroom already halfway to coming, only to find herself alone.

Lachlan’s hand that wasn’t gripping the subway pole moved to her face as he took control of the kiss, heat and light and that same wild punch jolting between them and making her feel whole again.

How had she not understood? Kissing him—touching him—made her feel whole.

Because when the train rocked to life again, she pulled back and held on to him instead of the subway, and didn’t have to pretend not to feel anything. Her own tumultuous longing or that intent look all over his face.

She just gazed up at him, mute and overwhelmed, and was nothing at all but herself.

And she could feel them both shatter. And shudder.

As if they were the same.

“It was always like this,” she whispered as the conductor said something unintelligible over the loudspeaker. “But I don’t want to hide it any longer.”

“I don’t want you to.”