“Great,” I say, picking up the corded phone by the bed. “Should I call room service for breakfast?”
He gives me a curt nod. I call and within a minute the deed is done.
As I walk away to go shower and dress, I expect him to follow. Shower sex—especially in a suite with so many shower heads—is a Declan delight.
But I shower alone.
As I dress, he jumps in the shower, and while I muddle through my tangled thread of thoughts, the staff delivers breakfast. By the time Dec’s out of the shower, toweling his wet, dark hair, I’m drinking coffee, legs crossed in a chair that faces the fountain and the fake Eiffel Tower on the strip.
“Is that one of the outfits Evie helped you with?”
I look down. “No. It’s a little from Marcello, and a little from her...” I don’t finish my sentence, because some element in his voice makes me pause.
He is angry.
Not this again. As I sit here watching the sun against the brush-covered beige mountains in the distance, the long metropolis before the base of the hills teeming with industry and debauchery in the form of skyscraper casinos and nightclubs, I feel a deep determination. Ever since we arrived here in Vegas, we’ve been prickly over any issue involving money.
His money.
Then again, we can’t really talk about my money, because that would be a three-second conversation.
His phone is the center of his attention now, as he stands in front of the room service cart, idly picking at a berry bowl and scrolling through messages. “Grand Canyon and solar panels,” he mutters. Must be some new business venture Anterdec’s involved with.
“We need to figure out what we’re doing here,” I say. “I feel like I’m living in suspended animation. We got away from the crazy wedding mess back in Massachusetts, and we’ve been here in Vegas for three days. What’s next?” I figure this is safe territory.
“I don’t know. Dad’s sticking his nose in the resort VP’s face constantly and driving her nuts. Your mom and dad dumped us to go watch 1970s entertainers. And you’re rejecting me left and right.”
“You could have followed me into the shower!” I protest.
“That’s not what I meant.”
And I know it.
“I’m not rejecting you,” I say gently. I don’t stand up, instead gazing out at the horizon, my eyes going unfocused as the line between mountain and sky blurs. “I just don’t want all this.”
“You don’t want me?”
“Ha ha.”
“That wasn’t a joke.”
A chill whips through me so fast that I reel, the dissonance too great. “Of course I want you!”
“But not my life.”
“What?”
“I try to share my life with you, Shannon.”
“You are sharing your life,” I say calmly, my grounded tone entirely fake. I’m trembling inside. “We live together. We’re about to get married.”
“And when I try to give you a nice wardrobe, or share a wonderful meal from a new chef, or buy you fine jewelry, you—”
“Don’t you understand that every time I look at a designer dress you buy for me, I see a car payment. When you talk about going out to dinner at private clubs, I see a student loan payment. When we take Carol and her boys to Canobie Lake Park and you treat everyone to all the goodies in there, Carol and I secretly feel really strange, because we’re used to packing a cooler and eating on the cheap—because just the tickets alone were hard enough for Mom and Dad to manage. And—” I sputter, trying to make up for anything I’ve said that might offend him—“it’s not that I don’t appreciate it all. I do. I know it comes from the heart, but I can’t unfeel what I feel.”
All those words come rushing out of me like a flash flood on a mountain pass, debris rising with the water line, destroying the only path along the way.
He softens, but doesn’t back down.
“And don’t you see, Shannon, that I am sharing who I am with you when I ask you to enter my world. I am designer clothing and private clubs and limos and Teslas and waterfront apartments. I am Milton Academy and private tutors and Harvard legacy. I hire people to manage the smaller details of my life because I can. Because I want to. I live like this because it’s all I know. You’re not the only one who looks at the other’s life and has a knee-jerk evaluative reaction to it.”
“Huh?”
“Every time we go to your parents’ house and Jason’s washing the car, I think, ‘What a waste of his time. He could be doing something else.’ Whenever yet another relative butts into our personal life, I wonder why they devote their psychological energy to someone else like that, when they could be working, or traveling, or just living quietly and entertaining themselves with something other than another person’s choices. Conversations around the dinner table about accepting what I consider abusive behavior from bosses get head nods and reinforcement, and in my world—growing up—that would never have happened.”
“Because you didn’t have a job as a teen?” I feel the sneer before I hear it, and pull back just in time.
I hope.
“No. I did.” He tips his head back and forth, thinking. “Internships. I learned to stand up for myself. I learned not to take shit from any boss. Especially my dad.”
“Was your ability to remain in your house dependent on that paycheck?”
He pauses, green eyes taking me in. “No.”
“That’s the difference.”