Highest Bidder (Salacious Players’ Club)

Daisy

“What are you reading?” I ask. We’re on a bench in the middle of the same park we visited on our first day—his favorite park. It’s our last day in Paris before we go home tomorrow, and I’m not ready to leave. I feel weightless here. Like I’ve finally found the freedom I was longing for after my mother died. It’s the city and it’s him. I’m living in a snapshot of the life I’ve always wanted to live, and tomorrow, I’ll have to wake up from this dream.

My feet are in his lap as I rest my head against the side of the bench, watching the people passing by. He turns the old book in his hand to show me the cover. It’s the collected works of Emily Dickinson that I bought for him yesterday, and I feel a blush warm my cheeks.

“Are you brushing up on your poetry?” I ask.

“Might as well.”

“Will you read me something?”

“Of course,” he says before flipping through a few pages. When he lands on one he likes, he clears his throat and reads it out loud in a gentle tone.

On the first line, my throat tightens and my eyes sting.

“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words, and never stops—at all…”

It was my mother’s favorite. Hearing it in his voice is like an invasion. Two worlds colliding.

While he speaks, the thumb of his free hand runs along the top of my foot to my ankle then back up, and I stare at him as if my heart is being slowly pulled out of my chest.

Even without confirmation, I’ve accepted the possibility that my mother loved Ronan. And I hate the reminder because it means I have no right to love him the same way. He’s not mine. How much would it hurt her to know that he and I are together? To know what we’ve done? If she were alive, would she be angry with me? Jealous, even?

His voice offers warmth and comfort as he reads, and I try to find something new in the poem that I never found before. But hope feels like a trigger. I wasted hope on my dying mother, so it feels foolish to hope for anything now.

To wish for happiness like this to last more than one week in Paris. Is it too soon to hope for more? Is it foolish to hope for forgiveness when I decide to come clean?

When I turn my head toward Ronan, he finishes the poem and looks at me. “What do you think?”

“That was beautiful,” I reply, shoving down the rising despair inside me.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “I like that one.”

“Can I ask you a personal question?”

He tilts his head, resting the book on his lap before linking his fingers with mine. “Of course.”

“Do you still feel the pain? From losing your family.”

His fingers squeeze mine as his eyes narrow. “Yes. It never goes away. There are moments when I feel like they were just here. Like they should still be here.”

I force myself to swallow, watching the way his face changes when he brings up his grief, how his features grow heavier and more weary.

“But over the years, those moments don’t come as often. And everything in between is fine.”

“Just fine?” I ask, resting my head against the back of the bench.

“Sometimes better than fine,” he replies with a soft smile. When he brings my knuckles to his lips, I feel that tug on my heart again. “I’ll be honest, Daisy. I used to think I could replace them. That if I got married again and had other kids, it would eclipse the pain I felt. But I did fall in love, many times, and I did get married again, but nothing ever dissolved the grief completely. So, I stopped trying.”

“Stopped trying to find love?”

A smile pulls at his lips. “You don’t want to hear about the women I’ve loved, Daisy. I know you don’t.”

I sit up a little. “Yes, I do. I know you had a life before me.”

“Really?” His face twists in confusion as he stares at me from across the bench, and I realize that he has no idea my motives are twofold. On one hand, I want to know everything about Ronan Kade that I can possibly know for my own lovestruck curiosity.

But also, because I know somewhere in those stories is a memory of my mother that I have never seen, and Ronan is a vault I’m dying to open.

“Yes, really,” I reply with confidence.

“To be honest, Daisy,” he says carefully. His hand reaches up to tug softly on one of my unruly blonde waves that’s fallen out of the clip holding it all back. “Nearly a decade ago, I stopped trying to find love to replace what I had lost, and that’s exactly when I did find it. But it didn’t work out anyway, so then I really gave up.”

“What happened?” I reply, eagerly, hoping it’s my mother he’s talking about.

“She already had a life that didn’t include me. And as much as I wanted her, I had to accept that ruining what she had was no way to love her.”

“Was she married?”

“No, she had a daughter.”

I have to hold in the gasp that wants to escape. I suspected this. I knew it was possible, but to hear him talk about her, knowing how much he loved her…it stings.

“It’s all right. That ship has sailed, and I’ve made peace with it. Can you imagine me now, though? If we had gotten married. Raised a child. You probably wouldn’t have seen me at Salacious.”

It’s taking everything in me to keep still, without crying as he talks, even while I know that the child he’s referring to is mostly likely me.

“Do you regret it?” I ask, my voice not more than a whisper.

“No,” he replies without hesitation. Then he leans forward and brushes his thumb across my cheek. “Just because I wanted her, doesn’t mean I deserved her. And it doesn’t mean we were meant to be. I loved her…a lot. But I refuse to live in the past. I’m here now, and this is exactly where I want to be.”

There is no holding back the tears that fill my eyes now. When he notices them, he pulls me closer until I’m sitting in his lap. Then he kisses my cheeks, one at a time, before kissing my lips. Without pushing or prying, he just holds me and strokes my hair as I cry.

In moments like these, my mother’s death still feels like an open wound. An open wound I’m trying to hide.

“Don’t be sad, baby girl. Not for me.”

“I’m not,” I reply. “I just…don’t want to go home tomorrow. I want to stay like this forever.”

“Me too, Daisy.”

“What’s going to happen to us back home?” My voice sounds weak and hesitant.

“Whatever you want to happen,” he replies.

I drag a breath into my lungs as I feel the relief of that response. Turning my head, I find his eyes with my own. “I want this. Us. Like this.”

His eyes shine with satisfaction as he brushes a wisp of hair off my forehead. “Me too.”

“What are you thinking about?” I ask, and the corner of his mouth tics upward.

Letting out a soft laugh, he kisses the side of my head and whispers, “Just all the rooms I want to take you in at Salacious when we get home.”

The blood in my veins grows hot with the thought.

After a few moments, we get up from the bench and walk hand in hand through the park, on our way back to the apartment. The people are staring again. But I’m not paying them any mind. All I’m thinking about is how good it feels to be his.

I don’t know when it started, but I feel like we’re about to embark on something that is guaranteed to be amazing. As long as it doesn’t all fall apart first.