Never Yours Again novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Forty Roses

Rhett walks into Lucy's office with forty roses and an audience; she tells him in front of everyone that no day on the calendar brings her back, and outside a driver says Mrs. Palgrave wants a word.

I slept four hours on Shawna's couch under a blanket that smelled like her dog.

At seven the next morning I opened my phone, and there he was.

Rhett was on the front page of a fashion site, standing in a sunny studio with his hand low on a tall blond woman's back.

The caption said Palgrave House had named Camille Draper the face of its fall campaign.

She wore a green coat.

He wore the exact smile he had worn last night when he told me to come back in forty-eight hours.

I looked at it for a full minute.

Then I opened my mother's weekly text, the one she sent every Monday and I answered every Wednesday with something vague.

It said, "Have you eaten a real dinner this week?"

I wrote back, "It's over, Mom. For real this time."

She answered right away.

"Good. Your room is ready. Come when you want, stay as long as you want, and I will not say a word about him."

I laughed so hard I had to put the phone down.

"Is that your mother?" Shawna shouted from the bathroom.

"She's promising not to say a word."

"That's the scariest thing I've ever heard."

Shawna came out with her red hair wet and a toothbrush in her mouth.

She took one look at the fashion site on my screen and spat in the sink.

"Is that the guest bed?"

"I don't know."

"It's the guest bed. Look at her ankles."

"I don't know that, Shawna."

"I do," she said. "Eat something. We have a client at ten."

We worked at a small firm that ran corporate events, and ten o'clock meant the whole floor was in the conference room around a pile of seating charts.

I was explaining where to put the stage for a pharmaceutical dinner when the glass door opened.

Rhett walked in carrying forty red roses.

I know it was forty because he said so to the receptionist on his way in.

"Forty," he told her. "One for every hour I'm giving her."

He had said forty-eight hours, and it had been eleven.

He didn't seem to mind.

He stood at the head of the table in a navy suit.

Everyone in the room stopped talking and looked at him.

"Lucy." He lowered his voice, which made it carry better. "I'm not here to fight. I'm here because I'm the bigger person."

My boss put her coffee down very slowly.

"This is my ex," I told her. "I'm sorry. This will take one minute."

"Ex," Rhett said, like he was tasting it. "Nobody said ex."

"I did. Last night. In the bedroom."

"You said you'd think about it."

"I said okay."

"That's the same." He held the roses out. "Come on. Thursday was a figure of speech. I'm giving you a head start. Let's go to lunch and put this behind us."

Nobody in the conference room looked at me.

Everybody looked at me.

A year ago I would have taken the roses.

I would have laughed it off and said he was impossible, and gone to lunch and let him buy me soup.

It was the easiest thing in the world, being forgiven.

I walked to the head of the table and stopped in front of him.

"Rhett."

"Yes."

"You told me to give it forty-eight hours."

"I did."

"I'm not coming back on Thursday." I kept my voice level. "I'm not coming back on Friday or at Christmas. There's no day on the calendar where I'm coming back."

His smile didn't move.

"You're angry."

"I'm finished."

"Lucy." He leaned in and whispered, and the whole room still heard it. "You can't live without me. We both know it."

A girl from accounting made a small sound in her throat.

I took the roses from his hand.

He started to smile.

I carried them past him and set them down in front of the receptionist.

"These are yours," I said. "Please put them in the lobby so nobody has to look at them."

I took the key to his building out of my pocket, because I'd forgotten I still had it.

I put it in his open palm and closed his fingers over it.

"Don't come to my work again," I said.

He stared at the key.

For the first time in two years, I saw him not know what to say.

It lasted two seconds.

Then his face tightened, and he straightened his tie, and he said very quietly, "You'll regret this."

"I regret the last two years," I said. "Not this."

He walked out through the glass door without another word.

The room stayed quiet until he was in the elevator.

Then my boss said, "Nobody tell me anything about that. Let's pick up where we left off with the stage."

I sat down and my hands were shaking, so I put them under the table.

Shawna slid a seating chart across to me and squeezed my knee.

"Forty roses," she muttered. "And he still came up short."

I went back to work.

I got through the stage, and the vegetarian menu, and the spelling of a doctor's name.

At noon I went down in the elevator for my sandwich.

Rhett wasn't in the lobby.

But a black car idled at the curb with its back window cracked, and a driver in a gray coat stood holding the rear door open.

He said, "Miss Tannen? Mrs. Palgrave would like a word."

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