The Shaadi Set-Up by Lillie Vale

Chapter 28

There’s no way to access the back porch without passing through the dining room first. I realize my mistake when I see the erased table, but I don’t falter. I stride past it, finally able to breathe when I push the glass door open and take in my first gulp of cool, salt-filled air.

God, I was such a fool. I’d been looking for signs in all the wrong places, when the universe had already given me the biggest one of them all.

Broken things can’t be fixed.

“I’m going for a walk,” I say over my shoulder to Raj, who’s followed me. “Alone.” The word punctuates the fog in my mind. “By myself,” I amend. Same meaning, but it makes me want to claw my heart out of my chest a little less.

I thought nothing would be worse than losing the opportunity to know Milan again. But no, this is worse. Because this makes it so everything new and tender between us this summer never happened at all. And now it won’t ever happen again.

I wait for the coil of anxiety and upset deep in my belly to loosen, dissipate. Surely now that my head’s made peace with saying farewell to even the tiniest wisp of a happy ending for us, my heart and the rest of me will fall in line?

But if anything, the coil squeezes even tighter.

My feet slip in and out of the sand as I walk. Frustrated, I hop along on one foot, ripping off my shoes without breaking stride. This side of Rosalie Island is ablaze with poppy-red color and marigold-bright rays. I almost make it to the nearest neighbor’s house before the urge to vomit passes and the horizon starts to swallow the sun along with my last shred of hope.

God, I’m a literal walking-into-the-sunset cliché.

I whip around. It’s time to go ho—go back and face things.

The plan to take my table back failed. No romantic candlelight dinners and playing footsie under the table. No dimpled children eating waffles and Milan’s perfect scrambled eggs. No birthday cakes and Christmas roasts. No families squeezed around my table, bickering over the crackling and the last dinner roll. No Milan. No life together. Everything I dreamed . . . gone.

I’d believed in him—in us, in what we shared. So much that I hadn’t let myself doubt for a moment that he would come chasing after me. That he wanted everything I wanted. It feels unreal how wrong I was. How disconnected my dream was from our reality.

Maybe I should have trusted in historical precedents instead of fresh starts.

I pad through the sand, heart sinking faster than the sun at my back. A hermit crab races to keep up with me, then scuttles across my path to join a second, smaller crab waiting near the water. My eyes sting, then blur, as I watch them together. It’s hard to believe that this is the same beach Milan and I jogged on with the pups not so long ago.

“Rita?”

I stop short. Milan’s walking up the beach, holding his flip-flops in his hands.

Face full of confusion and no trace of guilt, he asks, “What are you doing here?”

He’s asking me that? He has the gall to ask me that?

“You sanded my table,” I say, voice quivering. “You could have given it back to me or you could have— Anything but that. How could you? You had to get rid of everything that reminded you of us?”

He stops in his tracks, mouth falling open. “What are you talking about?”

“The trestle table in the dining room. The one I painted. For weeks.”

“It’s still here.”

“No,” I say vehemently. “It’s not.”

“Rita,” he says, voice rough with frustration, “I promise you that it is.”

“ ‘Promise’? Ha!”

His jaw clenches. “Why do you think I’m here? With a moving van? Do you really think I would let you—or your table—go?”

I stare at him.

He sighs. “Your table’s out front. Do you want proof?”

I give him a jerky nod.

This time we don’t go through the house, but around it, navigating through the tall beach grass. My van is in full view. There’s no way Milan can miss it, but with single-minded determination, he goes right to his own to unlatch the roll-up door at the back and shines his phone’s flashlight inside.

I can’t hold back my gasp.

The mural table is inside. My gaze zeroes in on the couple walking together in the sand the way we’d just done and on the green scrunchie in her hair.

The knot in my heart unravels, and hidden in its center is a terrifyingly small bud of hope.

But it’s growing larger by the second.

“Believe me, now?” His voice holds a trace of annoyance. “Why are you here with your own van?”

Before I can answer him, apologizing for my rant, Raj shouts from inside the house, “If you’re here to steal anything, you should know I called the police!”

“What the fuck?” Milan takes off for the front door, me on his heels.

He uses his key to get in, to his credit not blinking at Raj wielding a fireplace poker and a cranky expression. He sucks in his cheeks and looks from her to me before asking, “Does someone want to tell me what the two of you are doing here?”

“What are you doing here?” Raj counters.

He plays the trump card. Folding his arms across his chest, he says, “It’s my house.”

I swallow. Right. It’s his house. He has every right to be here, unlike us.

Raj lets the poker clatter back into the stand and huffs back to her seat.

He’s still waiting for an answer. I cast around for something that would explain why I, my best friend, and a second moving van are in front of his house.

“I, ah, forgot something here,” I say finally.

He half smiles, then remembers to steel his face again. “Another scrunchie?”

“Uh, not exactly.”

Milan lifts a brow. “Is it bigger than a bread box?”

He’s teasing me. I gnaw my lower lip, replying in kind. “Considerably.”

“Fine! You don’t have to interrogate us!” Raj bursts out. “We came for the table and that’s it. Rita was even planning on a replacement we were going to swap out for it, and maybe it’s wrong, maybe the word ‘stealing’ was thrown around, but this is important to her, okay?”

Wow. Miss Cat Burglar didn’t even hold up to three questions without folding like that.

I pass a hand over my eyes. “You are the worst criminal ever.”

“At least now I know why you’re here,” says Milan.

Anxiously, I ask, “You didn’t really call the police, did you, Raj?”

The blush rises on her cheeks. “No. It seemed like the smart thing to say to scare off an intruder.”

The tension in the room evaporates.

“Well, then,” says Raj. “I’m gonna give you two some space. And fair warning, I’m not coming out until someone gives me the all clear.”

Well, that’s one way to avoid awkwardness.

And oh god, awkward it is. Now that the fright and anger has faded, I’m left with the awful memory of the way we ended and that stony ferry ride home when we’d locked Bluebill Cottage up for the last time. And now, arguing again only thirty seconds after laying eyes on each other. It’s embarrassing. We should be better than this.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t exactly break in. I still had my key. Which, um, I should probably give back to you.” I pull it from my pocket, the metal warm to the touch, and hold it out.

I’m sure I don’t imagine that moment of hesitation before he takes it.

It’s a small key. It would be so easy for our fingers to brush, but he seems as tentative with his acceptance as I do in my offering.

“Thanks.” His Adam’s apple bobs. “So, were you seriously going to steal our table?”

My mind latches on to the our and brings it close. “Steal is a strong word.”

His mouth crooks. “Liberate, then?”

“It doesn’t mean anything to anyone but us,” I say. “Or, well, I guess just me. I’m the only one who’d want it.”

“You’re not the only one.”

I wring my hands. “Oh, did you— I mean, is there an offer? Someone who saw the pictures and wants— I know the whole point of bringing me in to flip this house was to sell it furnished, but—”

“Rita,” he says gently, ceasing the flow of my babble. “I meant me. I want the table.”

“So you came here to steal it?”

His cheeks flare with color. “I know what you put into it. I didn’t want someone else to have it. I was planning on smuggling your table out, replacing it with its twin we saw at the store, and retaking the dining room picture for the website.”

“You got a little streak of deviousness in your old age,” I say to lighten the mood, but all it does is reignite our banter, which last time led to . . .

We both find ourselves looking at the couch and then at each other.

“I was planning on giving it to you,” says Milan.

“But we had a fight,” I say. “You said we were done. Time to go back to our lives.”

“It was in the heat of the moment,” he says, hanging his head for a moment. Then he shoots back up and I’m taken aback by the fierceness in his eyes. “I was a jackass, Rita. I almost walked away from you again— No, I did walk away. I was hurt that you weren’t ready to be out in the open with me, outside of the fairy tale of this house. And instead of examining why you were hurt, and the role I played in it, I did the same exact thing you were afraid of.”

“You did,” I say quietly.

“But, Rita, try to see it from my point of view. You didn’t want to tell your folks about Neil. And I get why. But you wanted to keep me on the DL, too. It felt like a pattern. Worse, like a punishment. And I know that isn’t how you intended it, but if our breakup has taught us anything, it’s the thin line between intent and effect.”

“You always call me on my shit,” I tell him. “All of it. And it is infuriating. Especially when you’re right. I tried to break that pattern by coming here.”

“By turning to a life of crime?”

“By giving you a reason to come after me.” I grab Raj’s phone from where she left it on the coffee table, bypass the security code, and open the notes app. I turn the phone to face him. “The first pro on my list.”

I love him. I could learn to live without him again, but I really don’t want to.

He reads the list silently, ignoring the other random strings of letters.

“I waited for you a long time, Milan. I don’t intend to make the same mistake again. You’re right. I could have come to you any time over the last six years and I didn’t.” I give him a tiny smile. “We knocked down those six years apart into just six days, for what it’s worth.”

A slow, unsure smile spreads over his face. “And we’re both here. Does that mean . . . No, you tell me what it means.”

“It means I want to be with you. I want everything you want, everything I’ve ever wanted, ever since I was fifteen years old.” I press my hand to my chest. “I want my heart to always beat like this. For you.”

He closes the distance between us in two long strides. His arms are around me in an instant, crushing me to his chest. “I wish—” He breaks off, a frustrated crease appearing in his forehead. “I wish we could live here. Start fresh. But I can’t afford to, not after all the money invested in flipping it.”

I’ve had a lot of time to think about this. What comes next.

“What if we leased it?” I find myself asking. “If we’re both doing okay for money right now, then maybe we could find someone willing to rent, and maybe we could put our money toward paying down the mortgage and, one day . . .”

“One day live here ourselves,” he breathes.

I nod, a rigid, jerky thing. I don’t even dare to hope.

“I’d have to take a look at the numbers. See what we could rent it out for. Maybe downsize my apartment, find someplace cheaper. Figure out how long we’d have to wait until—” He stops again. But I can still sense he’s crunching numbers in his head, trying to work out whether the impossible could actually be within our reach. “This is what you want, Rita? Is that what would make you happy?”

“You make me happy,” I say. “And I love this house. But I love you so much more. And I’m willing to fight and make up with you every day to prove that, if I have to.”

His arms tighten around me. Our foreheads rest against each other, noses bumping. “Tell me more about the making-up part. Does it go like this?”

He kisses the question off my lips with a sweet, searing intensity that I feel all the way down to the tips of my toes and a hundred other places, too. The kiss deepens as our tongues touch, and his abdomen tenses against my stomach when I breathe his name into his mouth.

“Rita,” he rasps in return, devouring me in another kiss, digging his fingers into my hair. I gasp, pressing myself against the solid feel of him, feeling the hard heat of his torso and the bump of his nose as he makes his way along the shell of my ear and down my neck. Everywhere his lips linger alights with fireworks, setting me up to soar, knowing he’ll catch me if I fall.

The kiss goes on for what feels like minutes, and maybe it does, because the next thing I hear is Raj shouting, “I hope the silence means you’re kissing each other!”

“It does!” he calls back.

I stifle my laughter. “You can come out now, by the way.”

In a strangled voice, Milan calls, “Please don’t!” Then, to me, in a voice that promises another six years and another and another, “I think we still have some making up to do.”

I hum under my breath. “Six years’ worth, if we’re keeping track. And I want it with interest.”

He looks somber for a moment before nodding as if he’s come to a decision. “Gone but not forgotten.” His expression turns impish on a dime. “Kind of like that shirt of mine you’re wearing. I always wondered where it went.”

“Yours?” My mouth drops. “Uh, you are very much mistaken there, buddy.”

He runs his warm hands up my arms, then folds back the left sleeve. “Look familiar?”

I glance down, breath stolen by the sight of a small embroidered black heart. It’s almost invisible against the black fabric, scarcely bigger than a thumbnail, and pressed almost flat.

I remember stitching this. Back in the days he only wore gray and black, when he was so difficult to shop for, I’d made this birthday gift a little bit more special by giving him my heart on his sleeve. When I look back at his face, Milan knows I remember.

“Wait, how did you even know the heart was—oh. That day in front of the bookshelves.”

The memories whoosh back like a plug’s been unstoppered. That pensive, preoccupied look on his face that I couldn’t place. The way he’d seemed to be putting something together while I trembled on the precipice of coming apart under the roughened pads of his thumbs.

I take in a long, controlled inhale, then let it out, heart expanding about a dozen sizes. All these years, all these long six years, I’d been reaching for him and I never even knew it.

He grins. “Don’t worry. I don’t want it back. Looks cuter on you, anyway.”

“Good, because you’re not getting it.” My eye catches on movement through the glass-enclosed dining room. “Milan, I think I see a pony out there.”

“From here?” He taps his foot against the living room floorboards.

I’m already moving for the porch. “I swear I saw something.”

But when we get there, the beach is empty. I scan up and down the coastline, but whatever was there is gone now. Only our footprints remain.

Milan waits a respectful .02 seconds before saying, “I bet it was a real cute dog.”

I elbow him good-naturedly, trying not to laugh. “Shut it, you. Let me have this.”

He can’t stop smiling. “Your imaginary wild pony?”

“Are you going to tell this story to everyone we meet?”

He wraps his arms around me, bringing me flush against him for a soft, unhurried toe-curling kiss. His hands are clasped at the small of my back, thumb working erotic little circles on my tailbone. “Oh, only for the rest of our lives.”

I tilt my head back to look into his eyes. The teasing smile is gone, replaced by a solemnity he doesn’t often wear. “You and your cheeky declarations,” I whisper, flattening my palm against his cheek, savoring the hint of stubble. “Maybe it wasn’t a Banker. Can’t have everything, I guess.”

The smile in his eyes spreads, breaking over his entire face. “Yes,” he says, sliding an arm around my waist and bringing me close for another toe-curling kiss. “I’m making you a promise, Rita. We can have everything. Our new beginning. Everything your table and the house represents, not just now, but in the future. And I’m going to prove that to you.”

“Our table,” I say, giving him a peck on the lips. “Our house.” I repeat the kiss.

“Ours,” he agrees.

“And we’ll prove it to each other,” I say, and then reach up on my tiptoes to kiss him.