“It’s beautiful,” I say.
“It’s excessive. You don’t have to be afraid to speak your mind around me, Princess. I bought this when I was younger. When I thought I needed to prove how wealthy I was. If it wouldn’t be such a colossal waste, I’d sell it and move into something more modest. Then again, I’d miss my playroom if I moved.”
Playroom. I came across the term when I was researching BDSM. I doubt most people have the means to have an entire room devoted to their sex life, but I have no doubt whatever Jackson has inside his mansion is excessive, to say the least.
We park beneath the house in a large garage filled with expensive cars that catch and reflect every last bit of light. I’m more interested in Jackson’s body language as he leads me into the main entrance of his house than I am in all the wealth on display. He doesn’t seem proud of it or boastful. He seems disinterested, if anything, but I guess living like this for years would desensitize anyone to a certain point.
Everything in the home is beyond gorgeous. The floors are pure white and the rooms are spacious and filled with natural light. The decor is tasteful, clean, and modern.
“Are we going to, um, right now?” I ask, as he strips off his coat and lays it on the marble countertops in the kitchen.
“Relax, Princess,” he says, grinning. “I’m just taking off my jacket to make you dinner. You are hungry, right?”
I raise an eyebrow. “You’re going to cook?”
He grins. “Sort of. I’m a terrible cook, but I had a friend send something over even I can’t mess up. It’s from my favorite restaurant. You’ll love it. Unless I fuck it up, that is.”
I smile. “Sounds perfect.”
He goes into what I think is a pantry until the door opens and I see it’s full of wine bottles. He runs his finger along the bottles for a moment before deciding on one. He hefts it, inspects the label, and purses his lips. “This should do.”
“Is it like, some aged wine from the fifteen hundreds that only ten people have ever tasted?” I ask. I’m trying to get myself to be less stiff and let a little humor out, even if I have to force it a little. “A family recipe that has been lost so this is the only bottle left in the world?”
“Actually, I think I got this one at the supermarket,” he says, uncorking the bottle and grabbing two glasses for us. “Sometimes I’m worse than a little kid. I have to eat all this fancy food and drink fancy wine at business meetings. Half the time I’d rather just have a burger and some fries. Maybe a soda to wash it down.”
I laugh. “Seriously? I thought guys who looked like you only ate… I don’t know, lettuce and protein shakes?”
“Well, I do have an entire refrigerator just for lettuce, but I hate protein shakes.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “I actually can’t tell if you’re being serious.”
Jackson cracks a smile and I shake my head, not believing I almost fell for that.
“Seriously though, I hate lettuce. I pretty much survive on pasta, bread, and pretzels.”
“Well, it’s working for you,” I say, unable to stop from guiltily checking out the way his dress shirt hugs his powerful chest and shoulders.
He says nothing, but I see a spark in his eyes that tells me I may have just started a train of thought that could get me into a lot of trouble. He pulls an aluminum foil pan from the fridge and briefly glances at a sheet of paper on top of it before shoving it in the oven and setting the temperature.
“Should you set a timer?” I ask when I see he’s about to leave it.
“Nah, he just said around thirty minutes. We’ll remember.”
“Okay,” I say, trusting he knows what he’s talking about.
“Come on,” he says, grabbing two wine glasses and leading me out to the back patio.
The sun has almost fully set when we step outside. The sky is stained a dark purple above the treetops and hills behind his house. We’re only a couple minutes outside downtown, and I’m amazed by how much open space there is around his property.
“Wow,” I say, taking in the view. “I thought you’d need to drive hours to find this much space inside the city.
“Yeah,” he says. “It’s a nature preserve so the city couldn’t touch it. One of the perks that came with putting a house here.”
I sip the wine as I sit down in one of the patio chairs. I’ve never been a wine drinker, but it has a sweet, fruity taste that I can’t complain about. He sits beside me, sighing as he sinks into the chair.
“You know,” he says, eyes focused on the hills behind the house. “I've come to a lot of realizations right here in this chair. You spend so much time struggling and fighting to reach the top, and then once you've made it you wonder if it was all worth it in the end. You find yourself asking if it's everything you thought it would be. Were you chasing it because you had your eye on the prize or was it just because you liked the chase?"
“Which one was it?” I ask.
“I don’t know that it was either for me.. I think I was using the work and the money to distract myself. Every time I stopped too long to catch my breath, I’d feel like I wasn’t making use of the life Sarah sacrificed for me. I had it wrong for a long time though. I thought I needed success to make her sacrifice worth it. As if every dollar was a weight on the scale, and if I just put enough money on my end I could finally balance it out. I thought when that happened, the guilt might go away.”
He scoffs and sips his wine. “It was never the money. I realized that in this exact chair a few months ago.”
“What about happiness?” I suggest. “I mean, people always think money will make them happy. But I don’t really think they have as much to do with one another as people think. Sure, if you have no money it’s pretty hard to be happy, but...”
He turns to look at me, smiling slightly. “What do you think I need to be happy, then?”
“Love,” I say, without thinking. Once I realize the implication of what I just said, it takes all my willpower not to bury my face in my hands in embarrassment.
The smile on his face widens. “Hmm. So you think love is the key to my happiness. What is yours, then?”
“Well--um, I mean, I…” The moment hangs between us. If I say what I’m really feeling, I feel like I’ll be taking a step over a precipice I can’t undo. I’ll be launching myself forward in this thing between us so quickly it will be hard to stop. “I just want to graduate college,” I say finally.
“Right,” he says, leaning back in his chair and sipping his wine.
We sit a long time talking about nothing and everything in between. I focus less on what he says and more on how he looks when he says it, marveling at the perfection in the way his lips form the words or the power in everything from his eyes to his hands. He puts me at ease like no man ever has, and after a short while, I feel like I could tell him anything.
“You know,” I say, still grinning from the story he just told. “This is the dumbest thing,” I say, shaking my head at my lap and grinning. “But the only reason I let my friend talk me into this--”
“Oh, shit,” he says, hopping up and running in toward the kitchen.