The Other Way : Twenty One

If You Change Your Mind 

-

“It’s nice. But I think you can do better.”

I glanced up from the Bruno Magli I’d just slipped onto his foot, a shoe worth more than my entire ensemble and my phone bill combined. It was beautiful, really, as far as shoes go. Chocolate brown leather, an elaborate punched pattern trimming the graceful lines of contrast stitching. Exposed eyelets. Woven silk laces.

The shoe had nothing on the guy.

“You don’t like it?” I stuttered, fumbling the moment I met his eyes, piercing icy blue that made everything inside of me boil. He nudged some hair out of his face, blonde and a little too mussed for the expensive suit he was sporting. It was perfectly tailored, blizzard grey, single-buttoned, eggplant colored tie undone at his neck, the top button of a pale lilac dress shirt pulled open.

My knees were trembling before they’d even hit the floor.

“It’s not singing to me, no.” He angled his foot to look at the shoe, not bothering to stand before glancing back down at me. I was certain he had a clear view down the neckline of my dress. “I think you have a few tricks up your sleeve. I’m looking for something . . . different.”

“Different?”  

He looked at me again, eyebrow arched. “I’m not playing it safe. Show me what you’ve got.”

Three pairs later, he finally deemed my choice suitable enough to stand for inspection. We were in one of the private rooms, the full wall of mirrors extravagant for simply trying on shoes, but sort of perfect for subtly eyeballing him while he studied them in his reflection. These were my favorite in the whole store, a pair crafted in Italy by a house that had been making shoes for nearly two hundred years. The buttery soft leather was stripped back and then painted a rich shade of red, still-visible brush strokes giving the near appearance of wood grain. A steal at just under two thousand dollars, they were slim and tapered, elegant in a way I’d never felt any of my clients could pull off.

Until today.

Until him.

Where had this man come from? Standing before me in refreshing silver, manicured and poised to the point of myth, managing to make even the burning red shoes look intentional. I hated my life. So fucking boring and full of men who wanted the same black oxford in the same plain box, worn with the same boring suits as the hundreds that came before them.

“You don’t look impressed.” He was looking at me through the mirror as though he was trying to hold back a smile, failing slightly. “What do you think of them?”

I was nearly grimacing, surprised by my face when I caught a glimpse of its reflection. I smoothed out my furrows and cleared my throat, spouting off what I knew and loved about the shoe. “The body is grain leather, treated twice, and for all I hear it wears beautifully as it ages. There’s a bit of a raised heel, but I think you’ll find it only-”

“Not the prepackaged sales blurb,” he interrupted. “I’m asking you. What were you thinking just now, with that pretty scowl on your face?”

I bit my lip for half a moment before I gave in, blooming pink cheeks under his frosted eyes. “That I’ve never gotten to try these on someone.”

“No one else?” He perked an eyebrow and glanced down at the shoes, mouth spreading in a sly smile. “Why is that?”

“They’re a commitment,” I hedged.

“Dare I ask how much they are?”

More than a couple months’ worth of my rent, guy.

“They retail at just over eighteen hundred. Considering the craftsmanship and the label, they’re considered a bargain.”

“Is that your honest opinion?”

“Honest?”

“Honest,” he repeated, more of that wide mouth and the piercing eyes. He looked nearly excited for my answer so I played along.

“For that price, they should be able to shoot lasers from the toes,” I grumbled, nudging that expensive shoe with the toe of my cheap knockoff heel.

He grinned at me, eyes bright. “You are a breath of fresh fucking air. What in the world are you doing selling shoes?”

“Long story.” I rolled my eyes so that I wouldn’t start ranting and raving, or crying and collapsing. He certainly did not need to see any of that.

“Will you meet me tonight? My sister is throwing herself a birthday party and I would love the distraction.”

“I’m not a distraction.” I arched a cynical eyebrow, unable to believe that this boy in two thousand dollar shoes and an eight hundred dollar suit just asked me out.

“You’ve distracted me for the last hour.” He glanced at his watch and winked at me. “I’ll take these. And the Brunos.”

“I thought they weren’t singing to you?” I asked, confused. He’d obviously just been stringing this along if he liked the first pair enough to purchase them.

“Like I said, distractions. Is that a no?”

“No?”

“You won’t come?”

I held him off with vague excuses about customer/employee relationships. Mumbled something about protocol and needing to keep my job. Weak justifications, all the while feeling like giving up on everything and just saying yes. Fifteen minutes after he left I was in the stock room, re-shelving shoes and fighting with myself over everything I’d just said and done, how I’d let my face get the better of me. I was still feeling wobbly and precarious, aching knees and racing head. Tanya found me just as I shoved the last box into place.

“I was picking up in room four and I found this.”

It wasn’t until she handed me the business card did I realize that I didn’t even know his name. He was just blonde and beautiful and looked amazing in that suit. According to the card, his name was Jasper Hale and he was the first guy in what felt like forever who didn’t make me feel like a soap bubble when he looked at me. I was already making plans long before I flipped the card over.

Five words and a phone number in easy, sprawling script.

If you change your mind.

---

Precisely six hours and thirty seven minutes later I was on a dance floor in a club I would never go to, in shoes I only wore out of desperation, with a big drunken dude basically dry-humping my leg through a horrible radio hit with too much bass. He looked like he was the high school football star from somewhere in the midwest, corn-fed and probably a good farm kid until he moved to the city and got lost. Now he was drunk and overly-enthusiastic and set he had set his sights on me the moment I walked into the club.

He’d made my job of searching for Jasper a lot harder than it had to be.

“Dude, I’m not fucking interested.” I tried to push him off, wondering if this is what people with small, clingy children felt like, except this one was giant-sized. I tried squirming away from him through the crowd but he obviously had a knack for catching small creatures in any sort of environment, something I figured probably came in handy on the farm. Before I knew what was happening he had me ground up against him, knee worming between my own and sour-beer breath everywhere I turned. I squirmed violently, hands to his chest with my head craned to keep out of range of his beer cloud, and that was the moment I saw him.

Jasper.

Near the bar with a glass of something golden in his hand and still in that suit. His tie was gone, more buttons of his shirt were undone and I was so fucking thankful he was here.

“Jasper!”

I screamed, I’m not gonna lie. The music was deafening and everyone around me was yelling and laughing and bouncing around manically to the shitty music. Farm Boy was breathing hard down my neck and I was the proverbial needle in the messy, riotous haystack. Jasper glanced over and easily picked me out of the crowd, instant and unwavering. His gaze jumped to Farm Boy and he handed his glass the person he’d been talking to, leaping into the melee. He pushed his way through with his elbows, there faster than I thought possible, answering my inaudible call.

“Alright, that’s enough.” He wrestled me from Farm Boy with both hands and I stumbled into him, fisting a tight hold on his jacket lapels for good measure. He steadied me, pulling me against him and elbowing off a random stray who bounced into us mid flail.

“Hey, step off asshole,” Farm Boy growled and tried to pull me back. “The song isn’t over and besides, I saw her first.” He managed to get a giant paw around my wrist, clamping down tight enough to make me gasp, and Jasper’s fist connected cooly with his jaw in my peripheral vision.

Farm Boy stumbled backward, a hand to his face.

“She came here for me,” Jasper replied cooly and pulled me up close, our hips together and a hand firmly on my backside. He put a palm to my face, thumb grazing my cheek and his eyes searching mine. His mouth was perfect, wide and soft and he licked his lips, making me momentarily stupid. “You’re late, Babydoll. Kept me waiting.”

“Sorry,” I mumbled and watched in flat out fucking amazement as he came at my face, pressing his mouth down over mine and tugging me hard against him. I snaked an arm around his neck to keep my feet underneath me, holding on in case everything from my chin down stopped working.

Which felt like a distinct possibility.

He tasted like expensive whiskey and vanilla.

Jasper suddenly wrenched away and knelt in front of me, head near my waist for one exhilarating second before I was heels over brain, slung over his shoulder like a sack of flour with an excellent view of his ass and of Farm Boy disappearing in the crowd, looking cheated and despondent. He set me on my feet only when we were out in the chilly air, around the corner and under a street light. I straightened my clothes and fiddled with my hair, mostly so I didn’t stare while he did the same.

“I wasn’t exactly expecting that, but it was effective.” My breath billowed from my mouth and I shivered in the cold, suddenly unsure where my jacket was and if I even wanted to go back inside to get it.

“Is that a thank you?” he chuckled, shrugging out of that grey jacket I’d been so enamored with and settling it around my shoulders, still warm, reaching out to help me smooth the hair from my face. His fingers curled around my ear and I gulped.

“Thank you.”

“Of course, but only for you. I can be quite convincing when I want to be.”

---

He took me to his fancy, mid-level apartment.

Got me trashed on gin.

We spilled secrets to one another, an eye for an eye.

I found it endlessly irritating that he didn’t seem to like boobs and felt sort of foolish when I learned why. He hated my endless pessimism and the cause of it even more. We spent most of the night arguing. He thought I was giving in too easily, railing against the shitty circumstance my life had put me into, angry that I wouldn’t accept his help. I soundly refused every single one of his advances, unwilling to spread the responsibility to people who had nothing to do with the problem while I tried not to get too disappointed over the fact that our first kiss was probably our last one.  

We fell asleep in his bed together, drunk and cuddling, which became a regularity.

---

Two years later, everything changed.

Jasper typically showed up with flowers and kisses, chock full of confidence and cocky swagger, but that afternoon he flopped empty-handed onto the faded futon that doubled as the bed in my impossibly small studio. Pulling his hair out by the roots, despondently waiting for the phone call that might change his life. I tried to tell him to stop, that his hair was one of the best parts about him and it would do him no good to yank it all out now, but he didn’t listen.

“They’re never going to go for me,” he fretted.

“Sure they will. You’re everything they want.” I tried to sound reassuring but was doing a really shitty job. Jasper knew as well as I did that I had no idea what they wanted.

“No. Riley is everything they want.” He said the name as though it was dipped in salt. “Pretty wife, three kids that look like they came in a pre-packaged box at Wal-Mart. He even has a dog named Buster. Who names their dog that, anyway?”

“Sounds boring,” I scoffed.

“To you, maybe. But to old man Cullen, it might be just what he wants. This is the first new hire he’s making outside of his immediate family and I get the feeling that the decision is going to be influenced by that. Old-fashioned would be the very first word I picked to describe him, and all his business buddies.”

I’d only heard rumors about Carlisle Cullen, the investment consultant who raised a small empire in the real estate world with his eldest son by his side. The other son was off somewhere doing something depressingly humanitarian and the two of them were well known for being nuclear and frustratingly exclusive. This was a hard club to break into and Jasper was hoping to be the first, though hope seemed to be in short supply around here.

“You really think it’s going to matter? Why don’t you get a dog and name him Max?”

Jasper shook his head gloomily. “You should have seen the look on Carlisle’s face when he meet Riley’s piece. She looks like a Stepford wife,” he spat, sounding nearly disgusted.

“And he liked that?” I hated to admit it, but I could see the merit. Wives like that made their men look far more responsible and steadfast than they often actually were. A metaphor for commitment and loyalty that many of them often failed to accomplish otherwise.

“Obviously. He could barely take his eyes off her. Completely smitten.”

“You’re sure it wasn’t just because he’s a dirty old man? Most of them are.”

Jasper shook his head at me again, eyes heavy as though he already made up the ending. “They’re looking for someone I’m not, B. This was over before it even began.”

“Well, take me with you tomorrow. I’ll be your Stepford wife.”

Jasper stared at the carpet for a moment before glancing shrewdly at me, studying my face as though he was trying to imagine me in a blonde bouffant and taffeta dress. The decision was going to be announced at the annual company Christmas party tomorrow, an event that shut down one of the fanciest restaurants in Chicago every year and usually culminated with a full page of paparazzi photos the next morning. The biggest of the big-business, rubbing elbows and pennies over a four course meal that would have taken me nearly a month to be able to afford on my own.

I wasn’t entirely enthralled with the idea of wearing heels for more than twenty minutes, but I was willing to torture myself for good food.

“You would do that?” His eyebrows crumpled, face on the verge of looking hopeful. He’d been so good to me, the singular bright spot in all the muddy mess for the last two years and I wound my fingers through his, echoing words that held so much more weight than their simplicity allowed.

“Of course. But only for you. I can be quite convincing when I want to be.”

---

Esme eventually left, packing up her notebook and still rambling about carpeting and drapes. I’d barely heard a word she’d said to me in the last hour, accepting her kiss to my cheek and standing in the entryway after she left, feeling numb and guilty and oddly triumphant.

A shadow fell across my feet as Edward appeared on the deck.

Dripping wet, hair and eyes gone dark. Looking nearly angry. I had no time to wonder why he was still here. No time to ask why he hadn’t just swum away like I’d been so sure he would, or how much of my conversation with his mother he’d heard. He stalked into the villa and pushed me up against the wall, my skull thumping hard enough to make me dizzy, and fell to his knees in front of me. Hands under the hem of my nearly dry dress.Fingers dug into my hips, thumbs dragging my underwear aside, and he had his mouth on my clit before I even knew what was going on. Sucking strongly in a steady pulsing rhythm, eyes open with a hum in his throat that lodged right up against the base of my spine.

Jesus. God.

My knees nearly gave out. Heart nearly stopped. On fire from the inside out and loving every exquisitely painful second. I gripping his hair tight in both hands and barely kept his name inside my mouth as I took a running start and straight up flung myself from that ledge that had me so terrified before.

A fall that lasted forever and was over before it had even begun.

Edward stood, looking satisfied with himself, wiping his face with his palm and using his sticky fingers to grip my chin before pressing a kiss to my mouth. Salty and sweet and still sort of painful from the bruises he gave me before sauntering out the door.

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