I’ll take it. “Thank you,” I say, kissing her cheek. She kisses mine back.
“I’ll see you inside.” She pats Connor’s arm before she disappears into the palace.
Connor tilts his head, and he wears that arrogant, conceited smile I know so well. He edges forward and wraps his arms around my waist. “I love you,” he says. I love you.
The words fill me more than anything else. His lips touch my forehead, and he holds me so close, and I sway with him a little, as though we’re dancing at our reception. As though we’ve already said I do.
“One day,” he breathes, “we’re going to look back and recount all that we’ve done together. And we’re going to think, goddamn we were only twenty-four.”
My eyes well. “We’re the responsible pair.”
“The ones who clean everyone’s messes.”
“The ones everyone turns to,” I add.
“The most adult, even though we’re fairly new at this.”
I laugh into a tearful smile. This is about to happen. We’re going to be together. It feels like the start of a lifetime. Any fears I ever had, any reservations, are gone. I trust that he’ll stay here, for me.
That I am more than just a chase.
“Kiss the sky with me,” Connor whispers, a beautiful smile pulling his lips, “and don’t ever come down.”
EPILOGUE
THREE MONTHS LATER
CONNOR COBALT
Hot, blinding spotlights bear down on me, my hands on either side of a glass podium. Three-hundred faces stare back. And I can’t see a single one. It’s like being supine on a hospital table, gazing at white fluorescents with no recognition of what lies beyond.
I’m not nervous. My palms aren’t clammy. The only sweat that beads my forehead derive from these lights.
The Cobalt Inc. logo rotates on a screen behind me, subsidiary names like MagNetic printed beneath. I already talked about my mother. How she had a vision for this company, the typical things everyone would expect to hear after the CEO passed, leaving her son everything.
I step out of the podium, in a suit that embodies my confidence.
One day, I’m at Penn, sitting in the front of class and turning in assignments about managerial theories. And in a flash of time, I’m here. Twenty-four-years-old. Addressing men and women twice my age about Cobalt Inc.’s newest undertaking, with no one else commanding the stage but me.
I smile, not able to see a thing. And I don’t even care. “Galileo said, ‘All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered,’” I tell the crowd. “‘The point is to discover them.’” The only one who would know how apropos that is to my life would be the girl in the very first row.
“Today, I’m going to tell you two truths.”
I walk towards the edge of the stage with certainty.
“I know women,” I say, which causes a wave of chuckling. The sex tapes are public knowledge by now. And instead of shying away from the publicity, both Rose and I have taken advantage of it—as business students would.
“And I know diamonds.” My lips rise even higher.
The Cobalt Inc. logo fades behind me.
Cobalt Diamonds replaces it.
Everyone claps, more loudly as they read the tagline: If there’s anything we know, it’s women and diamonds.
The industry my mother built was always meant to interconnect to others. Magnets, paints, gemstones—we could have started a jewelry franchise years ago, but Cobalt wasn’t a well-known name before the reality show, and we would have had to buyout another company, something we didn’t want to do.
The sex tapes have immortalized me as something far greater than I am—a dominant god that can fulfill a woman’s every fantasy—and belief has more power than anything I can ever construct myself.
It’s given a face to my mother’s company and a much bigger future.
I tell the crowd that our Director of Advertising will discuss marketing strategies. I thank them, and instead of heading backstage, I walk down the stairs to the convention floor.
My eyes adjust slowly to the darkness, but the cheering has suddenly escalated. And when I blink a few times, I realize that everyone is on their feet.
Rose included.
She claps with them, her yellow-green eyes narrowed with passion and fire. I approach her, and without a word, I hold my wife’s hand and lead her down the aisle of businessmen and women. A few people pat my shoulder on the way out.
“Diamonds,” she says with the shake of her head. I’ve been keeping this secret from her for months now. A smile lights up her face. “I’d say it’s genius, but I’m afraid of inflating your ego. It’s already hard living with Loren’s and yours together.”
I grin and lower my head to whisper in her ear, “Ladies and gentlemen, she called me a genius, and she didn’t even glare when she said it.”
She shoots me one now.
I kiss her temple and stand up straight, pushing through the double doors into the quiet hallway. Several people in suits and nametags walk around with purpose, leather binders to their chests, paying attention to us only when they recognize our faces.
I hold her by the waist and lift her hand, pointing out the large diamond on her finger, stones encased all around the band. “This was one of the first designs,” I say.
“I have a Cobalt original?”
“Yes.”
She appraises the ring on her finger, her lips rising again. “When someone asks me who I’m wearing, I’m going to say me and my husband.”
The strangeness of that appeals to me just as much as it does to her. I lift her chin so her eyes meet mine, her lipstick dark red, bolding her features. “How much time do I have left with you?” I ask her.
“All day,” she says. “I cleared my schedule.”
I frown. “You cleared your schedule?” I almost laugh. “I saw your to-do list this morning. It was five pages long.”
“I’m trying something new,” she says, touching my chest with her hands and smoothing my suit.
“And what’s that?”
“Delegation,” she says. “I have a store manager. She’s taking care of the inventory and the mindless tasks.” Rose opened a boutique with her clothes in Philadelphia, no longer under the command of a department store. She could have accepted a couple offers from them. Many people were asking for a lingerie line from Rose, the demand increasing.
She’s been designing one, but not for H&M or Saks. It’ll all go in her new store. And even though she’s given up millions of dollars in return for being a small business owner, she’s happy. I can see it in her eyes. The pressure of success and fear of failure is finally gone.
“But we do have dinner plans,” she says.
“We do?” My brows rise.
“Loren and Lily are meeting us at a restaurant a few blocks over.” Rose tucks her hair behind her ear. “I think Lily is doing better.” She nods to herself.