HATE ME SLOWER

Chapter Six: Fitting Room

IVY

"Stand still," the seamstress mutters around a mouthful of pins, and I obey, arms slightly raised, staring at my own reflection in the floor-length mirror like it belongs to someone else entirely.

The dress is beautiful. Ivory silk, structured bodice, a skirt that moves like water when I shift my weight. It should feel like a dream.

Instead it feels like a costume for a role I never auditioned for.

"You're doing the face again," Olive says from the velvet chaise in the corner, scrolling through her phone with one eyebrow raised in my direction.

"What face?"

"The 'I am currently performing calm but internally screaming' face. I know it well. You've had it since we were twelve and Mrs. Hartwell made you read your poem out loud in front of the whole class."

"I don't remember that."

"You cried for an hour afterward. I remember it very clearly."

I huff out a laugh despite myself, and the seamstress shoots me a warning look for moving. "Sorry," I murmur, holding still again.

My phone buzzes against the vanity table. A text from Ryan.

Ryan: Dress fitting going okay?

I stare at the message for a long moment, strangely touched that he thought to ask, before typing back.

Ivy: Surviving. Barely.

Ryan: That bad?

Ivy: It's a beautiful dress. I just keep forgetting why I'm wearing it.

The three dots appear, disappear, appear again. Ryan Blackwood, apparently typing and deleting a response multiple times, which is somehow both endearing and worrying.

Ryan: For what it's worth, I don't think of this as a business arrangement anymore. Haven't for a while, actually.

My heart does something complicated at that. Before I can figure out how to respond, another message follows.

Ryan: Dinner tonight? Just us. No parents, no merger talk.

I look up to find Olive watching me with naked curiosity. "Who's texting you? You're doing the blushing thing."

"I am not blushing."

"Ivy. Your whole face is red."

"It's warm in here."

"Uh-huh." She crosses to peer over my shoulder at the phone, and I'm too slow to hide it. Her eyebrows shoot up. "Dinner? Just the two of you? My brother asked you on an actual date?"

"It's not a date. We're already engaged."

"Oh, it's absolutely a date." Olive looks delighted, practically vibrating. "This is huge. Ryan Blackwood does not ask people to dinner. He tolerates meals that happen to occur in his vicinity."

Despite myself, I smile, typing back a response.

Ivy: I'd like that.

RYAN

I've booked the private room at Elara's three times in the past decade. Once for a business dinner that ended in a merger. Once for my father's sixtieth birthday. Once for a date that lasted exactly forty minutes before I realized I was comparing the woman across from me to someone else entirely and ended the evening early out of basic decency.

Tonight feels different. Tonight, the person across from me is actually the one I've been comparing everyone else to for eleven years.

"This is nice," Ivy says, glancing around the dimly lit room exposed brick, candlelight, a single wall of windows overlooking the river. "Very different from the ballroom circus we've been living in."

"I wanted one evening that wasn't about the wedding, or the merger, or our parents." I pour her a glass of wine, steadier than I feel. "Just us."

"Just us," she repeats, something soft in her voice. "I don't think we've ever actually had that. Eleven years and somehow we've never just... talked."

"We talked plenty. You called me insufferable at least four times a month."

"You earned every single one of those."

I huff out a laugh, surprising myself with how easy it feels. "Fair."

The appetizers arrive something delicate and expensive that I barely taste, too focused on the woman across from me, the candlelight catching the gold flecks in her eyes, the way she's finally let her shoulders drop from the perpetual tension she's carried since the engagement announcement.

"Can I ask you something?" she says, setting down her fork. "And I need you to actually answer honestly, not deflect."

"Okay."

"Eleven years, Ryan. All that coldness. All those one-word answers and pointed silences. Was any of it real, or was it" She hesitates, searching for the word. "Was it all just you protecting yourself?"

The question lands heavier than she probably intends. I set down my own fork, giving myself a moment to find words I've avoided finding for over a decade.

"Both," I say finally. "It was real, in the sense that the distance was deliberate. But it wasn't because I didn't care, Ivy. It was because I cared too much, and I didn't know what to do with that, so I built a wall instead."

Her breath catches softly. "Why? Why build a wall at all?"

"Because you're Noah's sister. Because for years you were barely more than a teenager and I was watching you grow up from the sidelines of my best friend's life, and it felt wrong to want anything from that. Because the easiest way to survive wanting something I couldn't have was to convince myself and you that I didn't want it at all."

The room goes quiet except for the distant murmur of the restaurant beyond the private door.

"That's the most honest you've ever been with me," Ivy says softly.

"I know." I reach across the table, hesitant, and she doesn't pull away when my fingers find hers. "I'm trying, Ivy. I know eleven years of distance doesn't undo itself in a few weeks. But I'm trying."

She's quiet for a long moment, her thumb tracing absent patterns over my knuckles, before she looks up at me with an expression that steals the air from my lungs.

"I believe you," she says. "And for what it's worth I think I stopped hating you a long time before I was willing to admit it."

IVY

The walk back to the car is slow, unhurried, neither of us in any rush to end the evening. The city hums around us, distant traffic and laughter from a bar down the block, the air cool enough that Ryan drapes his jacket over my shoulders without either of us commenting on it this time.

"Thank you for tonight," I say as we reach the car. "I needed this. Needed to remember there's an actual person underneath all the business talk and family obligation."

"There's always been a person underneath it, Ivy. I just never let you see him."

He's close now closer than the conversation requires, close enough that I can see the flecks of gold in his dark eyes, close enough that my heart is doing something frantic and unfamiliar in my chest.

"Ryan," I whisper.

"Tell me to stop," he says, voice rough, "and I will."

I don't tell him to stop.

His hand comes up to cradle my jaw, achingly gentle for someone with such a reputation for coldness, and when he finally closes the distance between us, the kiss is slow and searching, eleven years of careful restraint unraveling in the space of a single breath.

I melt into him without meaning to, my hands fisting in the front of his shirt, and he makes a low sound against my mouth that sends heat pooling through every inch of me. His other hand slides to my waist, pulling me flush against him, and for one dizzying moment, the entire world narrows down to the taste of wine on his lips and the steady thunder of his heartbeat beneath my palm.

When we finally break apart, both of us breathing unsteadily, he rests his forehead against mine, eyes still closed.

"Eleven years," he murmurs. "Eleven years I told myself I'd never do that."

"And now?" I ask, breathless.

He opens his eyes, and what I see there steals whatever remained of my composure.

"Now I don't know how I survived this long without it."

To be continued in Chapter Seven...