"It's fine. They'll probably leave soon. Aren't celebrities always doing weird stuff? Kanye West and T-Swizzle will get into a knife fight or something and the paparazzi will move on. Especially if you don't give them anything good to talk about."
He laughed and stepped out of the car. He opened up my door and grabbed my hand, escorting me to the elevator. "You do know that I'm not a celebrity, right?" He smiled at me.
"Right. You're just a super sexy, eligible bachelor worth 2.8 billion dollars. You're not a celebrity at all."
We stepped into the elevator.
"Yeah, I'm not worth 2.8 billion dollars." He pressed the button for his floor.
"Oh, right." Because of the divorce. His wife had gotten half his money. Hopefully he wasn't too upset about that. 1.4 billion dollars was still way too much money for one person to have.
He looked down at me and smiled. "I'm worth way more than that." He slid his card into the reader and stepped into his apartment.
"You have more than 2.8 billion dollars? That's insane, James. What on earth are you going to do with all that..." I stopped talking when I saw a huge box in the middle of his living room floor. It was at least four feet tall and six feet wide. It was wrapped in blue wrapping paper and there was a huge bow on top. There was a small box sitting on top of it, also in blue wrapping paper with a matching blue bow.
"Oh." A smile broke over his face. "I almost forgot about that. Apparently I'm going to buy you gifts with it." He walked into his living room. But I just stood in his foyer.
"James, you already got me a birthday gift. I don't need anything."
"It's not for your birthday. Besides, it's kind of for both of us." He smiled at me.
"But..."
"Oh come on. You don't even know what it is yet. If you don't like it, I'll take it back. Just open it."
I walked over to him. "I don't want you to spend your money on me. I just want to spend time with you." I stood on my tiptoes and ran my hands through his hair.
"I know." He placed a soft kiss against my lips. He picked up the small present and tapped his hand on the large box. "Please just open it."
He looked so excited. And the way he was looking at me made me excited too. I grabbed one of the folds in the wrapping paper and pulled it down. It was actually ridiculously fun to open a present this big. I pulled the paper as I walked from one side of the present to the other, and then pushed the paper out of the way.
"Is this a T.V.?" I smiled at him. I guess I had made fun of him enough so that he decided to cave in and buy one.
"Well, after this morning I wasn't really sure if you'd want to go to classes the next few days. So if we're camped out here, I thought you'd like to have a T.V. to watch. You seem to love T.V."
I laughed. "That's incredibly sweet. But you know, I have a T.V. already. I can just bring it here. Melissa won't mind. She's always at Josh's anyway."
"Yeah, but it's tiny."
"There's nothing wrong with my T.V." I laughed.
"I was going to hang it over there," he pointed to the wall across from his sofa. "And I measured and this T.V. is the perfect size for the distance between the couch and the wall. And since Rob is coming, I wanted something to watch the Giants games on. So..."
"You're adorable. I'm definitely not going to make you take back that T.V. Clearly you want it."
"But do you like it?"
"Of course I like it. It's going to be like we're in a movie theater. Thank you."
He laughed and smiled down at me. "And there's one more thing." He held out the small box. "Now, before you start protesting, it didn't even cost me anything. It's just something that I really want you to have. And after today, I think maybe now's the best time ever." He tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear.
My heart started beating really fast. It was a really small box.Is that a ring sized box?No.He said it didn't cost anything. He just said a few hours ago that he wasn't ready to get married again.
He lowered his eyebrows slightly. "Are you okay?"
"What? Yeah."
He grabbed my hand and put the box on my palm. "Open it, Penny."
