10. Ellie
CHAPTER TEN
ellie
AS DIRECTED, I WALKED back to Cream & Craft to wait for Sully, but it wasn’t until he walked in the doors ten minutes later that I realized I never told him exactly where I was.
But that thought was quickly chased away by the overwhelm of his presence, and the way his whole body pivoted toward me like a magnetic pull. His gaze landed on me, and my breath suspended.
Oh, God. I’d known I’d have to face him again—that was the whole reason I’d moved back here. But I hadn’t expected it to be so soon or so suddenly or, most importantly, before I’d gotten the chance to figure out what I was going to say to him.
“Sawyer.”
His name left my lips, a whisper, maybe a whimper—a pathetic, ridiculous sound that I was grateful he couldn’t hear, still on the opposite side of the cafe.
But something lit in his gaze, and then he was crossing the space toward me, forcing me to steel my spine, even as my pulse ticked faster.
He looked so…Sully. Good but different—changed.
Even since the night in Boston. It was clear from the hard lines on his face and his red-rimmed eyes that he was angry, but whether it was directed at me or the strange man in the corner, I had no idea.
Did he hate that I was here? That I’d invaded his…
I don’t know, territory? Had his mom already talked to him?
Was he furious about the idea that I might move into the Maple Street house?
“Are you okay?” he asked, voice low.
The question surprised me, given the look on his face. He was closer now, and his gaze raked over me—assessing. When it finally met mine, I had to clutch the back of the chair to steady myself.
The last time Sully’s eyes had clashed momentarily with mine, his gaze had been wild, his hair messy, his jaw taut. Most importantly, his hands had been on my hips while he drove inside me repeatedly, fucking me with an intensity that I’d known would ruin me.
And it had.
It had also, coincidentally, gotten me pregnant.
Oh my God, I’m pregnant with Sullivan’s child.
It had hit me before, of course. But this was different—him, here.
Me, here, but altered because his atoms, his DNA, the things that made him who he was, had become a part of me.
It was such an odd juxtaposition, feeling further away from him than I ever had while the biology of it all might say something different.
It also felt unbelievably right.
“Yeah, yeah.” I hated how not okay I sounded. “I’m good. I just need someone to help me jump start my car. But you didn’t have to come—”
“I can drive you where you need to go,” he cut in, and I frowned.
“I’m sure a jump will be fine,” I countered, and my ex-boyfriend scowled.
“Fine. Let’s go jump your car, then.” Sully, maintaining a businesslike approach to all this, reached around me, snatching my bag from where it sat on a chair. “And then you can tell me what the hell you’re doing here.”
Oh. Great. Awesome. This was going so well.
I blew a breath out between my teeth. “It’s good to see you, too, Sullivan.”
Sully’s shoulder brushed mine as he repositioned, and my stomach flipped.
And then my pulse spiked, and my blood flow changed its course.
Suddenly, my arteries were carrying blood into my heart, and my veins were carting it away.
Or something like that, something that monumental and possibly disastrous.
Most notably, though, it sank in just how unprepared I was to see him. To be this close to him again, close enough that his familiar cologne wafted around me, and his touch disarmed me.
But still, I risked meeting his gaze for a second time.
A mistake, truly.
Because there was something unhinged about it, reckless, like he was handling this just as well as I was. Which was to say…badly.
“Good is not an adjective I would use to describe how it is seeing you again, Eleanor,” he finally said, his voice so low and deep that, considering our proximity, I could practically feel the rumble in his chest.
“What adjective would you use?” I asked against my better judgment.
His jaw ticked as he stared at me, and I imagined words flooding his mind, none of which were likely in my favor.
“You know I’m not good with things like that, El.” He sounded irritated that I was making him use them—words, descriptors. “More of a numbers guy.”
“Then tell me some numbers.”
Why I was pushing him on this, I had no idea. But I needed something from him. Some sign that I wouldn’t regret coming here. Some sort of emotion that didn’t make me want to run back to California.
“Thirty-six,” he said without missing a beat.
I raised a brow.
“One thousand, nine hundred, and seventy-three,” he rattled off next.
“Oh?”
His eyes darkened a degree. “Zero.”
My breath hitched, even though I had no idea what any of this stood for.
“Do I get a translation, or do I just get to wonder what they mean?”
He rubbed his jaw and then shrugged. “You’ll figure it out, Ms. MIT.”
I groaned, but there was a hint of a smile on his face now. Even if it was tilted, more of a smirk, and only a fraction of the Sully smile I knew well. But it was something. It was everything, actually—all that I needed right now.
“You don’t have to carry my bag,” I said, gesturing to his hand curled around the handle of my worn canvas tote.
“It’s fine,” he muttered, raking a hand through his messy blond hair, which was longer than I’d ever seen it.
I really wished his indignation were a little less adorable.
At least until he said, “For the record, if you didn’t want me showing up here to help, you shouldn’t have called my goddamn brother. ”
Yeah, I’d been wondering when he was going to bring that up.
“He was the only person I knew who might be nearby, what with the proximity to campus,” I tried to explain, not wanting to mention that Theo had texted me.
Sully’s expression hardened a little, and he looked like he was biting his tongue—holding himself back from saying something—and I couldn’t decide if I wanted him to let it out or not.
Eventually, he just said, “Let’s go,” and then gestured toward the exit.
My legs were wooden as I walked across the cafe, my heart beating in odd rhythms.
He was silent behind me—an odd thing in and of itself. As we walked out the door, I felt his fingers brush against the small of my back before his hand flattened there, guiding me to the left.
His touch was just as electrifying as ever, and I unconsciously slipped away, quickening my steps now now that I saw his car parked right by the entrance.
It was too much—feeling his hands on me.
There was over a decade of memories that coincided with that touch, but there was also one night in particular that I couldn’t get out of my mind.
One night not that long ago, when his hands had been all over me.
One night that my brain had been playing on repeat for most of the summer.
One night I couldn’t afford to think about right now.
“Wow, Eleanor.” Sully’s husky voice tickled the back of my neck while I felt him purposefully falling back, putting distance between us. “With how fast you’re trying to get away from me, you’d think you weren’t just on your knees begging for—”
“Can you…not?” I stopped in my tracks and whipped around.
He lifted a brow, that charismatic smirk lifting the corner of his mouth. Something about it was off, though. “What?”
I glared. Because he knew exactly what, and I hated how flippantly he was doing it. Like that night had just been fun, casual sex that hadn’t meant anything. Like we hadn’t both been begging each other for things we couldn’t entirely give.
“Oh, are we going to pretend it didn’t happen?” he pressed, and a muscle in his jaw seemed to jump at the idea. “That I didn’t fuck you so hard you saw stars a few weeks ago?”
A humorless laugh left my lips. He had no idea how impossible that was going to be—to pretend it didn’t happen—but I just wasn’t convinced this was the time or place to bring that up.
“I assumed that was what you wanted,” I shot back. “Considering you left Boston without saying, I don’t know…goodbye?”
His lips pressed together, his smirk vanishing. “Is that why you came all the way to Minnesota? To yell at me for that?”
I shook my head while taking a step backward. “Not exactly, but I’d love to know why you just left like none of it mattered. Like I didn’t—”
I cut myself off, choking on words I shouldn’t say. A rabbit hole I shouldn’t go down. He didn’t need to know how much it had hurt to wake up alone that morning. He didn’t need to know that I wondered constantly if that night had mattered to him the way it mattered to me.
A rare flicker of green flared in his gaze. “Thirty-six, Eleanor.”
“Thirty-six?”
“The number of days since the last time I saw you,” he said, his words gruff, like they hurt to say. “In that hotel room. Thirty-six days. And zero.”
“Zero?”
Somehow, I managed to repeat the number. Somehow, I was still breathing despite the way his gaze seared into me.
“The amount of clothes you were wearing when I walked away.”
My knees grew weak, but despite that, I forced myself to take another step back, to fight the instinct to lean into him.
Sully’s hand shot out, gripping my wrist. He yanked me closer to him, too close. I thought maybe he’d had the same instinct—to eliminate the distance between us—but then a glance over my shoulder told me I’d been about to walk off the edge of the curb.
The reason didn’t really matter, though. All that mattered was that I was close enough to time out his pulse. That every breath I took was filled with cedar and amber, a distinctly Sully scent swirling in the humid August air.
“But sure, let’s say I wanted to pretend it never happened,” he murmured, an ache in his voice. I didn’t dare look at him, didn’t dare tip my gaze to meet his, so his words whispered across my hairline. “And that it didn’t matter to me.”
“Sawyer…” I drew in a shaky breath but wasn’t able to compose myself enough to respond before he was reaching around me and opening his car door.