Chapter Eleven Coffee Interrupted
Chapter Eleven
Coffee Interrupted
I’m with Regan, taking a sip of my first honey lavender latte of the spring at the late-night coffee shop in town. We’re discussing
how to balance our flower stock against the sudden influx of online orders—that may or may not dry up at any time—when she
suddenly sets her cup down and mutters, “Well, shit.”
I turn around in my chair to see what she’s talking about. I’m expecting to see, I don’t know, Johnny doing something stupid
or maybe even that one old lady who keeps complaining to the town about the pride flag we have hanging over the shop door—but
instead find myself locking eyes with the very face I’ve been dreaming about seeing again for the last three weeks.
“Nikki?” I say, my jaw dropping open, my mantra of “hold on to the anger” flying right out the window.
Nikki stands by the door sheepishly. She’s forgone her makeup as usual, her cap pulled down low, and is in a casual hoodie
and leggings that if I had to guess probably cost more than my entire last year’s salary.
“Sorry,” she says with a little wave. “I’m not trying to ambush you.
I didn’t know you’d be in here. The shop was closed and I .
. .” Nikki walks over and I have to crane my neck to look up at her from my café seat.
I would hate being at this disadvantage—sitting while she towers over me—if she didn’t look so damn sad.
“I know you told me to go, and I tried, I did, but every time I sat down to work it felt wrong, knowing how upset you are with me and how differently you remember things. I almost called you a hundred times, but I figured I was blocked.” She shrugs, looking utterly pathetic.
“I’m not trying to stomp all over your boundaries, I swear, but if we could have a conversation . . . I want to make the book right.”
“Make the book right?!” Regan yelps, her incredulity kicking her voice up an octave or two. “So you’re both being ridiculous. Got it. Good to know.”
“I’m sorry?” Nikki says, clearly confused.
“You play off being here ‘for the book’ about as well as Annie played off not looking like a kicked puppy after you left,”
she says, even making air quotes. “For a couple of actresses, neither of you are very good at pretending.”
I turn to Regan with wide eyes. “What are you doing?” I whisper, looking back at Nikki in time to see her confusion morph
into something lighter.
“Hopefully finally getting you two dumbasses to talk,” she stage-whispers back.
“A kicked puppy?” Nikki asks, and I don’t miss the flicker of hope in her face.
I narrow my eyes. “Regan’s exaggerating. I was surprised you actually left, that’s all,” I say, afraid of what will happen
if I stop this facade of aloofness I’ve been projecting.
“Surprised?” Nikki says, like she doesn’t dare believe me.
“In my defense, you’d been acting like a fungus I couldn’t get rid of. It was jarring to have you leave without a word.” I
shoot a look at Regan. “I was not acting like a kicked puppy, though, thank you very much.”
“The irony.” Nikki squints at me, shaking her head. “Was I supposed to stop by on the way to the airport to let you know that
your wish was my command? You threw me out. You were very clear.”
“You were checking out the next day anyway!” I snap. “Which you never mentioned once.”
“Have you been looking into me?” Nikki tilts her head. “I’m going to have to talk to the woman who runs those cabins about
privacy. It’s a good thing you’re not the paparazzi.”
“It’ll be the paparazzi soon if you keep hanging around here. Eventually your luck will run out. Especially once they realize
I’m here too. Please tell me you at least haven’t been flying out of LAX?” I groan.
Regan stands abruptly. “Oops! I almost forgot! I have to run this coffee over to Johnny riiiight now.” She lifts up the to-go
coffee we ordered with ours. “Annie, I’ll catch up with you later? Good to see you, Nikki.”
I open my mouth to protest, but Nikki is already sliding into the abandoned seat. I’d think she felt happy about it too, except
for the way she’s nervously chewing on her lip. Regan disappears out the door, leaving us to our awkward silence.
“Would you have really wanted me to come say goodbye? Honestly?” Nikki asks finally. “I thought you wanted me gone.”
I look away, trying to decide the best way to handle this. The upsetting truth is that seeing Nikki here again has every nerve in my body firing simultaneously—a sudden deluge of fireworks and oxytocin floods my head and clouds my better judgment.
“Do you want a coffee?” I ask.
“If I say yes, are you going to take off when my back is turned?” She sounds genuinely concerned.
“No, but eventually the barista’s going to kick us out because you’d technically be loitering and I’m almost done with mine,”
I say. “They don’t have enough tables as it is.”
“What is it with this town and its loitering policies?” Nikki smiles and taps her fingers on the table, leaning back in her
chair. “Is it weird that I don’t trust you?”
“It’d be weirder if you did,” I say, realizing how true that is only after the words are out. She might be the one who pulled
away first, but I’m the one that severed ties completely.
“Stay?” she asks quietly, and I nod. “Good girl,” she adds before walking toward the register.
I’m glad she can’t see the way those familiar words twist inside my head and scamper through my veins, lighting every pleasure
sensor ablaze.
Did the heat just kick on in here?
It’s been a long time since Nikki’s said that to me—since anyone has—and the last time, the hundred last times, were in a
very different sort of context. She looks at me from the register, a tiny smirk pulling up one corner of her lips as if she knows exactly
what she’s done. Damn.
We weren’t exactly card-carrying members of the kink community in LA—her research for a potential role being the first and only time we actually went to a dungeon party—but we also weren’t afraid to push the boundaries at home.
Nikki found my praise kink adorable, and I found her need to take control blissful—it was the only time I could turn my brain off and just be.
Nikki might have been a trash girlfriend outside of bed, but she was a caring, careful, incredible partner in it. It’s part
of why it took me so long to leave. That connection? That level of intimacy? It’s a lightning strike that rarely happens twice.
She clears her throat and I startle, lost in thought, as she joins me again at the table. “Thank you,” she says around her
cup of black coffee.
“For what?”
“Everything,” she replies. “Especially talking to me tonight. I thought you would be hurling things at my face when you saw
that I came back.”
“Yet you interrupted me when I had a half-full cup of coffee,” I laugh. “Brave.”
“Wow, that’s a big turnaround for you.”
“Hmmm?” I ask, taking a sip.
“Calling me brave. I think in our last fight before you left LA, you called me a ‘selfish coward who wasn’t worth the period
stains on her panties.’”
“I probably could have worded that better.” I grimace, even though I stand by what I said. It felt true, at the time.
Nikki practically snarfs her coffee out her nose at my response. It triggers a coughing fit that’s frankly a little alarming until I realize it’s because she’s trying to laugh through it. I look away, fighting a smile as she pulls herself together.
“Oh my god,” she says. “I thought you were going to say sorry or something.”
The butterflies that are happily bathing in hot tubs of oxytocin in my brain quickly get to drowning. “Do you really think
you’re the one who deserves the apology?” I ask, my smile fading.
“Andy, Anne.” She sighs. “I understand there’s a lot that I don’t know about what you went through during our time on the
show, but there’s a lot of things I was dealing with too.”
“I’m sure there was,” I concede. “I’ve gotta be real with you, though, the whole humiliating and cheating on me thing makes
it kind of hard to empathize. Not to mention the Eliza situation. I might have said some mean things before I left, but I
never—”
“I didn’t cheat on you,” says, her voice going hard. “Not once.”
“Well, it was implied,” I say, picking at my nails and trying to avoid making eye contact. It’s embarrassing, laying it out there like this. “You were pretty messed up at the time. Maybe you don’t remember what it was like.”
“I don’t care if it was implied or not. I never screwed anyone else while we were together. I know my word doesn’t count for
anything with you anymore. That’s fair, but I promise you I didn’t.”
I move to interrupt her, but she doesn’t let me.
“I did get wasted way, way too much on too many things, for a lot of reasons,” she admits. “I was dealing with a lot of stuff, and I let people . . . They had this idea of me, you know? ‘For a good time, call Nikki.’ It’s why I was invited in the first place and possibly the only reason.
“I let a lot of people use me in a lot of ways those nights. I do remember, Anne, what it was really like. I’m ashamed of what I did to you. I’m ashamed of every time you saw me on some gossip site with someone else’s lips on my
skin.”
“How is that not cheating?” I ask.
She looks down at her coffee, spinning the cup in her hand before letting out a shuddering breath. My question hangs heavy
between us but I’m content to wait her out for a response.
“I don’t know,” she says quietly. “Maybe I am just making excuses by trying to force a distinction between kissing and having sex.” Nikki pierces me with her wide, honest
eyes. “That’s not what I want to do. I was messed up back then, and I’m not just talking about the drugs. I honestly believed
that if I didn’t kiss back or reciprocate the advances then I wasn’t . . . at that point my body didn’t even feel like my
own anymore, you know? Except for when I was with you. It always felt right, being with you.”