36. Now
THIRTY-SIX
now
The car rolls away, leaving a girl in the center of the street.
City lights halo her silhouette and hide her features. But I know her.
Lush blonde hair. Legs a tad too long for her body. The threadbare flower coat.
Ella .
If I get any closer, I’ll see the specks of warm cinnamon dusted over her nose. The silver rings around her irises that turn her eyes from ocean s to sapphires. Probably a peachy blush on the round apples of her cheeks.
Even if I don’t immediately recognize any of those gutting familiarities, some piece of me knows her. Always has, from the moment I laid eyes on her. Years after that godforsaken subway ride, my soul still snaps-to the second I see her.
Ella stands with her back to me, peering up at the Stryker & Sons billboard across the street. Her shoulders slump under an invisible weight.
When my cab deposited me on her street, our banner caught me off-guard. Dumb. I should have recognized the address sooner—after all, I’m the one who chose this block over another building four streets over.
Guilt and conceit muddle in my gin-addled mind. I feel perversely pleased that she was forced to deal with the memory of me while I spent the week wrestling her ghost. But some long-forgotten protective instinct still recoils from the notion of anything hurting her.
And that pisses me off.
Why the fuck should I care? She left me. Decimated me. And now I feel bad?
What if she sees me and bursts into tears? Or runs off screaming? My half-baked, fully-drunk plan seems more stupid by the second. I’m at her apartment ? Unannounced?
Three years after she left me ?
I can’t remember much of my decision-making process aside from my lungs crunching at the notion of calling her and never hearing back. Again.
In the months after her defection, I must have called her a thousand times. I sent texts daily, left voicemails. Until April, when I realized none of them ever displayed as “delivered,” because she had blocked my number. I followed that discovery with a week-long graduation trip/bender with Graham in Amsterdam, where—in the midst of a black-out—I deleted her information altogether .
…only to make Marco dig it all back up, now.
Why didn’t I just text her? My blurred brain doesn’t recall. I must have figured it would be better for her to reject me to my face… which now seems morbidly masochistic at best.
Or maybe you just can’t resist seeing her again .
Hasn’t it always been this way with us? I buzz around her like a moth to a flame, no matter how many times she burns my wings off.
I’m not prepared for Ella to turn around at that second. But she does.
A dart strikes me right in the throat, blocking my breath.
Dear God.
Her coat gapes open, revealing soft curves and a silky blue slip-dress. None of which match the white velvet boots stretched over her knees. She drifts closer, moving with the same sensuality that used to make me wild for her.
My eyes snag on the worn poppy-patterned overcoat—her only one, back then. My fingers twitch, recalling the feel of her bare shoulders whenever I slid the garment off them.
Her face hits me like a gut punch, ripping the air from my lungs, cramping my center. Done up for a night out, she’s breathtakingly bare, aside from crimson lips and dark wings of eyeliner. With her hair in a messy knot at the back of her head, I can trace the lines of her collarbones, her neck, her jaw.
And Jesus. It all hurts.
Her voice sends a thrill through my body, but her words scrape at the hole in my middle.
“Gray,” she murmurs, her voice breaking on the name she gave me. “What are you doing here?”