37. Then
THIRTY-SEVEN
then
Giving Ellie a key to my apartment was obviously the most brilliant thing I’d ever done.
My day was hellish, but walking in to find my girl curled up on my couch with a pile of dark green yarn on her lap made everything better.
She looked cozy, snuggled into one of my sweatshirts. I knew from a series of adorably awkward text messages that she had started her period earlier that day. She wanted to “warn” me which would have been sort of funny if she wasn’t so earnestly worried I would be upset by it .
Just to prove a point, I made sure to pull her straight into my lap and kiss her until she wound up dropping her knitting needles on the floor.
She wouldn’t tell me what she was making with that week’s yarn, but she did tell me she had made chili for dinner. I practically ran to the kitchen—her food was by far the very best I’d ever had.
By the time she settled herself on the barstool next to mine with her usual thoughtless grace, I was already a quarter of the way into my dinner, speechless at how delicious it tasted. I did manage an appreciative groan, though.
Ellie cast her smiling eyes in my direction. “You like it?”
I swallowed and turned to her. “You’ll have to be careful,” I grunted, only partially kidding. “Or I’m going to get used to this.”
She was so damn cute, engulfed in my hoodie, frowning at me. “Chili?”
I couldn’t resist leaning over and kissing her shoulder. “No. This . You. Here with me at the end of the day.” Her eyes glowed while we looked at each other, and I finished my confession. “I love it.”
The way she beamed at me stole my breath. “So do I.”
We ate in comfortable silence for a moment. After a bite of one of her biscuits, I was truly in awe. She was so industrious—cooking, baking, knitting, writing. Always making something out of nothing.
My eyes flickered to the yarn left abandoned on my couch. “Are you ever going to tell me what you’re making?”
Her smile turned secretive. “Nope.” Then, she shot me a pointed glance. “Are you going to tell me how work was?”
Touché .
It had only taken a few weeks for her to catch on to how much I hated my internship at Stryker & Sons. And while I fastidiously avoided the topic, she made sure to ask about it as often and as innocently as she could.
I glowered at her for a moment. “It was fine . ”
She pretended to consider my reply for a moment before casting me another searching look. “‘Fine’ like ‘I had a turkey sandwich, and it was fine,’ or ‘fine’ like ‘I got bit by a shark, but they sewed my leg back on, so now I’m fine?’”
A laugh escaped me before I could help it. “Well, Stryker does have its fair share of sharks…” I pictured the other interns, all well-heeled and ruthless. “But I’d say it was more of the former than the latter.”
Ella’s face softened, but her eyes stayed sharp. Her glowing gaze traced my face. “Did you show your dad any of your sketches today?”
My gut tightened, hardening into a wad of lead. “No.”
The curt response fell out of my mouth and sat between us, sucking all of the air out of the room. Ella worried her lower lip with her teeth and turned back to her dinner, poking at it with her spoon. I watched her, noting the way her mouth tightened bit by bit until she finally blew.
“Why not?”
She asked me about the sketches before but had never probed into why I refused to show them to my father. I had a few different answers, each more pathetic than the last.
Because they aren’t good enough. Because he’ll never understand me. Because if I show him and he mocks me or dismisses me, I won’t be able to keep pretending I still have a chance at that dream .
But my dumb ass didn’t tell her any of that. Instead, I let it all well up into a seething pit of frustration and self-pity. Then I snapped at her.
“Because I don’t want to, Ella.”
She blinked at me, taken aback, then swallowed hard. The color leeched from her face. “Oh,” she murmured, then added in a sarcastic mumble, “Sorry I asked.”
“No, you’re not,” I argued. “Because this isn’t the first time you’ve asked. Why don’t you want to let this go?”
She stared for a long moment—and I got more pissed off by her scrutiny with every second that ticked past .
“Look around us,” she finally said, soft and solemn. “Your sketches are everywhere. You draw them in notebooks and on napkins. They’re hanging on your walls. There are some rolled up in your bag… You drag them all the way downtown with you every day, Gray. I don’t think I’m the one who doesn’t want to let this go.”
Correct. On all counts. Of course.
But she didn’t know how stupid I was for carrying that damn hope around with me every day. And I didn’t want her know.
“I told you to drop this,” I gritted out, glaring at her for the first time ever. “Why can’t you respect that? God knows there’s shit you won’t talk to me about, and I don’t harass you over it!”
Her stricken expression sent a burning bolt of shame through my chest. Fuck me. What am I doing?
“You’re right,” Ella relented, her voice subdued. “I’m sorry.”
She turned her face to her lap and slid from her stool, carrying her half-eaten bowl of chili into the kitchen. I watched her rinse the dish out, tension pulling at my shoulders and my neck.
As the irrational anger cooled, half a dozen explanations and apologies bubbled to the surface. I tried to sort through them and put together a coherent thought. Before I managed one, she slipped away, walking into the bedroom area and picking up her clothes.
“Ella?”
I watched in rapt dismay while she somehow changed out of my sweatshirt and into hers without revealing any more than a strip of her lower back. When she floated over to the living room instead of coming back to me, I lurched to my feet.
“Ella.”
She waved a hand over her shoulder. “It’s fine,” she lied, gathering her things into her worn leather backpack. “I’m going to go. I’m obviously making your day more stressful.”
My throat swelled as she packed her knitting away. I should have told her that she wasn’t making my day worse—that, actually, she was the only part that had given me any sort of joy .
But everything got trapped inside of me except, “You don’t have to go.”
“I think I want to,” she whispered, still not facing me. “Can I call you tomorrow?”
I didn’t know what the fuck to say. She wanted to leave. I’d never force her to stay. And it was my own fault she wanted to get away from me.
Defeated, I sighed. “Sure.”
She got all the way to the door before I caught sight of her face. Just a quick glimpse of the profile, mostly in shadows. But it was enough to see that she had tears in her eyes.
As if my day didn’t suck enough ass already .
I hadn’t slept.
Ella’s tear-stained face loomed in my memory every time I closed my eyes. I tried calling her three times before she finally sent a no-nonsense text telling me she got home safely and that she would call me back the next day.
Friday morning turned out to be fucking freezing, with an ominous veil of dark clouds and cruel gusts of wind that whipped. I got to Stryker & Sons almost forty minutes late, with a coffee stain on my tie and fingers so numb I swore they’d break off on the door handle.
Ella never called.
By 11:54 a.m., I was as jittery as a junkie, checking my phone twice a minute, debating calling her again. That’s when it appeared—a text from my father. Two lines. No debate.
Family lunch today. 1:00pm—Keens .
Son of a bitch .
1:00 p.m. Uptown meant that, at almost noon, Downtown, I was already late .
I blew out of my temporary office and hustled up two stories to the executive floor, hoping my dad was late as well. But he wasn’t ensconced in his office. In fact, according to his secretary, he hadn’t come in at all.
A troubling premonition struck me as I stood in front of his vacant desk, looking down at it and then out of the window to the gloomy view beyond.
Something was wrong.
I stuffed the feeling down, battling it back with all the reason and denial I possessed. By the time Marco and I fought our way Uptown, it was 1:17 p.m., and I realized I’d had my phone in my pocket for the whole ride, lost in the tumult of my mind.
“This fucking day,” I muttered, pulling it out as I stalked from the curb to the restaurant. Ella’s name glowed up at me, along with a text I didn’t have time to open before I found myself inside.
Just as well , I figured. I wanted to give her my full attention when we spoke, so I wouldn’t fuck everything up again.
Ironically, I felt relieved. The eerie sense of dread gripping me relented.
What a stupid asshole I was.