Chapter 14 You Don’t Think I Could Take Him? #2
“The migraines started around then, too, and I don’t know if it made our relationship worse or just made it harder for me to leave.
You wouldn’t believe how easy it is to lose yourself in someone else.
I let him chip away at every bit of me, and even after, I was still so desperate to keep him.
He was so convincing of his own victimhood.
I truly think he believed I was doing something to him, just by existing.
And I couldn’t see myself clearly anymore. ”
Somehow, she’d convinced herself that his tormented love for her was a good thing.
He’d acted as though she were a weed, strangling him at the root, and still, he’d refused to excise her from his life.
He’d refused to leave her. His pain—his resentment—that was true commitment.
That was love. Because what else could it be?
She’d so badly wanted someone to care for her that she let herself get lost in someone who was just as careless with her as everyone else. And when all was said and done, the only person she had to rely on was herself. Just like always.
“I was such an idiot.”
Elliot reached over Waffle’s warm body and threaded his fingers through hers, his head mere inches away. He was looking at her, his eyes bathing every inch of her face in warm light.
There’d be no way to pass off this moment as casual or accidental. He was moving with intention. The air between them thickened. The look in his eyes pressed against her skin. Her heart stopped, like it was bracing for impact.
His eye contact didn’t waver as he stared at her, his lips parting in something that wasn’t quite a smile but couldn’t be anything else. It made her nervous, this role reversal. But he looked at her like he had plans she wasn’t privy to.
“As your husband, that leaves me with only one option,” he said finally, his gaze still confidently locked on hers. “I have to fight him.”
The volume of her laugh surprised them both.
It even woke Waffle—for approximately two seconds before he promptly crashed again.
It was the look on Elliot’s face. There wasn’t an ounce of possessive machismo in it.
She knew without a shadow of a doubt he’d said it to make her laugh and to declare—in the dumbest way possible—that he was in her corner.
“Hayden is long gone,” she assured him. “The whole thing kind of exploded, and Bree’s parents announced that, moving forward, the Groff Retreat would be child-free.” She rolled her eyes at the way her poor instincts managed to topple an entire program. “But I appreciate the empty gesture.”
“Empty? You don’t think I could take him?” he teased.
His thumb trailed along the back of her hand in delicate movements. She wasn’t sure she’d ever felt so physically connected to a person by a single point of contact. Their palms were welded together, fused by the heat and pressure of the air in the truck cab.
“No, you could. His eyebrow did this waggle-thing when he corrected people’s grammar. Very punchable. And you’re surprisingly fit.”
His brows shot up. “Surprisingly? Wow.”
“It was only a surprise at first. Because of all the sweaters.” His grin overwhelmed his face while her own felt like it had been transported to the inside of an oven. “Now, I know. Not like…I don’t know know. But I know.”
“What do you know?” He was so pleased with himself, and she wanted to hide her head in Waffle’s fur. Yet somehow, she couldn’t look away for even a second.
She swallowed, her desire stirring. “You shouldn’t fish for compliments. It’s unattractive.”
“You’re not attracted to me anymore, Davis?”
“Who said I was in the first place?”
“Come on.” He smirked, not missing a beat.
This would’ve been the moment to pull their hands apart.
Instead, he turned her fingers in his, admiring them with soft eyes.
“Sometimes when you look at me, it feels like no one’s ever looked at me before.
Like I didn’t exist before I met you and you made me out of nothing…
the way you make everything out of nothing—a roof, a table, that stag sculpture in the backyard. ”
She mirrored his posture without thinking—head tilted, knees angled toward his on the other side of their fluffy companion just as his were.
“You think it’s a stag?” Lainey hadn’t known what was revealing itself from the remnants of the dead tree down by the lake, but now that he mentioned it, the animal began to take shape inside her mind.
“I just said all that, and you want to talk about my take on your sculpture?”
“I have my priorities straight,” she teased.
He smiled. “That’s one of the things I like best about you.
You have this single-minded determination.
I admire it.” Her chest tightened from the simple feeling of being recognized so clearly by another person.
“That and your freckle right here.” He brushed his thumb over the space above her lip, a hair to the right of her cupid’s bow.
“I have a freckle there?” The question sounded like a breath of air.
He nodded. “It’s ruining my life.”
Her breath caught in her throat. The heat of his gaze wrapped around her body like a silk ribbon.
No one had ever looked at her like that.
She wasn’t sure anyone had ever looked at anyone like that—with such naked want—and the longer he did, the more receiving his desire began to feel like agony.
Like when something was too good, too right, it had to hurt a little for the sake of balance.
“Why don’t you tell your friends about me?” she asked, her aching vulnerability twining each word. What am I to you? What will I have meant to you when this arrangement inevitably ends?
He adjusted his glasses with the hand that’d just been touching her face. He was buying time.
“I have.” He swallowed hard. “They already know about you…from before. They know about the woman who drove me to the gas station. And how I felt about her.”
Lainey’s heartbeat slowed to a crawl. She shouldn’t push, but she couldn’t help herself. She had to know.
“How did you feel about her?” Her heart was folding in on itself as she waited for his answer.
“Like seeing her felt like déjà vu. Like I’d met her a thousand times, even though I knew I’d never seen her before in my life, because I would’ve remembered.
Something inside me recognized her even though that wasn’t possible.
It wasn’t like I knew her, but…I knew I was supposed to know her.
And I wondered if maybe that was the point of this whole mess I’d gotten myself into.
That it was all to meet her.” He cleared his throat.
“It would be hard to explain how it all changed so quickly.”
The emotional whiplash of the last fifteen seconds knocked the wind out of her.
These were the kinds of impossibly romantic things men in old movies said about women whose greatest flaw was their propensity to faint.
She couldn’t conceive of a universe in which these words were meant for her.
But then again, it all changed so quickly, just as he’d said.
There was a palpable energy between them to be sure—he’d admitted as much—but for her, this thing was becoming so much more than a mere attraction.
There were moments when she could feel his wariness of her falling away from his limbs like late spring melt on a tree.
But would it ever be enough? Or would he always find her hard to trust?
Awareness tickled at the back of Lainey’s neck at just how thin the air was between them.
How little of it there was. She’d always prided herself on her ability to read people, but there was no telling what Elliot Hodges was thinking when his eyes dragged down her cheek with the weight of a finger, pulling all the way to her bottom lip.
Without thinking, she lifted her own hand to her mouth, pressing her index finger to the spot where he stared. She held it there, remembering the feel of his mouth against hers. Pressing down harder and harder until his tongue swept across her full lips.
She wasn’t certain anyone else possessed the capacity to admire someone the way Elliot could. Or maybe it was some alchemy between them that raised the stakes each time his eyes tangled up in hers.
The realization shot fear through her belly. He saw it, too, the moment her gaze went from heated to terrified.
“There’s that look again,” he observed.
“What look?”
“The Benihana look. The B&B look. The look you give me when you think I’m about to kiss you. It’s like your face is a slot machine, cycling through a million different feelings in seconds until you land on abject horror and completely skewer my confidence.”
Her breath solidified in her chest at the mere mention of a kiss. An intentional one this time. A premeditated one. Neither of them spoke for several seconds. Even their breaths were quiet, as if they might scare away the air if they dared to breathe too loudly.
He shattered the silence first. “Do you ever think about what would’ve happened if Forest’s Bridge didn’t exist?
” he asked. “If I was just some stupid architecture fanboy, passing through town? And you drove me in your car, and I asked for your number at a gas station? What do you think would’ve happened? ”
She looked down at their hands, knowing there were wise things she was going to say and careless things she wished she’d say. But the wise part of her never let her have nice things.
It all changed so quickly, she reminded herself.
“You would’ve been passing through town,” she replied, each inhalation deliberate work. “You’d’ve lost interest, and I would’ve become a funny anecdote for your next Hinge date.” Her laugh shook with dishonesty.
His gaze was relentless and still she couldn’t help but inch closer—a flower bending toward the sun. “I think it would be difficult to lose interest in you, Lainey,” he said, his voice holding a confidence that scared her.