Chapter Twenty-Eight
Remi
Life was funny. A few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have believed there was a possibility of Alicia walking up to me with her cheeks flushed from alcohol, and saying, “You’re sober, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you mind taking me home? I can ask Emmett, but it looks like he’s having fun—”
“No,” I interrupted with an eager break in my voice. “I’m ready to go.”
The pink of her cheeks deepened as a smile split across her face. Her amber eyes glinted. A gentle breeze could have knocked me over. I was a goner, and maybe she knew. And maybe she was gone with me.
I handed her my coat from the backseat of my SUV to drape backward across her shoulders while we waited for the engine to warm up enough to kick heat through the vents.
She nuzzled it up to her chin. I gripped her headrest to look over my shoulder as I backed up.
Within seconds we were on the dirt road that would lead us back to our place—places.
It was good to remind myself that I still didn’t know what she wanted from me. I couldn’t attach myself to her if this wasn’t what she wanted. My heart ached at the thought, but I’d survived the loss of us once. I could do it again.
“So, Hazel hates me,” she said, drawing me out of my thoughts.
I winced. “That was so fucking shitty of her.”
Alicia raised an eyebrow. “Doesn’t mean she didn’t have a point.”
“And what exactly would that point be?” I asked, my tone harsher than it should have been—I was angry at Hazel, not Alicia.
“That she has reason to be protective of you about me.”
“She refuses to acknowledge that I was an asshole to you too.”
She chewed on her lower lip, a crease formed between her brows. “You almost failed your exams?”
“I didn’t, though. This will probably shock you, but I didn’t handle our divorce well.”
“Yeah.” She turned to look out the window. “Me either.”
The conversation went dry, while my thoughts were preoccupied by a future where she’d fit me into her life.
It at once felt insurmountable to pass this distance our divorce created, and at the same time, she was so close to me.
I knew her. It was so easy to fall into these conversations, because we fit.
I just didn’t know if that was enough for her.
“Can we listen to something?” she asked, breaking the silence again.
I grabbed my phone off its dashboard mount and handed it to her. “Sure, the passcode is my birthday.”
“Oh, free access to your phone, how very brave of you.” She punched the four digits without hesitation.
“I don’t think there’s anything exciting in there that you haven’t seen before.”
“You keep your own nudes?”
“Sometimes it’s hard to get the angles right,” I admitted.
She snorted. “So true.”
Imagining her sending me nudes had me trying to discretely shift the fit of my pants. Damn sweats left nothing to the imagination.
She put my phone back on the mount, the beginning chords of Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois album began playing through the speakers. “What about the ones that are sent to you?”
My cheeks warmed. “I don’t keep them. It feels wrong if we’re not in a relationship.”
For a moment, she was silent as she tapped a finger on her armrest. “So, you don’t have mine anymore?”
The pause between her question and what should have been my denial was too long; in the silence she read my admission of guilt.
She gasped, angling toward me in her seat. “You do, don’t you?”
“I couldn’t delete them.”
“Them?! There’s more than one?”
I drove one handed with the lower half of my face hidden behind my other hand, as if it would make the embarrassment easier to manage if she couldn’t see it. “Not a weird creepy amount. I haven’t looked at them in years.”
“Oh, I have a creepy amount of you.”
I straightened, completely forgetting any of this was awkward. “You do?”
“Apparently you’re a nudes prude, so probably.”
“Is it like a full frontal, or just dick pic?”
“I’ve got you at every angle.”
Yeah, there was no hope for the pants and concealing my growing hard-on.
“Am I the only exception to your rule in here?” Her voice trailed off as if the answer was of no consequence.
“You’re the only exception everywhere.”
There was a beat of silence, before she asked in a voice barely louder than the music, “Why couldn’t you delete them?”
I wouldn’t be able to delete the Mona Lisa either, was too corny to say, but it was the first explanation that came to my mind.
There was more than naked pictures in my password protected photo album of her.
A photo of her laughing so hard I knew in real life no sound was actually coming out.
One of her rolling her eyes at me. And the last one, was of her sitting on the beach with her eyes closed as the breeze blew back her hair, the setting sun casting its rays on her skin.
The freckles on her nose the same color as her vibrant hair.
Yes, the pictures of her naked were sexy and made my body ache for her, but they revealed different elements of her as well that I couldn’t just . . . delete.
“If I showed them to you, you’d understand,” I finally said.
I turned into my driveway and parked under the carport.
The windows in our units were dark. We walked to the front porch, and I followed her up the steps.
My coat hung too big off her shoulders. I held my arms tight across my chest waiting for the fog to clear from my glasses enough to see her properly.
On the plus side, the cold had distracted my body enough that I was no longer posting a tent.
There were the muffled sounds of Furgie barking and whining behind Alicia’s door.
I leaned back against the railing as she released Furgie into the front yard.
“Aren’t you freezing?” she asked, but it couldn’t dispel the weight in the air around us.
“Yeah,” I answered.
She pulled her phone from her pocket. “Why don’t you go inside?”
Despite the cold, my palms began to sweat. But loving her in secret was killing me. I couldn’t keep skating around the truth indefinitely; I had to at least nudge us toward her knowing—toward me saying . . .
“Because you’re not in there,” I mumbled, scraping the toe of my boot at a patch of ice clinging to porch.
“Oh no,” she breathed.
My blood ran colder than the air freezing my lungs. I forced myself to look up at her, even though it felt like she’d dug my heart out of my chest with two syllables. I thought I was prepared for my heart’s potential to break, but of course I wasn’t.
Who could be?
What was the point of her flirting? Was this some elaborate revenge scheme? To convince me to open up, just to reject me in the end.
As soon as I saw her stricken face illuminated by her phone screen, all my feelings of pain and anger turned into concern. “What’s wrong? Is everyone okay?”
She tilted her head up and swallowed. “Fuckboy lawyer.”
“Fuckboy?”
“Uh, not mine. Sorry. He’s in Lansing. He’s helping me.
” Rubbing the back of her neck, she lowered her eyes back to her phone.
“He just texted me and Sadie, ‘It’s going to shit. I’m sorry, ladies.
They’re getting special permits to begin excavating before the deal is even finalized.
I’m still fighting it, but it’s not looking good. ’ ”
“So, what do we have to do?”
Her mouth hung open for a minute as if searching for words. Finally, she shrugged her arms heavy at her sides. “I need all of my signatures now.”
The quiver in her voice was torture. I ran a hand down her arm, not that I could feel it through the baggy fabric of my coat. “The permits will take a little while, right?”
“Depends on how tight they are with a judge. But I’m so close. The petition is almost there.”
Furgie climbed the stairs and shook, sending clumps of snow flying. Alicia ducked her head, and I angled my body to block her from being hit. The tap of paws on carpet registered somewhere in the back of my mind, but I was too preoccupied by the pinch of Alicia’s brows and the defeat in her eyes.
“We’ll get this figured out.” I brushed a loose strand of hair behind her ear.
“No one is more devoted, and creative, and . . . you don’t give up.
You’ll figure it out. We’re not done. We’ll get everybody rallied, and fuck .
. . I don’t know, Leese, but we’re not giving up.
Not when this means so much to you. Not when it’s the right thing to do—”
Whatever I was going to say exploded into nothingness, along with everything else I’d ever known, because Alicia’s mouth was on mine. My entire existence began and ended right there.
Her hands fisted into the hair at the base of my skull.
I took hold of her ribs and pulled her to me like I was the moon finally able to plunge into the ocean instead of pushing it away.
The taste of her, so rich in my memory and real on my tongue.
The whimper at the back of her throat. The feel of her body hot against mine. She was my entire world.