Chapter Four #3
I want to ask him more. And try as I might to pretend, it’s not just for the article.
But he’s already given me more than he’s given any journalist in eight years, so I don’t want to push it.
I might have been able to once, but now…
We’re not there. I don’t know if we’ll ever be there again, and the thought breaks my heart a little bit all over again.
That summer, once we got past our initial push/pull phase, we talked nonstop.
It was one of my favorite things about Dax.
I got to start with a blank page. I’d never had that before.
I’d always been known as “one of the Donavan kids” or “Charlie’s/Brooklyn’s friend.
” For the first time, with him, I got to be Sloane—just Sloane.
An unknown. I spend most of my time telling other people’s stories, and it wasn’t until I met Dax that I realized how much I wanted to tell my own.
We reach the intersection where I parked, and my steps slow to a stop. I can’t help but feel like we didn’t finish our conversation.
I have nothing left to say.
Push.
I have everything left to say.
Pull.
Dax will always feel like unfinished business. I just have to get used to it.
I jerk my head toward my old Jeep, its white paint rusting at the seams from too many Boston winters. “This is me.”
He nods, taking a step back and gesturing to the other side of the intersection. “I’m that way.”
I wonder if that’s the truth or a lie. I hate that I want it to be a lie, that I want him to have gone out of his way to spend time with me—stilted conversation or not.
“Well—” I wave awkwardly, taking a half step back.
“Sloane,” he calls, his gravelly voice wrapping around my name like a river rock worn down from years trapped in the undertow.
He closes the distance between us easily. He closes nearly all of the distance between us. My posture straightens as if struck by lightning. There’s no way he doesn’t clock the way my breath hitches at his proximity.
I tip my head back to meet his gaze, trying desperately to decipher his rapidly shifting moods. Backlit by the streetlamp, his face is all harsh angles and shadows, his expression impossible to make out.
When his hand comes between us, for a second I think he’s going to grab my chin, tip it up, aligning our mouths the way he used to. But he doesn’t. What he does instead is somehow worse.
Pinching the jacket zipper between his fingers, he slowly drags it down, his knuckle grazing along my front.
He doesn’t break eye contact the entire time, like now that he’s given himself permission to look, he’s going to fucking look.
It’s a struggle to keep my face impassive, hoping against hope he can’t hear the thundering of my heartbeat.
Pull.
The zipper snags at the bottom, and he gives it a tug so the two sides of the jacket fall open. The motion rocks me forward, our fronts almost colliding. I catch myself, resuming the minuscule distance between us. This is just our game.
Push.
His fingertips graze my collarbone, an indulgence before his hands slide under the jacket and ease it back off my shoulders.
The movement brings us closer, his front brushing mine.
The friction of my T-shirt against my skin is more erotic than it has any right to be.
It seems I’m not alone in that, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows thickly.
It’s not the cold giving me goose bumps as he guides the jacket down my arms, his touch like a match dragged too slowly along a strike pad to ignite, but the promise is there.
Dax standing this close to me, teasing me, pushing my buttons… My body’s response to him is Pavlovian, as are the words that slip out unbidden: “I cannot fucking stand you.”
It’s what I said to him before he kissed me for the first time.
It’s what I said to him again and again that summer as he infuriated and enthralled me in equal measure.
He memorized the script of our first kiss word for word the same way I did, because those rare moments when real life is better than any movie—you don’t forget that. It’s tattooed on your heart.
I cannot fucking stand you.
Stop flirting with me.
I would never.
That would be disgusting.
Completely abhorrent.
And then he’d shut me up with a kiss.
Dax’s face is still concealed in shadow, and it’s unfair because I’m certain an embarrassing, bald hope is illuminated on mine. I can’t help it.
He dips his head, his lips a ghost along my scalp. “I know,” he breathes. “Me, too.” With that, he steps back, a grin and that damned dimple hitting me like a blow to the chest. “See you around, Donavan.” He turns and jogs across the street.
He doesn’t say his line.
He… forgot.
Push.
Whatever game we were playing, it wasn’t the Getting Back Together Game, and I didn’t just tip my hand; I spilled it all over the table. It would be tragic if it weren’t so goddamn mortifying.
A slew of curses rush to the tip of my tongue, and I suck them all back in, reveling in their bitter taste. Nothing can happen with Dax, because of the very thing he’s doing right now: walking away. Like it’s nothing.
Push, push, push.
He passes beneath a streetlamp, shrugging on his jacket and flicking the hood up before disappearing into the night, looking like a goddamned music video as I’m left standing here, alone and shivering.
I’m rooted to the spot, reeling, seething, half hoping he’ll glance back.
He doesn’t.
I loose a few of my withheld curses as I let myself into my car and tug the hoodie from my back seat over my head.
It’s the one I stole from Dax three years ago, the one that no longer smells like him.
I hope my scent clings to the jacket I borrowed tonight.
Then I hope it fades, haunting him the way he haunts me.