Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
‘Good book?’ Elliot asked, startling her out of her reading.
She looked up at him and her heart stuttered back to life. ‘Hi,’ she whispered.
‘You’re smiling while you read,’ he said, still standing over her like he wasn’t sure if he should join her. ‘Must be a good one.’ His hair was wet from the rain, and a dark curl dripped over his forehead. Daisy yearned to push it back, but she was afraid she’d given up that privilege.
She put the diary down on the library table and stood up to meet him, feeling suddenly awkward and nervous. ‘It’s my aunt’s diary. It’s part of what I wanted to show you. Can you stay?’
‘For a bit, sure.’ He shucked off his wet coat and draped it over the back of a chair.
She blew out a sigh of relief.
‘Thanks.’
Elliot gave her another small smile and then silence settled between them as they made themselves comfortable at the table.
She’d picked one in the back corner so they wouldn’t disturb anyone, not that there were many people here.
Finals were over for most schools, so it was mainly toddlers running around after story time and some older folks browsing the shelves.
Elliot picked up a few photos and flipped through the old flower-shop ledger.
She hadn’t brought the whole box. Just a few of her best finds.
And certainly, no photos of her as a little girl in frilly dresses.
But she didn’t feel like they could get down to business until she apologized.
‘I’m sorry I’ve been avoiding you,’ she blurted and Elliot looked up in surprise.
‘Is that what you’ve been doing? We text every day.’
‘In person, I mean.’
‘Right. I did think it was odd that you had three hair appointments in one week.’
‘It’s worse than that.’ Daisy took a deep breath before confessing.
‘You get coffee at eight so I don’t go into the café until nine.
Tuesday when you came into the shop, I ran out the back door and hid in the alley until you left.
I skipped the town meeting on Thursday even though the book club was presenting their summer reading list, which I never miss. ’
Hurt flickered in his eyes. ‘It’s nice to know I wasn’t imagining it, I guess.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s okay.’
‘It’s really not.’
Color rose in his cheeks, and he looked like he wanted to say one thing and instead said another. ‘We weren’t really together,’ he said and why did hearing that hurt so damn much? ‘You don’t owe me an explanation.’
‘But we’re friends.’ Weren’t they? Had she ruined it all? ‘I mean, I want to be friends and that was a really shitty thing to do to a friend.’
‘I agree.’
Daisy winced. ‘I’m sorry.’
Elliot blew out a long sigh. ‘You could have just told me.’
‘I know.’
‘I was trying to give you space. I was trying to be respectful.’
‘I appreciate that, I just—’
‘You just what, Daisy?’ The question was clipped, his voice verging on anger. She’d never heard him like that before. ‘You just what? I’d love to know because it was really damn hard not seeing you for two weeks.’
‘It was?’
He scoffed. ‘Of course it was.’
Daisy bit down on a smile. ‘Oh.’
He looked up and caught her smiling. ‘That makes you happy?’
‘A little.’
He shook his head, his lips tipping into a rueful smile of his own. ‘I hated not seeing you. A few texts a day was not enough, Daisy. I hated it but I was trying not to…’
‘Not to what?’
‘Scare you away.’
‘Everything about this scares me,’ she confessed, her voice barely a whisper in the quiet library.
Elliot’s gaze was gentle when it met hers again. ‘I know. So, what happened? Why were you diving behind trash cans to avoid seeing me?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
He laughed. ‘Practically.’
‘I don’t know. After Beltane, I panicked…’
He pushed the wet hair back from his face. ‘I did some of my own panicking.’
‘You did?’
‘Yes. Ever since I realized you were wrong.’
‘Wrong about what?’
He put down the photo he was holding, giving her his full attention.
‘I’m not repeating old patterns.’
Daisy swallowed hard. ‘You’re not?’
‘Nope.’
‘Are you going to elaborate?’ she asked, exasperated, and Elliot smirked. The gall!
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You don’t think so?! You’re just going to tell me I’m wrong and that’s it?’
His smile grew. ‘I don’t think you’re ready for me to elaborate, Daisy. Just know this, my feelings for you are nothing like my feelings were for Leigh. This is nothing like that.’
Daisy’s throat went dry. ‘And what is this, exactly?’ she rasped.
‘Whatever you want it to be. I just like spending time with you.’
‘You just like spending time with me?’
‘Yes, I want to spend time with you, Daisy November. If that’s all right with you.’ He stared at her from across the table, his eyes dark behind his glasses, waiting for her answer. As if there was anything else she could say besides yes. But he waited anyway.
‘Yes,’ She cleared her throat. ‘It’s all right with me.’
He smirked, again. ‘Good.’
She stared at him, but he turned his attention back to the spread of documents in front of them.
Elliot turned the diary over in his hands with reverent awe. ‘This is very cool. It’s in such good condition. Where did you find it?’
She was torn between her desire to tell him all about it and her desire to kick him in the shins under the table for teasing her like this. But maybe he was right. Maybe she wasn’t ready for him to elaborate.
‘My grandmother had a box of things she’d cleared out of the shop a while ago, and this diary was in there.
It’s like it was fate for me to find it.
’ That’s how she’d been feeling, like fate or …
or … something had been reaching out to her, like she was meant to learn about her great-aunt, to fix things for her.
But all of that was a bit too crazy to admit out loud.
‘It’s certainly incredible that it ended up with you.’
‘She cannot shut up about this guy named Nathan, and I think it must be your lookalike from the photos, but I don’t have any proof of that, really. So, do you know any more about him? The guy that looks like you?’
Elliot winced. ‘I started looking through some ancestry stuff I had worked on years ago, but things got kinda chaotic at work, so I haven’t had a ton of time. He’s definitely my great-grandfather’s cousin. His name is Nathan. That’s about all I know.’
‘Nathan! So, it is him!’
He smiled at her, and she had to look away.
‘What’s going on at work? I don’t want to keep you.’
‘I needed a break. And I wanted to see you.’
Daisy couldn’t help her smile. ‘So, what’s going on?’
‘My brother’s here.’
‘Caleb?’
‘Yeah. The original contractor bailed and so I had to call in my brother. The whole project is late because of it, and he just arrived last week so I’ve been catching him up on everything.’
Had their texts been that superficial? She didn’t even know his brother was in town. She’d almost lost him as a friend, as everything. That thought had her feeling far more panicked than anything that had happened after Beltane.
She needed to get him back.
She wanted to keep him.
‘And how do you feel about your brother being here?’
‘I’d kinda rather talk about dead relatives than live ones,’ Elliot said wryly, taking off his glasses and rubbing the lenses with the bottom of his shirt to clear the drops of water left by his hair.
Daisy laughed a bit too loud and got a censoring look from an old man with a newspaper. She mouthed a quick sorry, even though that same old man had been nearly yelling across the library just a few minutes ago, wondering where the most recent edition of the paper was.
‘Dead relatives it is,’ she whispered, leaning closer as Elliot pulled out his phone to show her the ancestry app he’d been using.
‘My great-aunt has been talking a lot about Nathan in her diary.’ Their heads tipped together, and his thigh pressed against hers and every nerve ending in Daisy’s body woke up.
Hiding from him hadn’t stopped her from wanting him.
Elliot had somehow managed to wake up the part of herself she had shut down after David left.
And that part, the part that wanted to push his hair back and run her fingers through it, the part that wanted to kiss him, to taste him again, the part that wanted to feel his skin pressed against hers, to hear the sound of his pleasure and want and need taking over, that part was wide awake now.
He looked up from his phone and caught her staring. His cheeks flushed pink like he knew exactly what she was thinking about.
‘That’s very interesting,’ she said, her voice unnecessarily breathy considering Elliot had been talking about Ellis Island records.
The corner of his mouth quirked up. ‘Oh, yeah?’
Daisy gave a slight nod. Their faces were so close now she could see the fan of his eyelashes behind his glasses and the stubble growing in on his jawline.
‘I’m glad you think so,’ he said.
‘I’m glad you came,’ she said, and his smile grew.
It would be so easy to lean forward and kiss him in this dim corner of the library with the rain streaming down the window, to press her lips to his and stop pretending she didn’t have feelings for this man who’d done nothing but help her since they met.
But her emotions were still a jumbled mess, and her thoughts were even worse.
She didn’t know if she could give Elliot what he deserved, and she certainly didn’t want to hurt him again.
Elliot held her gaze a moment longer like he was waiting for her to decide.
‘You were saying?’ she said, letting her gaze return to the family tree on Elliot’s phone.
He cleared his throat. ‘Right so here’s where my great-grandfather’s family arrived but they stayed with a cousin named Nathan, who was already living here. I think that might be our guy.’
‘Incredible!’
They spent the rest of Elliot’s lunch break attempting to decode old census records and birth certificates.
They didn’t kiss, but Elliot’s leg stayed firmly pressed to hers, his foot occasionally tapping against hers when he found something exciting, their elbows knocked together as he tapped on his phone, and more than once their heads dipped close enough to touch, Elliot’s damp hair against hers.
She couldn’t help how she leaned into him, the way she craved every accidental brush of their bodies.
By the time they packed up their little corner of the library, Daisy was not thinking about the past at all. She was obsessively thinking about the present and how to have more of Elliot in it.
Daisy was falling and she didn’t know if she wanted to catch herself this time.