Chapter 11 #6
He pointed to a door on the second floor. “No, I mean, I live here. My apartment is right there. Why are you in the tenant parking lot?”
Oops.
“Oh!” She reached for the ignition button. “I had no idea!” Turning the car on, she felt discombobulated, ready to flee, nerves pure electricity but firing without aim.
“Don’t do that. We’ve got about three inches on the roads and another six coming.”
“Nine inches?” she squeaked.
He smiled, biting his lips. “Something like that.”
“I can’t drive in that much snow!” she wailed, fully awake now, all of this hitting her at once.
“What were you doing out here?”
“Working.”
“Working? In the parking lot of Bilbee’s?”
“Yes.”
“Then why is your screen on The Vampire Tracker?”
Caught.
“Um… long story.”
“Come upstairs and warm up. Tell me about it.”
“I was avoiding people.”
“After that rant, I can imagine. What happened? Your personality changed suddenly.” As he bent toward the window, his breath pushed a white cloud into the car.
“I know. I feel like an idiot.”
“But why?”
“Work texts. They kept coming, and I’m under a lot of pressure. I needed to leave, and I got frustrated.”
“Work can be stressful.”
She wasn’t about to tell him that she would be fired if this deal didn’t go through.
“Plus, everyone here hates me.”
“No one hates you.”
“You do.”
“I don’t hate you, Rachel.”
“You don’t like me.”
“Can we just… talk?”
She’d been wishing to hear him say those words for five years.
“If you stay here, you’ll become a Rachelsicle.”
“My Peloton experience does not indicate that’s true.”
“I was making a popsicle joke.”
“Oh.”
“Come upstairs.”
She popped the locks and he opened the door. “Bring your bag and your laptop.”
“Why?”
“You want them freezing out here?”
“Good point.”
Once she collected everything, she climbed out of the car, her muscles screaming from being in the same position for so long. “What time is it?”
“Ten.”
“Ten!” she gasped.
“Yeah.”
“Wow.”
“How long were you out there?”
“Since before five.”
“Geez, Rachel. That’s…”
“What?”
“Weird.”
A set of stairs, steep but safe, met her as he moved ahead before her, stopping at a thick metal door, which he keyed into easily. Inside, there was a hallway with another metal door in one direction and a simple wood door in the other. He walked toward the wood door.
“You live here?”
“I do.”
“I thought you lived with your parents.”
Harsh laughter met that statement. “My mother would smother me.”
“Deanna’s great!”
“She is. She would also smother me.”
In all her time here in town, she’d never imagined that Kell had his own place, much less what it might look like. The apartment had an enormous living room with furniture neatly arranged around a soapstone wood stove, a galley kitchen cut into the open space, and three doors.
“It’s a one bedroom.”
He pointed to the first of three doors. “Closet.”
The second door. “Bedroom.”
The third. “Bathroom.”
“Yes, please!”
Kell laughed. “Make yourself at home.”
Inside the bathroom, she found a huge clawfoot tub with a plastic curtain hanging from an oval metal rod.
The room smelled of his cologne. This gave her the chance to inhale with abandon, but she wondered how smart it would really be to reach the point of hyperventilation and have him find her passed out on his bathroom floor.
Not a great end to an already awful day.
After she finished up, she came out to find him with a big glass of water in his hand.
“Here. Drink.”
“How did you know?”
“Just a guess.”
Gulping greedily, she finished it all. “Thank you.”
“Have a seat.”
A green couch with a folded wool blanket on it, with green, red, and yellow stripes, beckoned. She sat. He sat in a brown leather chair across from her.
“Your place, huh?”
“Nothing like yours, I’m sure. You live in a wall of glass, right? With a concierge and a pool and on-site spa.”
Damn.
“Good guess.”
“Not really a wild guess.”
“You think you know me that well?”
“I think you live a certain kind of life, I live a certain kind of life, and there isn’t a lot of overlap.”
“You seem to know a lot about me. Considering you’ve thwarted me every step of the way as I try to get this deal done, I assume this is oppositional research?”
“Nope. Gut instinct.”
A distinct sadness permeated the air, weird and out of place, yet… not.
Rachel was in a liminal state, hazy from taking an unexpected nap and being awoken by Kell. Maybe her brain wasn’t as rational as normal. Maybe she wasn’t firing on all cylinders.
For whatever reason, she jumped right in.
“You never heard me out.”
From the look on his face, he instantly knew what she meant.
“What was I going to hear? A bunch of excuses?”
“You were going to hear your friend explain how she never would have hurt you the way you assume she did.”
Pieces of him deflated, slowly, painfully, beautifully, right before her eyes. First, his shoulders lowered, a sudden release that made it look like he’d been carrying a boulder on them. Next, his hands dropped between his knees.
Then, his mouth, going from a tightness to a looseness that made his whole face change.
Just like that, he looked more like the old Kell than he had in all the days she’d been here.
A small laugh came out of him, a huff through his nose that she couldn’t read.
“This is crazymaking.”
“Tell me about it.”
Blinking hard, he looked torn, different emotions rippling across his face, switching from guarded to open to fierce and back.
“I don’t know how to get over this. D.C. changed me.”
“I can tell.” A lump in her throat, made half of hope, half of fear, formed instantly.
“But you – you’re here now. You’re different, too.”
“Good different or bad different?”
“Different. Just... different.”
“I am. And we have a past, like it or not, Kell. A past I’ve been trying to tell you wasn’t what you thought it was.”
Some war inside him began to leak out as his eyes flared, the light gray turning dark, the skin around his eyes infused with pain. Struggle embedded itself in his features, his muscles tensing, his breath picking up, chest expanding.
The poor guy looked so conflicted.
Good.
Conflicted was better than dug in. Conflicted meant he was wavering.
Conflicted was a sign of progress.
“There’s no way out, Rachel. It’s such a double bind. If I believe you now, I have five years of emotional grooves in me that are etched deep. Beliefs I can’t just turn off because I want to.”
“Do you want to?”
“Of course I do.”
“Really?”
“Yes. This,” he said, waving his hand between them, “would be so much easier if I could just snap my fingers and...”
“I know. I have all that, too. Maybe we can start over, though.”
“Start over? That would involve a lot of forgetting.”
“Forgiving, too,” she said softly.
“You want me to forgive you for something you say you never did?”
“No, Kell. I want us to forgive ourselves. Forgive our past selves. We’ve been living with a low-grade emotional torture all these years, letting it get in the way of whatever else we can be.
I can’t convince you of anything about our past. I’ve tried.
All I know is that I didn’t do what you think I did, I am your friend, and I want to be part of your life. ”
All the words coming out of her came from a wise place, her past self watching, wanting Kell desperately, hoping she could break through to him, get him to stand down, open his heart.
He had such a wonderful, kind heart.
“Do you know how much I wanted to hear that, Rachel? How much I’ve wished for it?”
“Then why didn’t you give me a chance in D.C.?”
“Because I was a stupid twenty-three-year-old who was nothing but a wall of disgusted shame after thinking I knew what I was doing. My year in D.C. was starting my new life. New version of me, right? I thought I was going to stand out, make an impact. That I was the king of my life.”
“You were.”
“After Alissa and John–and I thought, you–screwed me over, I couldn’t bear to be vulnerable again. You were my friend–more than any of them, in fact. I’d let you inside my inner world more than even Alissa.”
“Oh!”
“You know that moment, right before she barged in on us? When we were watching The Valhalla Stalker, and you were on the couch in your leggings and Stanford sweatshirt, and I threw a blanket on us?”
“Love You Warm,” she whispered.
He tilted his head, one corner of his mouth going up. “You do remember.”
“I can’t not remember, Kell. I’ve run through that night a million times in my mind, wondering how I could have made it all turn out differently.”
“I was close to kissing you.”
“I know.”
“But I felt like a jerk about it. I’d just dumped Alissa by text. What kind of guy kisses another woman right after doing that?”
“A guy who’s been hurt, and who has a friend who really, really wanted him to kiss her.”
They sat in silence, the emotions their conversation was evoking too big to put into words.
“You wanted me to kiss you?”
“More than anything.”
“Then I blew it.”
“Maybe not. You kissed me the other day.”
“Yes. But it wasn’t the same kiss I would have given you five years ago.”
“Tell me more about that kiss.”
“How about I show it to you?”
She smiled. “You must have a really good memory if you can recall an unfinished kiss from five years ago.”
Standing, he tapped his head. “I have a remarkable capacity for detail when it comes to wanting to be closer to you.” He closed the gap between them as Rachel stood.
“Does this mean you forgive me for whatever you think I did five years ago?”
The kiss was his answer.
And for now, that would do.
That would do just fine.
Five years of yearning and questions, desires and worries were caught in the kiss he gave her, Kell’s beard a soft, tickling addition to the already heated kiss.
His arms wrapped around her, fingers pressing between her shoulder blades, each fingertip distinct, as if trigger points in her muscles were begging for the perfect combination to unlock layers of her.
The kiss was everything. Everything. All the broken pieces of her that had done nothing wrong felt pulled together, finally whole again, questions swirling and settling, everything chaotic becoming orderly.
All of her was aligning with all of him.
Then he pulled away, pressing his forehead against hers, breathing softly, slowly, as if barely under control.
“Look. This could go in a lot of different directions right now, Rachel. I could ask you to come to bed with me. You could choose to leave, though I don’t advise it with the snowstorm.
You could sleep on the couch. I could sleep on the couch.
We could make love and have a wonderful memory, after which you leave town and we never see each other again.
Or we could make love and you could stay here.
Lots of branches, like a young tree, growing and trying to understand where it holds space. ”
“Yes,” she gasped, because she didn’t know what to say. Every possibility he just laid out was on the table.
The one that hurt to contemplate was the one where she left.
“I don’t want to do anything halfway with you.
That’s not my style. You didn’t come here to talk to me and I didn’t go out on purpose to find you.
Random happenstance led to your being here in my apartment, in my arms.” He smiled gently.
“And your lips are just too perfect not to kiss. So here’s what I propose. ”
Her heart soared at the word propose.
“Sleep.”
“What?”
“Sleep. You take the bed. I’ll take the couch. Let’s give this a night to sink in, try to absorb it, and in the light of day we’ll talk.”
“Talk.”
“Yes.”
Oh, how she wanted to do more than talk. So much more. Every word Kell said was sensible. Decent. Deliberative and sensitive.
A part of her wanted to give in to temptation. Be bold. Go wild. Throw herself at him and hope he caught her, kiss him with the crazy abandon of pent-up desire and pure instinct. As her body thrummed with barely contained impulse, she struggled to keep her voice steady.
“That sounds… good,” she said, every part of her body screaming No, that doesn’t sound good at all! The opposite!
Was she reading his expression wrong?
“You agree?”
Each breath took a century to enter her lungs, and another century to exit. Reading him was impossible. Was he being a gentleman? Taking it slow out of care?
Or trying to read her signals? Should she fling herself at him like she wanted, finally touch him and be touched, connect in a deeper way?
Too many layers of fear and confusion cluttered the space between them, so she pulled back. Played it safe.
Left this at almost.
“I do. And I’ll take the couch. Not you.”
Reaching for a familiar blanket that was across the back of his couch, she smiled as she unfolded it.
LOVE YOU WARM, it said.
“You’ll need more than that, though.” Kell left the room, walking a bit stiffly, and returned with a fluffy bed pillow and a thick down comforter.
He frowned.
“You’re a guest. You should have the more comfortable bed.”
“I’ll be fine.” She took the pillow and blanket from him. Awkwardness was setting in, and she wanted space as fast as possible. She yawned, the deep, involuntary act making him laugh and yawn, too.
“All right then. Goodnight, Rachel.” He bent down and kissed her on the forehead, disappearing into his bedroom, the door’s click as he left making her heart pound.
And other parts of her too.
They had just said no to sex.
Another almost.
But this almost didn’t feel like she had missed out on something.
Quite the opposite.
It felt like she was on the edge of something more.