37. Buzz #2
“A man like what?” I asked, gripping the railing until the metal pressed hard into my palms.
“Not a perfect man,” Ezra said dryly. “Those are useless. Usually liars.”
I let out a breath that almost hurt.
“But a good one,” he went on. “Don’t fuck it up this time, Burns.”
I nodded once, but it was not enough. Not for what he had just handed me. Not for Lucy. “I love her,” I choked out. “I never stopped.”
“For the record, if you hurt her, I can trade you with one phone call.” He pointed at me. “I mean it.”
“I know.”
He could trade me. Without blinking. If I hurt Lucy badly enough, he would move heaven, earth, and my contract before breakfast.
He nodded once, satisfied. Then he moved past me toward the door. At the stairwell, he stopped without turning around. “And Buzz?”
“Yeah?”
“She likes the coffee.” Ezra opened the door and disappeared downstairs, leaving me alone on the terrace with the city, the string lights, and a hope so large it scared the hell out of me.
When I finally turned toward the stairwell, I saw her.
Lucy stood just inside the glass door leading back down to the mezzanine landing.
Her hand rested on the doorframe. The oversized hoodie had slipped off one shoulder. Her curls framed her face in wild, drying waves, and her glasses sat slightly crooked like she had pushed them up too many times.
For one suspended second, neither of us moved.
Her eyes searched my face. Then Lucy blinked, looked past me toward the dessert table visible through the windows below, and said, “I was checking on Frozen Bento.” She lifted her chin. “He’s a structural concern.”
A laugh broke out of me before I could stop it. “Of course,” I said. “Public safety.”
“Exactly.”
“Can’t have him losing the other ear.”
“That would make him asymmetrical.”
“Tragic.”
“Devastating to the arts.”
We stood there looking at each other, smiling like idiots in the doorway between a rooftop and the rest of our lives.
I wanted to tell her everything.
I wanted to cross the few feet between us, touch her face, and finish what we had almost started beside Betsy.
Instead, I stayed where I was. Because tonight, for the first time in years, Lucy Thomas did not look like she was trying to survive being near me. She looked like she was choosing it.
Footsteps sounded on the stairs behind her, and Bobby’s voice carried up before he appeared.
“Good news, emotionally complicated people. Vivienne says if everyone doesn’t leave in the next ten minutes, tomorrow’s wedding timeline will collapse and somehow that will be my fault.”
Lucy stepped back, the moment folding itself carefully away. “I have to be up early,” she said.
“Yeah,” I coughed. “Wedding day.”
Her smile wobbled at the edge, but held. “Wedding day.”
Downstairs, the rehearsal dinner had started its slow unraveling into goodbyes. Hugs. Last-minute reminders. Bea crying again because Lo told her she looked beautiful. Alois trying to murder anyone who made Bea cry until Bea explained, repeatedly, that happy tears were not a felony.
Frozen Bento remained by the dessert table, diminished but dignified.
Arlo caught Lucy at the bottom of the stairs and tugged lightly on the sleeve of her hoodie. “You sure you don’t want to keep the full outfit? It’s a statement.”
“We’ll see,” Lucy said.
He grinned and kissed her cheek. “Drive safe.”
“Always.”
When Lucy reached the stairs to the main floor, she glanced back.
“You parked out front?” I asked.
She nodded. “Vivienne made me move my car so the photographer could get exterior shots without my shame-mobile in the background.”
“Want me to walk you?”
“Yeah,” she said softly. “Okay.”
So I walked Lucy Thomas through North Line.
Through the warm noise of the main dining room, past the horseshoe bar gleaming under amber lights, past regulars who did double takes at the sight of Ezra Thomas’s daughter in rolled sweatpants and damp curls.
Lucy held her head high like she had planned the entire look.
Outside, the summer night wrapped around us.
Her car sat near the curb beneath a streetlamp. The air smelled like warm pavement, rain that had missed us, and the faint sweetness of flowers from the planters Arlo kept near the entrance.
“We have to be normal tomorrow,” she said.
I glanced over. “Do we?”
Her mouth twitched. “Wedding normal.”
“That’s a different category.”
“It is. It includes schedules, photos, vows, emotional fathers, and at least one crisis Vivienne will pretend she saw coming.”
“Sounds manageable.”
“You say that because you are not a bridesmaid.”
“I am a groomsman. We have responsibilities.”
Lucy looked me up and down. “You have to stand where someone tells you and not lock your knees.”
“I’ve been training my whole life.”
She looked down, then back up at me.
The streetlamp caught the brown in her eyes and turned it soft. Her hair was still a mess. Her borrowed hoodie swallowed one wrist. She looked nothing like the polished woman who had walked into wedding week determined to keep every piece of herself contained.
She looked like Lucy.
My Lucy, some reckless part of me thought.
“Thank you for tonight,” she said.
“For the ice cat transport?”
“For not making it worse.”
I nodded slowly. “That bar is on the floor, Luce.”
Her eyes warmed at the name. “Maybe,” she said. “But you cleared it.”
I slipped my hands into my pockets so I would not reach for her. “I’ll see you in the morning,” I said.
She opened her car door, then paused. “Ty?”
My heart kicked once, hard. “Yeah?”
She looked at me over the top of the door. Whatever she was going to say lived there for a second. I saw it. The shape of it. The fear. The want. The almost. Then she took a breath and changed her mind. “Don’t be late.”
I smiled, even though my chest hurt. “I won’t.”