Chapter 17 #2
All ten steps of the way, I think a dozen times about just bailing. Pulling my hood up to hide my face, I look around for Steel Heel as I slide into one of the drier chairs.
“You look . . . better,” she says earnestly, perching on the edge of the seat across from me. I watch her fingers toy with her bag’s keychain, twisting it nervously.
“I don’t know that I’ve gotten there yet.” I shrug with a bit of an exaggerated grimace.
“Yeah? How have things been? What have you been up to?”
“Just a lot of resting. Been watching reruns most of this week,” I say, before I realize she’ll know that means I was avoiding answering her. Hoping to distract from that fact, I quickly add, “We’ll see how long it takes for Vin to start saying it’s my turn to take out the trash.”
Her impossibly large eyes pin me to my chair. “I thought you’d text me back.”
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“Yeah, uh. I meant to. I tried, but I just kept drafting my thoughts and deleting them.” I sigh. It’s as honest a response as I can give her. I’d thought meeting up with her would make my feelings clearer to me, to know what to say to her.
She nods, and for the first time since she got here, she drops her eyes to her hands in her lap, her long eyelashes fluttering against her cheek.
The moment stretches out between us. I’d give anything to know what she’s thinking.
“So, uh, I hear you had a fight with Clayton,” I say, just to move the topic onto literally anything. Might as well invite the elephant into the room.
I don’t know if she’s kept in contact with Clayton, if he’s spun some other tale for her and she’s all too ready to believe it.
The thought lives in the back of my mind, cloying, a self-righteous anger burning on the pain of our breakup.
Maybe I can’t call it a breakup. I’m not really sure if we were even an actual thing.
Lacey flushes and looks a little self-conscious, glancing over her shoulder. “Yeah, um, I guess it made the news. I haven’t been paying attention to how the tabloids are covering it.”
“So, does that make you the new protector of the city?” I tease, perhaps a little too meanly. I don’t think she’s the sort to take on a spotlight of valor, but maybe I just don’t know her as well as I’d like to think I do.
She shrugs, tucking her hair behind her ear. “I don’t know about that. I don’t think there’s going to be anyone my particular skillset can handle showing up.”
“Not even me?”
“I mean, I guess I could handle you.” She rolls her eyes with a little smile.
For a brief, shining second, her eyes meet mine and it all feels just so incredibly easy to be with her, to talk to her.
Then she stiffens, her cheeks turning red.
“Not like that. I just, I mean, we aren’t like, enemies, right? ”
Her teeth worry into her glossy lower lip, and I bite back on saying something as idiotic as, “We can be enemies if you want to handle me,” because I do actually, really, truly want more than that. I don’t want this thing between us to just be some passing interlude.
My hesitation to answer her draws out too long, even though it only lasts a couple seconds.
“I get that you’re mad at me right now—and you have every right to be,” Lacey says, her brows drawing together apologetically.
“I’m not mad, really, I promise. I just . . . I’ve had a lot on my mind.”
She nods, chewing her lower lip, waiting for me to tell her any of it. I don’t know where to start. The gap between us is barely more than a couple feet, but it’s a chasm of differences. All the reasons our paths should have never crossed feel overwhelmingly present.
I glance around the scattered curbside seating for any sign of Steel Heel.
As much as I’m champing at the bit to ask her when he’s showing up, I don’t want the thought of him to keep coming between us.
I think about all the times I pushed her to see him the way I did, how my impatience doubled at every tiny step forward she made.
Instead of celebrating her progress, all I could focus on was how far we had left to go.
Could I be patient enough for her that it wouldn’t ruin things?
Would it eat away at me, to keep sharing space in her heart with him, always wanting more?
Some naive, hopeful part of me wanted to believe that it would be worth it, but after everything that’s happened, I think I knew all along this was only going to end one way.
There was no reality where it was just us, tucked away in some cozy eternal Saturday afternoon, undisturbed by evil ex-boyfriends.
“I’m sorry we got in a fight,” I manage to get out, the one piece I can separate from all the other tangled feelings. “I, uh, swung by your place the other night, but you weren’t home.”
As my words are trailing off I realize maybe that was a bit creepy. I don’t know, it wasn’t that weird for us before.
Lacey just shrugs. “Oh. Um, yeah, I moved.”
“Moved?”
“Yeah, I don’t live there anymore,” she clarifies, like that’s the part I’m confused about.
“Everyone kept saying I should take some time off work after that night, and so I did, and I just kept getting all these calls and emails from everyone who wanted to know what happened, where Clayton went, and . . . I just couldn’t be there anymore, y’know? ”
This is news. I clear my throat, and venture cautiously forward. “Too many memories?”
She grimaces, shakes her head a little. “I didn’t think I could keep staying in the Steel Penthouse after what I did. I figured I’d just go, before the building manager evicted me or whatever.”
“What’d you do?”
“Oh, um. I might have uh, clipped my microphone onto him while he was monologuing,” she admits sheepishly. “It was pretty bad, I don’t know if there’s damage control left for him to do.”
I blink at her.
“And then I might have um, thrown some stuff at him, there was an explosion, I don’t know if you remember that part? Adrianna said I probably shouldn’t admit to the property damage, so just to be clear, I’m not.” She sighs, and I can’t believe I missed all that being non-lucid in the tube.
“Did you know you’re hot? Like really fucking hot?” I ask weakly, unable to come up with a more substantial reply.
She rolls her eyes. “I did, actually. Before I did the weathercast, I used to post my Pilates routines online, and I got a lot of thirsty comments.”
“Yeah, some of them are probably from me. I had notifications set up so whenever you posted a video—” I stop myself there, but it’s still too late.
She levels a look at me like that might be the weird thing that makes us awkwardly leave and never talk to each other again. I grimace, shrugging it off. She knew I was like this.
Glancing around the street one more time, I finally ask the question I’ve been avoiding. “So, if you don’t know where Clayton is, why’d you say you were meeting him?”
Lacey purses her lips together and looks away, delicately tucking some of her askew curls back behind her ear. I catch the hint of a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. “When did I say that?”
“You said you were meeting your boyfriend here.”
Lacey blinks back at me with her long eyelashes and her innocent doe eyes like she has absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. Then she fucking smiles in that diabolically evil way she does that makes me absolutely helpless to her.
Before I can put together any kind of question, a waiter steps outside and hands us menus. He places those rolled up napkin and utensils bundles between us, then glances at me and seems a little lost for a moment.
“Uh, could we get a couple of waters? Thanks,” Lacey says, redirecting his attention. He nods and leaves.
Somewhere between unbundling the napkin and looking at the flickering candle on the table between us, it occurs to me how much like a date this looks. There’s even a little bundle of flowers on the third chair that I had not noticed before.
“Oh, they usually have really good specials, I need to ask him about those when he comes back,” Lacey says as she flips over the menu and scans it. She reaches out and threads her fingers through mine, toying with my thumb absently while she reads the menu.
Hold the fuck up.
This girl has set me up. We’re on a whole ass date.
I sit back and cover my mouth, and as much of my face as I can with a hand, my cheeks heating up. That’s actually really fucking cute. I’ve been tricked. Snafued. I fell right into her trap. Oh, she can handle me any time.
“You said something a while back about never being invited out for dinner before, so . . .” She shrugs a little, then leans forward, placing her chin in her palm. “We can go someplace nicer next time, if you like. But I didn’t want to ambush you with some place that had a dress code.”
Was I upset about something?
Lacey’s dark brown eyes glint mischievously, her smile infectious. I turn her hand over in mine, tracing wandering outlines over the shapes in her palm.
Almost automatically, I lean in to murmur, “You called me your boyfriend on live TV?”
“A little premature, maybe. It’s quicker than saying, ‘that guy it’s kind of complicated with,’ ” she whispers back, like we’re sharing a secret.
I’m a little bit hoping she’ll do it again, just for me to hear it.
There’s a rosy Saturday in the red of her lower lip.
Just a second ago I couldn’t imagine a world where it would be possible, much less that easy.
I desperately, deeply, truly, madly and a few more adverbs love this girl.
She pulls away just as I’m thinking about kissing her.
“Not to like, corner you with that, if you’re not ok with it, I mean,” she mumbles, her eyes on her lap. “You don’t have to—”
“Lacey—”
She pushes on, eyes shuttered. “You mean a lot to me. I know I haven’t been doing a good job of showing that.
I haven’t felt like I could be wrong safely in a long time.
I’ve been sitting on the defensive for so long it’s become my knee-jerk reaction, and .
. . it’s not the person I want to be. I like myself better when I’m with you.
I feel like I have room to try to be better. ”
Her fingers are still tangled with mine as she sits back in her chair, taking in a deep breath after unloading all her thoughts at once. Her eyes flick to me, a little guarded after spilling her heart all over the table.
It’s a lot to take in. Honestly I was so taken by finding out we’d finally gone on our first real date, I’d forgotten anything I might have still begrudged her.
“I know you’ve been having a hard time disentangling yourself,” I say uncertainly, everything I hadn’t been willing to acknowledge in the heat of our argument, everything I owed her.
“I wanted to be supportive, but I was impatient. I just wanted you to see things the way I did already. But I wasn’t seeing how it was for you to be living in that. I’m sorry for the things I said.”
“I appreciate you saying that.” She smiles before her expression grows a little distant. I squeeze her hand reflexively. I want to reach across the table and crush her to me. Her voice tight and hushed, she says, “If you want to end things . . . I’ll respect that. I won’t push you on it.”
“You’ll be ok with that?”
Her lower lip wobbles a little as she looks away from me. She delicately brushes a finger against the side of her face I can’t see. Lacey swallows and raises her chin, gathering her confidence. “Yeah, I’ll be ok. After a while, yeah.”
“Just a while?”
She lets out a small, defeated laugh that makes me a little misty-eyed. “Yeah.”
“Damn, ok.”
“Ellis—”
“I’m just saying, I don’t think I’d ever get over you.”
“It’s not a contest,” she scoffs with a wrinkle of her nose, and half of a noise that sounds an awful lot like a laugh escapes her. I tug her hand closer until I can press a kiss to her knuckle, her palm, her wrist.
Her hand turns over against my face, her thumb toying with my lower lip as I sigh. “Yeah, but it’s you. If it was a contest, I’d totally win.”
We sit in the cool, quiet evening for several moments without saying a word. Somewhere in the last twenty minutes, the sun slipped behind the skyline and the night crept in. The darkness shrouds us as if we’re the only ones around.
The tiny tealight on the table between us flickers in the wind, its gentle glow brushing Lacey’s cheeks with warmth. “No, you wouldn’t.”