20. Evie
EVIE
There’s a knock that comes just a few minutes after I’ve locked the front door. My first thought is that Grant forgot something, or worse, that he’s circled back to renegotiate the cheek kiss.
For all intents and purposes, it was a good date. We got along well. He paid for a nice meal at my favorite Mediterranean place. Under normal circumstances, I would’ve invited him inside. But Hazel was right; I need to be honest with myself about what’s going on here.
I’m not over what happened with Briggs. It was one spur-of-the-moment hookup, sure, but I can’t stomach being discarded like that. If Grant’s at the door now, I’ll have to explain it all to him. Right here, right now.
I had planned to do it sometime when it wouldn’t ruin a nice evening—some kinder week, over coffee, when the wound’s got a scab on it.
But when I check the peephole, I find the wound himself standing on my doormat.
He’s in a suit, tie gone, collar open. I’ve seen Briggs dressed like this on TV before, doing press at a podium after games, but it didn’t quite prepare me for the in-person version. The camera flattens him. It misses the sheer size of the man against my little entryway.
I put my forehead against the door and take one deep breath. Then I open it and cross my arms, waiting for him to explain himself.
“Hey,” he says, the corner of his mouth tipping up in a hopeful, undeserving smile.
I roll my eyes.
“You look pretty.” His gaze does a lap and comes back up. “How was your date?”
My stomach drops. “You saw that.”
“Unfortunately.”
“Oh, like you give a shit.”
“I do.” He shifts his weight. “I’ve been trying to get a hold of you.”
The nerve of it lands somewhere between fury and a small flutter in the pit of my stomach, and I hate that he can still garner the latter.
“That’s funny,” I mutter. “Thought you were gonna be heads down for a while.”
He takes the hit without flinching. “I fucked up.”
That’s not what I thought he was going to say. I had a whole speech loaded for the deflecting version of him, and now it’s useless.
“Go on, then.”
“I’m sorry for leaving like that. I hate knowing you’re pissed at me. I hate not being able to text you throughout the day. And I—” His jaw works. “I fucking hate that you went out with another guy tonight.”
“What did you expect me to do?” It comes out louder than I planned, and I don’t care. “Sit here and pine over you? I knew your ego was inflated, but that’s a brand-new level of delusional.”
“No. It’s—” He looks down the walkway, then back. “Can I come in?”
I make him wait for it. Ten drawn-out seconds while the January cold pours past him into my apartment. “Five minutes,” I say.
He steps inside. I shut the door and shrug out of my jacket, hanging it on the hook. I’m still wearing a dress underneath, a fitted black one with a square neckline and about a dozen pieces of vintage silver.
His eyes rake over my entire body. When my gaze narrows, his throat bobs.
“Eyes up, Maxwell. You’re on a timer.”
“I’m messed up over some shit tonight,” he says, “and you’re the first person I wanted to come see. I know I shouldn’t have run with my tail tucked after we hooked up. That was fucked.”
“Embarrassing, really.”
He frowns. “I’m sorry I made you feel that way.”
“Ew. Not me. You.” I point at him. “That was beyond childish.”
He chuckles roughly. “It was. When we were interrupted, everything that’s gone wrong in my life came flooding back in. I put that on you, and it wasn’t fair.”
I raise a brow. “And tonight?”
“More shit has gone wrong.” His expression is stripped of its usual defenses. “But it doesn’t make me want to run anymore. It makes me want less space between us.”
Damn him. Damn him for saying it so plainly, in my living room, while he’s wearing that suit, when I’ve spent two weeks building a very nice wall between us.
I let out a heavy sigh and head for the cushions. “You want a drink?”
“I could do one. Got an early flight.”
I retreat to the kitchen and pull down the plum wine, the fancy stuff Tomás brought me back from his trip to Connecticut. I pour two glasses and carry them over, and when he takes his, his thumb brushes the back of my hand.
I do my best not to acknowledge the current that runs straight up my arm.
He looks around the room while I settle into the opposite corner of the sofa. He’s been here exactly once before, and we sure didn’t spend that night sitting politely on a couch.
“So you regret running away?” I ask, raising a brow. “You sure you weren’t driven off by the poster of Vincent Price in my bedroom?”
He grins, that small, stubborn lift of his mustache. “Not at all.”
“Or the altar to my dead houseplants on the windowsill.” When he shakes his head, I add, “Then it must’ve been my general lack of talent in bed. Were you bored or something?”
“Definitely not that.” His finger traces the rim of the glass.
“I just got too far into my own head. Decided it’d be better if we didn’t bother trying to untangle the shit that’s up there.
You—” He stops, starts over, his voice dropping an octave.
“God, Evie. I could spend days in bed with you, and it still wouldn’t be enough. ”
The admission lands like a hit. “What is enough for you?”
“What?”
“Tonight,” I murmur, “what was the shitty thing that drove you here?”
He sets the glass on the coffee table. For a long stretch, he doesn’t say anything, and I let the silence do its work.
My dad’s the professional at this—thirty years of sitting across from people while they wait for the right combination of words to arrive.
I know enough to mimic it, even when my mouth wants to have its merry way.
“I was engaged,” he says. “Before. To Ophelia.”
I blink. “You were?”
“We had four years together. I bought her a ring. We set a date, made the venue deposit, the whole thing. She was—” He shakes his head. “She grew up here. She knew me before any of the money, before the call-up. That’s rare in my life. People who knew me first.”
“Okay,” I say quietly.
The fact that he was engaged doesn’t surprise me as much as the fact that I care.
I know Ophelia was important. I saw it in the way Murphy reacted to her, in the way she looked at the house, like she still had some claim to it.
But knowing they were once going to get married makes something inside me tighten.
He watches my face.
“I was with her when I got called up,” he says. “She was there before Charlotte and the contracts, before people knew my name.”
I nod once. “And then?”
“Two years ago, I flew home in the offseason. Zig and I were sharing a place then, this shitty condo in Summerlin I kept so he’d have somewhere stable.
He was out. His phone was on the counter, and I picked it up to order food because mine was dead.
” He’s staring at the middle distance now, somewhere over the coffee table. “There was a text thread between them.”
The room goes quiet, and I wince as the heater ticks.
“Ophelia and Ziggy,” I say so he doesn’t have to.
“The whole time I was in Charlotte doing my season, my fiancée and my little brother were—” The sentence dies.
He picks up the wine and takes a huge mouthful.
“I read every message. Tortured myself. Sat on his couch and read the entire thing top to bottom like it was going to change if I got to the end.”
I want to cross the couch to comfort him with a touch, but I resist the urge because this clearly takes a toll on him to admit out loud.
“Then what happened?”
“He came home.” He works through a heavy swallow. “I threw his phone at the wall and shattered it. Didn’t even have to say what it was about. He knew.”
“Why—why would they do that to you?”
“Don’t know. I never asked because I didn’t want an explanation.
Ziggy was always hooking up with somebody.
Girlfriends of friends, exes of exes—the lines never applied to him.
Figured he might as well fuck my fiancée, too, I guess.
We didn’t talk for a long time after that, not until my dad’s stroke. ”
“And Ophelia?”
“I broke off all contact the second I found out. Blocked her number. Called off the wedding. She was devastated, or so I hear.” He winds a hand around the back of his neck, grimacing.
“She came to the fucking game tonight. Third time she’s turned up since Ziggy passed.
I don’t know why she won’t just leave it alone. ”
“Now I really am sorry I ate her pie,” I reply, smiling as the wrinkle in his brow slowly smooths out. “That’s genuinely one of the most awful things I’ve heard. And I’ve heard a lot of bad shit in my time.”
“You would, wouldn’t you? During your career as a vampire.”
“Death care professional,” I correct.
“Mmm.” He sets the glass down and scoots closer, close enough to playfully tug a loose strand of my hair. “I’m really sorry, Evie. I’m a mess.”
“Have you ever thought about talking to someone?”
He gives me a puzzled look. “I’m talking to you.”
“I mean like a professional.”
“A therapist?”
“Well, yeah. Someone who can help you work through all these mixed-up feelings. Grief and betrayal. Infidelity and aggression.”
“Aggression?”
“I mean, you take your frustrations out on the ice, right? Like that day with the Detroit guy. I’ve seen you play when you’re angry, and it astounds me a little—how good you are at hitting things.”
“Playing angry is good for me sometimes,” he deflects, but there’s no conviction behind it. “We won tonight.”
“I know.”
His head tilts. “Yeah?”
“I checked the score about two seconds after I walked into this apartment tonight. Sue me.”
“Okay.” He laughs. “Do you know any good lawyers?”
“Maybe Grant is still around. Should I go check?”
I pretend to get up from the couch, but he catches my wrist and pulls me gently back down. I land across his lap, and his hand winds over my hip, thumb moving in one slow pass.
“That guy is a lawyer?”
“Yep, Hazel’s coworker.”
He swipes his tongue across his lower lip. “Do you like him?”
“I—” It would be easy to lie. To make Grant into more than he is, watch Briggs squirm about it. But he’s had a bad enough night without me inventing a rival. “He’s funny and charming. But . . . I don’t know.”
His hand tightens where it sits. “You don’t know, huh?”
“Is that what this is all about? You’re jealous?”
“Extremely. I’ve been thinking about nothing but your mouth since December twenty-sixth, and tonight, some stranger got to make you laugh in a parking lot. I don’t know what I would’ve done if he’d gone up these stairs with you.”
My hand comes up to his neck of its own accord, palm settling over the dahlia. His mother’s favorite flower, inked into his skin forever. Two weeks of telling myself I was finished with him, and here I am with my hand over his pulse, wanting to be let in past all that.
Still, when he leans in to kiss me, I press a finger to his lips and push him back.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I ask.
He stares into my eyes, head tilted. “Kissing a pretty girl.”
“Uh-uh. Not happening.” I untangle myself from his lap, reclaiming my corner of the couch. “I don’t hand out second chances like Halloween candy. Sorry.”
His chest heaves. “Is that so?”
“Afraid it is.”
“What if I beg?” He slides off the couch onto his knees in front of me, hands settling on either side of my thighs.
When he looks up through his lashes, he does it in a manner that should be illegal in several states.
“I can be very persuasive down here. You have personal experience with my persuading.”
Heat crawls up my neck, so I dig my nails into my palm to hold the line. “Get up.”
“That’s a no?”
“Briggs.” It comes out softer than I mean it to, so I firm it up. “You don’t get to ditch and then change your mind two weeks later. I’m not built like that.”
He gets up off his knees and sits back beside me, elbows on his thighs, nodding slowly at the carpet.
“Maybe this happened for a reason,” I say. “The interruption. All of it. It was a wake-up call for both of us.”
“I agree.” He turns his head. “Just in the other direction. I think we should give this a shot.”
“Give what a shot, exactly? Hooking up on the rare occasion you’re in town?”
“No, I—”
“Listen,” I cut in, waiting as he shifts to face me fully. “Let’s just see how it goes. You go back to Charlotte early tomorrow. I’ll be here. If we feel like texting, we text. If we don’t—”
“We will.”
“If we don’t,” I repeat, “no hard feelings.”
He looks at me for a long moment, and I brace for the argument. Instead, he nods, finishes the last of the plum wine, and carries both our glasses to the sink on his way up. Buying himself a minute.
“For the record,” he says at the door, shrugging his jacket on, “I’m going to text you tomorrow before the flight.”
He did let me in, eventually. He navigated the Vegas traffic after a win just to hand over the truth in person rather than through a screen. But one honest hour doesn’t erase the version of him that runs when things get hard.
“We’ll see how you feel.”
“Yeah,” he says, “we will.”
I turn the lock and stay there in the hush of my apartment, my palm still buzzing from the heat of his skin. I want to buy what he’s selling, I genuinely do. But in this valley, wanting a thing and trusting it to stay aren’t always compatible.