Chapter 7 #2
“No. I just—” Words fail, as usual. “I think I broke something important. It’s my fault she left in the first place, and now she’s here and I don’t know how to even—”
He shoots, misses, curses softly. “You’re giving yourself too much credit.” He turns to me. “She went to Sweden because she wanted to, not because of you. That’s what smart people do, right? They chase the next big thing. They don’t let feelings run their entire show.”
“No, Dom. It was me. I may not have all your emotional intelligence, but I know how to compute a causal chain. I put my hand on her face instead of kissing her. She fled the country.”
He’s silent for a long time, just eyeing the table. “Maybe you did hurt her,” he says finally. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t fix it.”
I almost laugh. “You ever try to un-break eggs?”
He shrugs, taking another shot. “I’ve picked shells out of a few omelets in my day.” He sinks the ball, then adds, “Terrible metaphor, by the way. Audrey’s not an omelet. Or a cracked egg. She’s a whole-ass human who’s pissed at you. Big difference.”
“You’re right. This is—” I gesture vaguely at the booth where Audrey is sitting, where she’s been carefully not looking at me all night. “I don’t even know what this is. But I know I can’t fix it without explaining. And I can’t explain without—”
“Without what?”
I don’t answer. Because the end of that sentence is without her finding out what I really am. And I’m not ready to say that out loud, even to Dominic.
I pocket a ball, and it’s easy now that I’ve figured out the angles. “I don’t think she wants it fixed. She said there’s nothing complicated between us.”
Dominic straightens with a snort. “She’s angry. And she’s lying, which is even better.” He leans in. “You know what most people do when someone hurts them?”
“Move to Sweden?”
“They give up and build a bunker. Or they run the same problem in a loop, like you do. But Audrey? She’s got the fighter gene. She’s going to give you hell every day until she gets an answer she likes.”
“Or until she proves to herself she doesn’t care.” I set up for a tricky bank shot, but the angle’s off. The ball rolls uselessly along the rail. Just like every conversation I’ve had with her today.
Dominic whistles. “You’re not listening. You don’t get over people that quickly. Not the ones that matter.”
“You’ve dated every person within a ten-mile radius. I’m not sure you know what the ones-that-matter category means.” I regret it right away and wince, ready to apologize.
But Dominic just grins, unbothered. “Probably true. But that means I know a rebound from a grudge match, and she’s not here to rebound.
” He lets his gaze settle on where she’s now standing at the edge of the booth, saying something to Layla and Serena as she gestures toward the bar. “Now’s your chance. Go talk to her.”
I follow his line of sight, watching her approach the bartender with a smile. “That’s a terrible idea.”
“Probably. But you’re going to do it, anyway. Might as well be now, when you’ve got some liquid courage.”
“I don’t have liquid courage. I have liquid poor decision-making.”
“Same thing.” He gestures toward the bar. “Go. I’ll cover for you.”
“Cover for me, how? Everyone can see us.”
“I’ll create a distraction. Start a fight. Knock over a table. Something dramatic.”
“Please don’t.”
“Then go talk to her before I do something we’ll both regret.”
I set down my pool cue. Audrey is still at the bar, waiting for her drink, her back to me. The line of her shoulders. The way the dim light catches her hair.
My heart is pounding as if I’m about to defuse a bomb. Which, emotionally speaking, I might be.
I walk over before I can talk myself out of it.
“Hey.”
She stiffens. Doesn’t turn around. “Hey.”
The bartender—Jake, his name is Jake—sets her drink down, and she takes it but doesn’t move. Like she’s waiting for me to say whatever I came to say.
I have no idea what I came to say.
“I’m sorry about this,” I try. “The whole... running into each other thing. I didn’t know you’d be here. Dominic just told me to meet him here and—”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s clearly not fine.”
She turns then, finally, and looks at me.
Her eyes are a little glassy from the whiskey, her cheeks flushed pink.
This close, I can smell her perfume—the new floral one that still makes my chest ache from unfamiliarity.
But the walls she’s been hiding behind have slipped.
Not all the way, but enough that I can see the person underneath.
The person I hurt.
“You’re right,” she says. “It’s not fine.”
I wait. She takes a long sip of her drink, and I watch her throat move as she swallows. Something about that small motion—the vulnerability of it—makes it hard to breathe.
“You really hurt me, Logan.”
The words are quiet. A little slurred. But they hit like a punch to the chest.
“I know.”
“Do you?” She sets her glass down too hard.
Whiskey sloshes over the rim. “Because I spent all that time I was in Sweden trying to figure out what I did wrong. What was so awful about me that you couldn’t even—” She stops.
Presses her lips together. “I flew to another continent to get away from how you made me feel.”
Nothing. The word screams in my head. Nothing was awful about you. You were perfect. You ARE perfect.
“And now I’m back, and I have to work with you again, and I don’t—” Her voice cracks. “I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how to be in the same room with you and pretend it doesn’t still hurt.”
“Audrey—”
“I’m not asking for an explanation.” She holds up a hand. “I don’t want one. I just needed you to know. That it wasn’t nothing to me. That you… It hurt. I’m hurt. And I don’t know when that’s gonna stop being a problem for me.”
I want to tell her everything. About the panic that seized me when she leaned in.
But I can’t.
Because if I tell her the truth—that I’m a thirty-four-year-old virgin who panicked because he’d never been kissed before—she won’t be angry anymore.
She’ll be something worse. She’ll pity me.
Or she’ll realize that the person she thought was her intellectual equal is actually just a broken thing pretending to be human.
I’d rather she hate me for the wrong reason than see me clearly and leave anyway.
“I know,” I say instead. “And I’m sorry. I’ll spend the rest of my life being sorry for how I handled that night.”
For making you think you were the problem. You were never the problem.
I swallow all of it. Give her the surface apology because the real one isn’t happening.
“But we have to work together. For the next eighty-two days at least, we have to be in the same room, solving the same problems. And I’m asking—” My voice cracks. “Can we try to be friends? Or at least... not enemies. For the sake of the project. Please.”
She’s quiet for a long moment. Behind us, someone has hijacked the Bluetooth speaker, and a song I don’t recognize is playing—something with a heavy beat and lyrics about dancing with strangers.
“I’ll think about it,” she says finally.
It’s not a yes. But it’s not a no.
“OK.” I nod. “Thank you.”
She looks at me for another moment—something flickering across her face, too fast to identify—and then she pushes off the bar, grabbing her drink.
“I’m going to dance with my girls.” She pauses. “Try not to spiral while I’m gone.”
“I always spiral.”
“I know.” And there it is—the ghost of a smile. Barely there. Gone before I can be sure I saw it.
But I saw it. I saw it.
That’s the Audrey I remember. The one who used to tease me about my spiraling. Who knew all my worst habits and somehow found them endearing instead of pathetic. She’s still in there, underneath the blonde hair and the armor and the hurt I caused.
She walks away, and I let her go. But something in my chest unclenches for the first time in three months.
I’ll think about it isn’t forgiveness. It isn’t friendship. But it’s not nothing, either.
She reaches the space near the jukebox—a makeshift dance floor now—where Layla and Serena pull her in with delighted shrieks. The three of them move together, laughing, and it’s like watching her come back to life, one drink at a time, with her friends instead of with me.
It should make me happy, seeing her laugh again.
It does. And it doesn’t. Because I want to be out there with her. I want her hips under my hands, her laugh against my ear, her body close enough to feel her warmth.
But I had my chance. And I put my hand on her face like a malfunctioning traffic light. Stop. When everything in me was screaming, go.
I turn back to the bar and signal Jake. “Another whiskey.”
He pours without comment. I wrap my hands around the glass and stare at the amber liquid as if it has answers.
“That looked heavy.”
David settles onto the stool beside me, his own drink in hand. His expression is neutral—not prying, just present.
“You heard that?”
“Enough.” He takes a sip, facing the room instead of me. “I’m not going to ask what happened between you two. That’s your business.”
“Thanks.”
We sit in silence for a moment. On the dance floor, Audrey is twirling Serena in a clumsy circle, both of them laughing when they nearly crash into a table.
“But if you ever need to talk,” David says quietly. “My door’s open.” He glances at me. “I know something about carrying things you can’t explain to anyone else.”
I think about his ex-wife. His daughter. The way he shows up every single day without complaint, handling everything alone. There’s a reason he never talks about what happened—a reason the others tiptoe around it. Whatever David’s carrying, it’s heavier than he lets anyone see.
“I appreciate that.”
He nods once, finishes his whiskey, and sets the glass on the bar. “I should head out. Bedtime stories don’t read themselves, and my nanny’s hourly rate increases the later I am.” He claps a hand on my shoulder. “Get home safe, Logan.”
“Yeah. You too.”
He leaves. I stay at the bar, nursing my whiskey, watching Audrey dance.
I’ll think about it.
At least she didn’t tell me to fuck off.