Chapter 6
It had been a week.
Which was fine. Which was, in fact, ideal.
Mr. Cross had taken my daughter's number off her like a man who was used to getting what he wanted, typed those digits into his fancy phone, saved the contact under whatever he had decided to save it under, and then did absolutely nothing.
No call, no text, not one of those passive-aggressive thinking-of-you messages a woman could screenshot for her group chat and roll her eyes at over a glass of wine. A week of nothing.
Which was perfect, to be clear.
I wouldn't have answered. I would’ve let his name sit on my screen until the call went to voicemail, and I would’ve ignored the voicemail for, on principle, three to five business days.
He would’ve had to work for any response.
He would’ve had to send a follow-up, which I would’ve also ignored, and we would’ve proceeded in this manner until he eventually gave up and I won.
That had been the plan. The plan required him to call me first.
But he hadn't called me first.
And so, instead of executing my masterful campaign of romantic disinterest, I'd spent a week in a low-grade civil war with my own brain on the subject of why a man would take a woman's number off her eight-year-old, almost kiss her at her kitchen counter, walk out of her apartment in his crooked expensive suit, and then choose silence.
There were theories. He had hated me. He had lost the phone. He had reconnected with an ex. He had died. All of these were preferable to the leading theory, which was that he had simply not thought about it again.
Sabrina, Sabrina, Sabrina, no.
I shook the thought off. I was three blocks from home with a daughter to feed, a refill to pick up, and a cat who was, as we spoke, almost certainly knocking something off a shelf out of pure ideology. I had a life. I couldn't afford distractions.
I pushed through the door of the pharmacy on Vandenberg.
The shop was warm and bright, smelling of cough drops and floor cleaner.
The muzak was a tinny corporate version of a song I'd liked when I was nineteen and couldn't now identify.
Two people were ahead of me in line — a man arguing with the pharmacist about a coupon that was either expired or never valid in the first place, and a woman in a green coat scrolling on her phone.
I joined the line and pulled out my own phone for the same reason as every other adult in a pharmacy line, which was to have somewhere to put my eyes that wasn't the man arguing about the coupon.
A reminder I'd set on my phone was on the lock screen.
Bonnie. Dr. Reyes. 22 days. I stared at the number, closed the notification, and started thumbing through nothing in particular.
Mrs. Park had texted me earlier — all good, kid eating, cat yelling at her.
I tapped a heart on it without looking too closely, because Mrs. Park's check-ins were the closest thing to a hand on my shoulder I'd had in months, and I didn't currently have the bandwidth to be touched by anything.
The man with the coupon left, swearing under his breath. The woman in the green coat moved forward.
Someone ahead of me, half-turned toward the door, asked, "Sabrina?"
I knew the voice.
I knew it before I looked up, and I had a sequence of thoughts in the space of half a breath that ran approximately as follows: No, no, no, not him! Not here. Of all the pharmacies in the city. Of all the days. Of all the times. This isn't happening. This isn't — okay, this is happening.
I looked up.
He was at the counter, half-turned toward me, holding a small white paper bag with the chain's logo. It was the same logo on the bag the pharmacist was already preparing to hand me.
He was wearing a hoodie — gray cotton, full zipper, and jeans, and, worst of all, sneakers with laces.
I'd seen Beau Cross at a black-tie auction.
I'd seen him in an expensive suit. I hadn't, at any point, mentally accounted for the existence of a hoodie in his wardrobe, and now there was one, and it was — to my outrage — he looked great.
He looked relaxed. He looked like he had been borrowed out of someone else's life and was returning it later that afternoon.
His eyes were — stop it. Sabrina, stop it.
The pharmacist behind the counter said my name. I turned to her. She had Bonnie's bag in her hand. I took it, and I didn't put it in my purse fast enough — there was a pause, half a beat, where it sat in the air between us — and Beau was looking at it.
He had, of course, seen the row of orange bottles on my kitchen counter. He had been hungover six feet from them. He wasn't going to pretend he hadn't seen them, and I wasn't going to volunteer them to him here at a chain pharmacy.
I shoved the bag into my purse and stepped to the side.
He stepped to the side.
I stepped the other way.
He stepped the other way.
He was, apparently, not leaving.
I gave up on the pretense and looked at him. "Are you stalking me, Cross?"
He held up his own white paper bag. "In a pharmacy?"
I shrugged. "It's where I'd start. Easy access to the prescription drugs."
He smiled.
The corners of his eyes moved, his shoulders dropped a quarter inch, and his face — his whole face — went somewhere I hadn't seen it go before. The polished edges went soft. He looked briefly like a man I would have wanted to know in another life, and I was furious with him for it.
He shoved both hands into the front pocket of his hoodie. "Could I walk you somewhere?"
I shouldered Bonnie's bag and started for the door without looking at him. "I'm walking home. Three blocks. You can walk if you can keep up."
I went out the door.
I didn't slow down. I wouldn't have slowed down if he had been falling behind.
I wouldn't have checked. I'd been leaving rooms before people could ask me to leave them since I was nineteen, and I hadn't — against considerable odds — lost the technique.
The technique was: Go faster than they expected, and don't look back.
He caught up to me at the end of the block.
He fell in beside me without making a thing of it, one hand holding his medicine bag, the other in his hoodie pockets, matching my pace exactly. I wasn't going to acknowledge that he had matched it.
He looked at the side of my face. "You didn't even give me a chance."
I threw him a glance and faced forward again. "It's up to you if you can keep up. Don't expect me to make up for your shortcomings."
He laughed under his breath. "I don't have shortcomings."
I bit the inside of my cheek to hold back a smile, and I lost. "Not in that hoodie, you don't."
He glanced down at himself. "What's that supposed to mean? You don't expect me to always be in a suit, do you?"
I kept my eyes on the cracked sidewalk. "No, but you can at least put in some effort."
He laughed again, longer this time. "Are you baiting me?"
I let myself grin at the sidewalk. "Maybe." I let him have a beat. "For a man who likes his drinks a specific way, I thought you'd have better style."
He turned his head to look at me. He didn't slow down. "Will you ever let that go?"
"Never." I tipped my chin up at the corner of the next block. "It's the most pompous thing I've ever heard come out of a human mouth. You're not used to the word no, are you?"
He thought about it for half a step. "Truthfully? No, I'm not."
I waited.
He continued, "That's why I like you."
I walked another four steps before I trusted my mouth to participate in this conversation. "You enjoy being around people who don't like you."
He grinned at me sideways — slow, entertained, not the polished one. "Don't worry. You'll get there very soon, Sabrina."
We were at my stoop.
I didn't know we'd reached until I was at it. Three blocks had felt like one, and the world had gotten wider around me and quieter. I was in front of my building with Bonnie's bag on my shoulder and a man in a hoodie at the curb.
I went up the bottom step. I turned.
He was at the curb, one hand still in his hoodie pocket, looking up at me. The half-step difference put my face above his.
He didn't smile. "Are you okay?"
I blinked.
It wasn't the question I'd been preparing to volley. It was an honest thing in the middle of a banter exit, and I wasn't — I was very much not — equipped for honest things at the end of three blocks in a hoodie.
"Yeah." My mouth was a fraction slow. "I'm okay."
We stared at each other.
The street kept moving around us — a kid going past on a scooter, somebody yelling at someone half a block down.
I asked it back. "Are you?"
His eyes moved off mine. His mouth went thin. The shadow stayed less than a second, and then he covered it with a smile.
He was looking somewhere over my shoulder. "Now, why wouldn't I be okay?"
I had the urge to touch his cheek.
It wasn't a decision. It wasn't a thought I had. It was something my hand was already doing while my brain was busy elsewhere — busy at the front of the building, defending the entry — and my hand made it past the fence before any of the alarms went off.
We made eye contact as my fingers reached him.
The skin at the line of his jaw was warm and rough where he hadn't shaved. He held very still, as if a bird had landed on his wrist, and he didn't want to startle it.
The pharmacy bag began to slip from my other hand.
I caught it against my chest. He had moved at the same time — his free hand landed on the bag a beat after mine, and then his other came down too, and we were holding Bonnie's prescription with four hands stacked, and a second ago, I hadn't been touching him, and now I was, very specifically, touching him.
Neither of us let go.
The bag was paper. It was small. It was pressed between my ribs and his palms. The warmth of his hands came through it. The bag moved with my breath.
"Cross."
His thumb sat on top of one of mine. "Yeah?"
"You can let go."
"I know."
He didn't. I didn't pull away.
His hand — one of them, the top one — came off the bag. Slowly. He didn't break eye contact while it moved. The back of his knuckles brushed the side of my jaw, light, deliberate, and I forgot to take the next breath.
He turned his hand.
His palm settled against the side of my face. His thumb sat at the corner of my mouth. He took his time.
I tilted my face into his palm.
I didn't decide to. My body had decided. Sabrina, Sabrina, Sabrina, no —
His pupils went wide. He started to lean in.
My brain was screaming. It had pulled the laminated list out of the drawer and was reading it aloud — He hasn't called you in a week.
You are standing on your own stoop with a pharmacy bag full of your daughter's heart medication, you have a kid who needs you whole, and you have a heart you can't afford to spend on a man whom you met just a week ago — Sabrina, don't, don't, don't —
A car horn blasted on the street behind us.
We both jolted.
His hand stayed on my face for one beat after the jolt — his thumb still at the corner of my mouth, his palm still warm — and then he pulled it back slow, like something heavy he was setting down with care.
I stepped down off the bottom step I had drifted onto.
The pharmacy bag was still between us. I reached for it. He released it. The transfer was awkward — fingers brushing fingers, the paper crinkling, neither of us looking at the other, and both of us looking at the bag.
We were both breathing too fast.
"I should go upstairs,” I whispered.
"Ok,” he said with a nod.
I turned toward the door of my building. "Cross."
"Yeah."
The paper crumpled in my hand. "If you don't leave in the next ten seconds, I'm going to do something we will both regret."
He laughed — short, surprised, and real. He stepped back from the curb. He turned.
Took two steps and then looked over his shoulder at me.
"For the record." He gave me the pharmacy smile — corners of his eyes moving, shoulders dropping a quarter inch, the polished edges going soft — and my pulse went stupid. "I wouldn't have regretted it."