ERICA #3
“Oh, it’s last names now, is it?” Hobbs’s gaze slides back to me, slow and deliberate. “Armitage.”
He lifts two fingers to his own eyes and then points them at me, an ugly little I’m watching you gesture, and even though every instinct in my body wants to bolt, I make myself stand there and take it, chin up, because flinching is a gift I’m not giving him twice in one lifetime.
He backs up, straightens his jacket one more unnecessary time, and disappears down the sidewalk without looking back. I watch him go until he turns the corner, until my shoulders finally unlock from somewhere up near my ears.
Jeremiah bends down, retrieves Great Expectations off the concrete, and brushes the cover off before he straightens up.
Then he hugs me, and suddenly I’m folded against a chest, solid and warm.
His heartbeat is going hard and fast right under my ear as his arms come around me slow and careful like I might startle if he moves too quickly.
And I realize, somewhere in the part of my brain that isn’t currently short-circuiting, that I cannot remember the last time someone hugged me like this.
This is a whole-body cocoon, and I sink into it before I decide to, and the protective shell in my chest, the shell I built a long time ago out of spite and self-preservation and plain loneliness starts to give way at the seams. Just a little.
I have been running my whole life. Restless, three steps ahead of whoever might be behind me, because stopping has never once felt safe. And for one long, unguarded minute I let myself have this.
Here, held against a man who I’ve only truly known for the better part of a week, I feel safe.
I pull back before I do something humiliating, like cry on a national landmark’s front steps.
“Are you okay?” he asks again, ducking his head to look at me properly.
“Fine,” I say, steadier this time. Mostly. The word comes out clipped and unconvincing even to me, and I’m the one saying it. My hands are still shaking. I curl them into fists so he won’t see.
“Who was that guy?”
Say something. Anything. Not the truth.
“Nobody. Just someone I used to know.”
Jeremiah’s jaw tightens, and something dark passes behind his eyes. “If he bothers you again, you tell me. I mean it. I will find him.”
“Jeremiah, it’s fine.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“No.”
It does not land convincingly.
“Because,” he says slowly, and there’s something rough at the edges of his voice now. “And I want to be very clear about this. Contrary to what hockey players’ reputations might suggest, I am not a fighter. I don’t start things. I barely finish the things other people start.”
“Okay.”
“But.” He takes a dramatic pause. “I do have cousins. A lot of cousins. And I can make a phone call right now, this second, and by tomorrow morning that man will have a very loud and very persistent Spanish-speaking presence in his life that he did not ask for and will not enjoy.”
I laugh. I don’t mean to. It just happens, a full, undignified laugh that surprises both of us, and something in my chest that’s been wound tight all morning finally lets go.
“I’m fine, Jeremiah. Really. But since you’re here, and you clearly have nothing better to do than threaten strangers on my behalf…” I nod toward the street, toward the little cart two blocks down that’s been doing brisk business all week. “You could buy me an ice cream.”
He blinks. Then grins, slow, like the sun coming up. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. I can do that.”
He falls into step beside me, presses the recovered book back into my hands, and glances back once toward the museum doors like he’s cataloguing the building itself as a threat.
Something about that, the fact that he’s still half-braced for a fight he already won, does something unhelpful to my pulse.
“Well,” Zoe says in my ear, apparently fully recovered from her signal-loss crisis and back to her regularly scheduled programming. “That was hot. Go get that gala invite. And a little somethin’ somethin’, if you know what I mean.”
“I’m turning you off now,” I mutter, and click the earpiece dead.
Jeremiah glances over. “What?”
“Uh. Seeing me like this. It must be such a turn-off.”
“Why would you say that?” He looks entirely too pleased with himself. “Damsel in distress? That’s basically catnip.”
He full-on smiles, and something about the shift, breezy and jovial after everything that just happened, does something complicated to my chest.
“I’ve got the women’s team’s Game One tonight, actually,” he says as we approach the ice cream cart. “I’m supposed to be there. You should come. As my guest.”
For one unguarded second I actually consider it, actually picture myself in the stands next to him, cheering for a team I have no personal stake in whatsoever, and it’s such a lovely picture that I have to shut it down fast before I get attached to it.
“Can’t tonight,” I say. “Girls’ trip stuff. You know how it is.”
Which is, again, technically true, in the sense that my girls and I do in fact have stuff planned for tonight.
“Ice cream, though,” I add. “I’m not turning down ice cream.”
“Ice cream it is.”