Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
MEGAN: THE PAST
The Thursday coffee had become our thing without either of us officially saying so.
One hour, I’d told him the first time. That was the rule. I had a seminar at six, and a reading list a mile long and absolutely zero business turning a study break into something I looked forward to more than I should. One hour. In and out. No complications.
That was eight weeks ago.
Tonight it was past nine, the café was down to its last few customers, and neither of us had moved. The tea I’d ordered had gone cold an hour ago, and I’d drunk it anyway because touching the cup gave my hands something to do when Wyatt looked at me the way he was looking at me right now.
As if I were the most interesting thing he’d ever seen.
Stop it, I told myself. You know better than this.
I did know better. I’d known better since I was seventeen years old in a parking lot in Savannah, telling Christine I was immune to his charm while my treacherous eyes found him every single time.
I was still doing it. The only difference was that now I was doing it across a café table in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where nobody knew my name, my family’s history, or which side of the iron gate I’d grown up on.
That was supposed to make things easier, but it did not make things easier.
“You went quiet,” Wyatt said.
“I think sometimes.”
The corner of his mouth moved. “I know you do. What are you thinking about?”
You. “Nothing important.”
He leaned back in his chair and studied me with those blue eyes that had always seen more than I wanted to reveal.
“You do that thing when you’re thinking about something you don’t want to say.
Your pen stops moving, and you fix your gaze on a point about two feet to the left of where you’re actually looking. ”
I glanced down. My pen had, in fact, stopped moving. I capped it.
“I don’t do that,” I said.
“You absolutely do that.” He wasn’t smug about it—just certain, as he was about most things. Easy and unhurried, like a man who had decided something and was content to wait. “You did it in the library on Wednesday. And in class last Thursday, when Harrigan was going over the Sherman Act.”
“You were watching me during the Sherman Act?”
“I watch you a lot,” he said simply. No apology. No deflection. Just the fact, offered the same way he offered everything—straight across the table, no games.
My stomach did the thing I’d strictly forbidden it from doing.
“Wyatt—”
“I know.” He held up one hand. “I know what you’re going to say.”
“Do you?”
“You’re going to tell me we’re friends. That this is nice and you enjoy my company, but you didn’t come to Harvard to get involved with anyone. That you have a plan, and the plan doesn’t include complications, and that I’m a complication.” He tilted his head slightly. “How am I doing?”
Too well. “Reasonably accurate.”
“Thought so.” He didn’t seem bothered by it. He picked up his coffee, took a slow sip, and set it back down. “Can I tell you something?”
“You’re going to anyway.”
“Probably.” He smiled. “I think your plan has a flaw.”
“My plan doesn’t have flaws. My plans are thoroughly researched and carefully constructed.”
“I know they are. But you planned around a version of me you made up before you knew me.” He leaned forward, his forearms on the table, his eyes steady on mine.
“The version that was my sister’s brother and my family’s name and everything you spent twelve years watching from a parking lot.
You planned around that guy.” He paused.
“But that’s not who I am, Megan. And I think part of you already knows that. ”
The café was quiet enough for me to hear the rain that had started outside, tapping against the window. Someone in the kitchen dropped something metal; it clanged once, then fell silent.
I looked at him.
This was the problem with Wyatt Aldridge—the real, actual problem, the one I couldn’t neatly file under a category and manage from a safe distance.
He didn’t argue. He didn’t push. He didn’t try to talk me into anything with charm or persistence, or the easy confidence that usually came with a face like his.
He just told the truth in a quiet voice and waited.
I’d spent most of my life around people who used words to maneuver. Wyatt used them to mean something.
That’s the most dangerous kind, I thought, because manipulation could be identified. You could map it, anticipate it, and defend against it. Sincerity was harder. Sincerity slipped through the places armor wasn’t designed to cover.
I looked down at my tea, now mostly cold.
“You’re doing it again,” he said.
“Doing what?”
“Leaving.”
The observation wasn’t accusing. That somehow made it worse.
“I’m sitting right here.”
“Physically, yes.”
I hated that he was right. More than that, I hated that he’d noticed it.
The conversation had drifted somewhere dangerous without either of us explicitly steering it there. We’d started with business law and ended up discussing plans, ambition, and the quiet assumptions people built their lives around.
Worse, I’d enjoyed it.
Not because he was handsome. Not because I’d spent two years watching him from a distance in Savannah. Because talking to him felt unexpectedly easy, and easy things had always made me suspicious.
I was eighteen years old, rebuilding my life from the ground up. I had goals. I had a future. I had a carefully constructed understanding of what mattered.
Wyatt Aldridge fit into none of those categories.
That meant I should leave. Immediately.
“It’s late,” I said.
His mouth curved slightly, as if he knew exactly what I was doing and had decided not to call me on it.
“It is.”
“I have a reading list.”
“You do.”
“And you have that brief due Monday.”
“I do.”
For a moment, neither of us moved. Then he stood and reached for his jacket. “I’ll walk you back.”
I opened my mouth to tell him it wasn’t necessary. The problem was that I wanted him to.
“All right,” I said.
His smile was small. Real.
Which somehow felt like the beginning of a problem.
The rain had settled into a steady drizzle by the time we stepped outside, the kind that wasn’t worth an umbrella but still got into everything.
We walked close enough that our arms brushed every few steps, neither of us pulling away from it.
The campus was quiet, mostly empty, the kind of October night that smelled of wet leaves and something almost cold.
I didn’t say anything. He didn’t either. Somehow, the silence wasn’t uncomfortable. It never was with him, which was one of the things I’d noticed first and trusted least—how easy it was just to be near him.
Don’t, I reminded myself. You know exactly how this ends. You’ve seen it end before it started.
We reached my building, and I stopped at the bottom of the steps, turning to face him. He stopped too, close enough that I had to look up a little, the drizzle catching in his hair and on his jacket shoulders.
“Thank you for dinner,” I said. “Both times.” Then, because it was true and I’d decided a long time ago that honesty was the only currency I trusted, “I like talking to you, Wyatt.”
“I know you do.” His voice had grown quieter. “I like talking to you, too. I like talking to you more than I’ve ever liked talking to anyone else.”
The rain. The wet leaves. The empty campus.
Don’t.
“Good night,” I said.
“Megan.” He said my name the way he always said it—like it meant something, like it was a complete sentence all by itself. Then he reached up and tucked a strand of wet hair behind my ear, his fingers barely grazing my jaw, the lightest possible touch.
I stopped breathing.
“I’ve been patient,” he said quietly. “I’m good at being patient. But I want to kiss you, and I think you want me to, and I’m just going to say that plainly because I don’t know another way to talk to you.”
My heart was doing something completely unacceptable behind my ribs.
You know better, the smart part of my brain said. You know exactly how this goes. You’ve watched it from a parking lot. You’ve told yourself a hundred times. You left Savannah. You left all of it. You cannot afford to—
“Okay,” I said.
The word surprised both of us.
His smile was slow and quiet, nothing like the charming social version.
This one was real, just for me, and that made it worse somehow.
There was something he wasn’t telling me.
I’d known it for about two weeks, filed it under not my business for now because we weren’t at the stage where everything was my business, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be at that stage, so I hadn’t pushed.
But it was there. In the moments when he went quiet in a way that was different from his usual quiet—not the comfortable library silence but something tighter, more controlled.
In the way he’d deflected twice when I asked about going home for Thanksgiving.
In the way he’d looked at his phone in the café on Thursday and put it down without answering whatever he’d seen.
I noted it the way I noted everything. By then, I had my own Wyatt Aldridge catalog.
Later, I thought, watching his face in the rain. Ask him later.
He cupped my face in both hands, gently tilted my face up, and kissed me.
It wasn’t rushed or breathless. It wasn’t frantic, performative, or what I expected.
Instead, it was calm, assured, and unhurried, like a man who had settled on this place as his forever, with no plans to go anywhere.
His thumbs softly stroked my cheekbones, and I instinctively leaned into the touch before second-guessing myself.
When he pulled back, he didn’t go far. His forehead rested against mine, his eyes still closed as the rain fell around us.
“I’ve been wanting to do that since the first day of class,” he said softly.
Since the parking lot, I thought. Me too.
“Don’t read too much into it,” I said instead.
His quiet laugh warmed the space between us. “You said the same thing the first day I walked you to class.”
“And I meant it then too.”
He stepped back, still smiling, giving me room. “Good night, Megan.”
I turned, walked up the steps, and went through the door without looking back. I made it all the way to the second-floor landing before I realized I was smiling.
Oh no, I thought.
Oh no.