Chapter 6 #2
Now her thumbs were pounding the screen fit to crack it. She bared her teeth and let out a low hiss as she hit Send.
Tai,
No, thank you. Sign the form please.
Claire
A minute passed. Then two. She nearly crowed in triumph when her inbox rang again. Surely he’d seen the folly in stubbornness and signed the thing….
Claire,
This is my single condition to signing. It’s not negotiable.
Tai
Claire growled at the phone, then tucked it away in its customary nook and returned to her customers. She fumed in the frost of her fury until, from the center of her chest outward, she felt like a vampire icicle.
Fine. She would go. She would glare. He would sign the documents, and this whole thing would be over. She would be through with Tai for good. She needed this. She needed it so she no longer had to see his name on the shareholders reports, include him in emails about overhead and profits.
Maybe she wouldn’t need it if her disdain had remained as pure and icy as it had been three years ago. If seeing him at Leslie and Ryker’s party had left her unaffected by his voice, his laugh, his eyes, his refusal to tell her the whole truth when she’d risked asking one last time.
But she hadn’t been unaffected. In fact she’d remembered all over again why a sliver of her heart had wondered, back when they brainstormed musical décor and researched instrument vendors, if he saw her as she saw him. As a possibility. As someone worth knowing…deeper.
So without returning his email, at five twenty-eight she walked into the title office with her purse slung over her shoulder and a pen easily accessible in the outside pocket.
Sign and get out. Sign and get out.
He stood up from one of the lobby chairs, and he looked…
infuriating. His navy-blue suit was tailored, and he wore it with a classic white dress shirt, an eye-catching yellow tie, and a heck-ton of authority.
Even his brown dress shoes gleamed with an expensive aura.
His hair was neat and professional, and somehow, annoyingly, this contrast was the perfect reminder of how casually he’d shaken it back from his face when he emerged from underwater to talk to her in the dim cave with a snapping turtle latched onto his foot.
But the man she faced now wasn’t cave-swimming Tai.
This was fundraising Tai, who’d just spent his day among dollar signs and donor meetings.
He nodded to her, and she nodded back and hoped she looked half as confident.
She hadn’t dressed for this part. She was wearing her usual bartender’s uniform—a cap-sleeved beige button-down shirt, black jeans, and black tennis shoes.
“Hi, Claire,” came the disarming baritone.
She glared at him with the fiercest weaponized look she could wield toward one of her own kind, and it caught him off-guard just as she intended. Tai broke eye contact, a self-protective instinct.
Good. Now that she had him on the defensive, she could do this. “Do not ‘hi, Claire’ me. This is a stupid hoop you wanted me to jump through for your own satisfaction, and I’m doing it, but I’m not happy about it, so just—”
He held up both hands, palms out. “No. I wanted to talk, and you’ve blocked my number.”
“Talk about straightforward documents that can be signed via email? What, did you call your lawyer?”
“No. I’m prepared to sign everything over to you today.”
She spread her hands. “Then what is this? What do you want from me, Tai?”
“A truce,” he said.
She blinked. “Why?”
“I’ve been thinking since the bachelor party. Ryker and Leslie mean a lot to both of us, and spending the day with…everybody…” He shrugged, then latched one hand onto the back of his neck. “I made a decision three years ago that hurt you.”
She snorted.
“And I’m sorry for that, Claire. Hurting you was never okay with me.”
“So tell me why you did it. Once and for all.”
“I can’t tell you anything that’s going to satisfy you. I’ve said everything I can, and we can continue to run this circle for the next thousand years, or we can start over, be normal to each other at the wedding.”
“That’s…it? That’s all you want?”
He shrugged, but his hand tightened on the back of his neck at the same time. “What else? Not like I expect or need to be part of the gang.”
Wait… Tai knew that Ryker kept his friendship separate?
Well, of course he did. When she and Tai had fallen out, they’d still been getting to know Ryker individually, and the friend group had only just formed.
Leaving Tai out hadn’t seemed dramatic back then.
But now he’d met them all, seen their ease together.
Now he knew he’d been deliberately excluded.
And wow, that must have hurt him. She took a moment to study him, not the tailored suit and the flashy tie, but the lines around his eyes and mouth, the tension in his fingers as he kept his hand on his neck.
“If I call a truce,” she said, “then you’ll sign the papers.”
His mouth slackened for only a fraction of a moment. Then the disappointment was gone, smoothed into his same old maddening blankness of expression. “I’ll sign the papers regardless.”
“Time to prove it then.”
He motioned her to follow him. “There’s a conference room set aside for us. I called ahead.”
Of course he had. She trailed down a narrow hall after him, and they entered a room furnished with a long desk in the center, surrounded by office chairs.
The staff had produced hard copies of everything she’d emailed Tai, and the stacks lay in the center of the desk, side by side, accompanied by two black pens.
Tai tugged one pile toward himself as he sank into one of the chairs. Claire did likewise while a slow numbness spread from her core outward to her toes and fingertips. Yes, she wanted this, but it felt wrong now. No victory, only loss of what they could have had.
She focused on the documents in front of her, skimmed to make sure everything was as she’d ordered it from her lending agency. Not a word was out of place. Beside her, silent and wholly withdrawn now, Tai flipped the sheets and read as well. Around the same time, they both picked up a pen.
Tai’s signature was a bold sweep across the page, the T and the K both clear, the rest of his name more of a squiggle topped by three dots.
When he’d finished with one stack and she with the other, they traded and signed the other set.
Beside his broad pen strokes, Claire’s signature was no neater, but her looping faux-cursive looked extra feminine.
When they set down their pens, the sense of loss lifted. This was what she’d wanted, saved toward for three years. Maybe now they could move on from each other.
She glanced at Tai to find him still impassive, not a single giveaway on his face. “Thanks.”
“Of course,” he said.
“No, really. You didn’t have to agree at all, much less the same day I asked.”
“Despite making you jump through hoops?” Was that a smirk teasing one corner of his mouth? No, it couldn’t be. Anyway it was already gone, too late to analyze further.
“I…” She shook her head, tried to regain the perspective that had led her to this request in the first place.
But she didn’t know how to categorize the unlikely event that somehow, instead of convincing both of them they should maintain distance, seeing her again at the bachelor party had made Tai want the opposite.
A truce. “Maybe now that we’re not business partners anymore… I guess we could try a do-over.”
The corner of his mouth definitely moved this time. Not a smirk but maybe a smile.