10. Erik
Erik
She comes out of her door like she’s won an argument with it.
Coat half on. Bag swinging. She hits the sidewalk and turns toward the coffee place without breaking stride, and I watch her go from the curb with my helmet still on.
Nobody needs to know I’ve been around the block twice already.
I give her a lead. Far enough that following her doesn’t look like following her.
She’s at the counter by the time I reach the window, and I don’t have to hear it to know the order — the seasonal one’s done, so it’s back to the mint mocha, and she’ll take the table by the window because she always takes the table by the window.
She takes the table by the window.
I go in, get a coffee I don’t want, find a seat far enough back that she won’t notice me and close enough that I’ll catch it if she starts talking to herself.
She will.
She lasts maybe thirty seconds before something comes out of her coat pocket. Small. Folded. She reads it, puts it face down, makes it four more seconds, and reaches for it again.
I look at my coffee so I don’t look at her.
She grumbles at the paper.
I’m smiling before I decide to. Three years and she still doesn’t know she does that — argues out loud with objects, and loses horribly.
Then someone stops at her table.
I keep my eyes on her. I always keep my eyes on her — it’s the one thing my body does without asking, and a man standing over her table doesn’t change it. So I get the back of him in pieces. Tall. Broad. Blond. The easy stance of a man who’s never had to earn a room.
Then he turns enough for the side of his face, and I know him.
Kyle.
It goes through me before I can stop it, low and ugly and nothing I’m proud of — that’s the one who had her.
The one who got years I didn’t. The one she let in.
It’s there and it’s hot and it has nothing to do with whether he’s a problem.
I shove it down hard, because it’s mine to deal with and not worth the breath, and I don’t get to be that man while she’s sitting right there.
I shove it down.
Then her face drops.
The light in her eyes goes out. Her shoulders pull in small. And every part of me that just wasted a second being jealous goes cold and quiet and points at one thing.
She’s scared.
I don’t care who he is anymore. I don’t care that he had her. He’s frightening her, now, ten feet from me, and the jealousy’s gone like it was never there, burned off the second her face changed.
I catch pieces over the noise. San Diego.
Just visiting. Crazy, running into you. Her voice comes back flat and careful, all the give pressed out of it — and I know the difference between her real voice and the one she uses to make people stop, and this is neither.
This is a third one. I’ve never heard it. I hate it on contact.
She starts packing up like she didn’t just sit down. Eyes going to the door.
Then he leans in and puts a finger to her cheek.
The table shifts under my hand.
Solid wood, bolted to a cast base, and it moves where I’m gripping it. I feel it give and I make myself let go. Not now. Whatever that is, it waits.
She jerks back from his hand. He smiles like the flinch was the point — and she’s already on her feet gathering her things, and he steps into the space she made standing up, and then closer, and there’s a wall behind her and he knows there’s a wall behind her, and she says—
Kyle. Get off of me.
I’m up.
I don’t remember standing. I’m already across the room, and the only piece of myself I’m running right now is my voice, and I keep it level.
“Ella.”
Just that. Not a word for him. One for her.
Her eyes come to mine and the change is instant — the line of her shoulders breaks, and she lets out a breath, small and fast, like she’s been holding it since he walked up.
She went looking for the exit and got me instead. The panic broke.
No time for that. Later.
“Kyle was just leaving,” she says.
Kyle looks at me for the first time. I close the last of the distance and put my arm around her shoulders, and she settles into my side, and I do not let myself think about how that feels with him standing there. There’s a job in front of me and the job is getting her out.
“Oh.” The smile goes to something worse. “I see how it is.”
She starts to say his name.
“Couldn’t keep it in your pants.” He says it to her, watching me. “Good to know you downgraded.”
The room goes quiet, or I do. Same result.
I keep my eyes on her. Looking at him is a decision I can’t afford to make yet, because I know what’s on the other side of it.
“Ready, Ella?”
“Ready, Ella,” he echoes, soft, pleased with himself. “I’ll be around. I’ll find you.”
“I’m pretty busy,” she says.
“Don’t worry. I’ll make sure of it.”
She goes rigid against me. My arm tightens. I move her toward the door before I do the other thing.
We walk out.
The cold hits and she keeps moving, arms crossed over her bag, and I match her step without thinking about it. Half a block before I catch the shaking.
I slow down and lift the bag off her shoulder.
She lets me. Doesn’t look up.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“For what?”
“You didn’t have to—”
“He had his hands on you.”
She goes quiet.
“He’s an asshole,” I say.
“He’s my ex.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” I look down at her. “You don’t deserve—”
I stop.
You don’t deserve any of it. Not the way he looked at you like he still owned part of you. Not the years you’ve spent deciding the way it ended was a thing about you. Not the breath you let out when you saw me — like you’d been waiting on someone, and didn’t know it was always going to be me.
None of that is mine to say on a sidewalk. Most of it isn’t mine to say yet at all.
“Let’s get you home,” I say.
She nods.
My arm goes back around her. She doesn’t ask me to move it. She doesn’t move away. She just lets herself be there, warm against my side, and the shaking goes out of her slow, and I catch the second it stops.
How long I’ve wanted this. Not the fear, not Kyle’s hand on her, none of that — just her weight against me and her not stepping out from under my arm.
And it puts me back in the hallway. A year in.
Standing outside her door with my hand up to knock, because I’d been doing that more and more, finding reasons, and that day I didn’t even have one.
I just wanted to be on her side of the door.
I’d spent months not understanding why a woman I barely knew had become the thing every day arranged itself around, why losing track of her for an afternoon sat wrong in my chest, why I’d built a whole life eight feet from hers and called it nothing.
Then I heard her through the door. Talking to that plant. Something ordinary, I don’t even remember what. And it landed all at once, the way the floor lands when you misjudge a step in the dark.
Mine.
Not a hope. Not a question I was working toward. An answer that had been sitting there the whole time, waiting for me to stop looking away from it.
I backed off. Hand still up. Didn’t knock. Crossed the hall to my own door and shut it and stood there with my heart going like I’d run somewhere.
That was two years ago.
I also want to go back inside and put Kyle through the window. Both, at the same time. That’s just where I am.
The street’s loud the whole way back. Neither of us says anything.
I keep my arm where it is and everything else where she can’t see it.