Chapter -10 #2
She stared one beat longer. “You tell me.”
I could have said it was nothing but instead I heard myself ask, “You know him well?”
There was a pause.
Then Michael, because he had chosen this exact moment to become useful, took Britney’s hand and said, “We’re getting another drink.”
Britney’s gaze flicked between me and Kelly once. Then she let him lead her away.
Hope, God bless her, grabbed Charlie by the front of his shirt and hauled him after them with more strength than should’ve lived in that body.
It was Kelly and me at the high-top table while the bar moved around us in noise and light and bodies, the rest of the world giving us exactly enough cover to either recover or make this much, much worse.
Kelly folded her arms and found my face. “You don’t get to do that with me.”
I held her gaze. “What.”
“I knew him from work. I didn’t go out with him.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“You were being territorial.”
“He offered to buy you a drink.”
“Yes. Like people do in bars.”
“You didn’t mention him.”
Her mouth fell open slightly. “I didn’t mention every man on earth to you because that would take years.”
I kept my face still. “You said he wasn’t a date.”
“Yeah it was a work event one afternoon where the drinks were all paid for by the firm.”
“He wanted one.”
Kelly laughed once, incredulous. “Why exactly are you asking me this like I owe you a romantic audit.”
“Because I want to know.”
Silence. The honest one.
The room seemed to tighten around it.
Music thumped from the speakers overhead. Kelly looked at me like she was finally seeing the exact shape of the thing I had almost managed to keep contained.
“Xerses,” she said slowly, “are you jealous?”
I held her eyes. “Yes.”
She blinked.
Then her whole face altered. And she recognized the truth.
She leaned one elbow onto the table and took a slow sip of her drink, watching me over the rim.
“That is ” She set the glass down carefully. “not helping you look sane.”
“I’m not trying to look sane.”
Instead she looked very, very interested.
I looked at the crowd where Ben had disappeared and forced my attention back to her. “He likes you.”
Kelly’s eyes flashed. “A lot of people like me.”
The sentence landed directly in my chest.
I wanted her to claim me as I wanted to claim her.
“No, I don’t think you do.”
Her voice had changed. Lower now. More private somehow, even in a packed bar.
“Men have been flirting with me long before you got bored at dinner and decided I was convenient.”
I leaned in. “Kelly.”
“No.” She matched the movement, eyes bright now. “You don’t get to look possessive and then act like the world starts and stops where you notice me.”
That hit hard to deserve honesty. “Fair.”
She blinked once, like she hadn’t expected agreement.
“It still doesn’t mean I enjoyed him touching you.”
That made her breathing change.
“That sounds like your problem,” she said.
“It is.”
“And yet you’re making it my face.”
“I’m answering your question.”
She held my gaze for one long second.
And the room changed again.
The bar. The music. The people around us. All of it dropped a fraction farther away because whatever had cracked open in me when Ben touched her elbow had done something equally destabilizing to her.
“You know what,” she said quietly, “I think I do like this.”
I stared at her.
She stared back.
Her mouth softened the slightest fraction, and if the room had not been public, if we had not had exactly enough alcohol in our systems to make honesty reckless and not enough to make it stupid, I might have done something with that.
Instead I wrapped one hand around the edge of the table and said, “That is also my problem.”
She smiled then.
And for one completely unhelpful second, all I could think about was what she’d look like making that exact expression from much closer up.
Kelly sat back first, the smile gone but not erased. Just banked.
The rest of the night moved in fits. Charlie dancing badly.
Hope dancing well enough to make him worse by comparison.
Miley pretending she did not like bars while clearly enjoying the music.
Avril and Kir disappearing onto the little outside deck for ten quiet minutes and coming back looking happier.
Jeff and Michael in conversation deep enough to be disarming and boring at once.
And me.
Watching Kelly.
Enough to know Kelly knew it now and occasionally, very occasionally, did things like turn her head at just the right speed while talking to someone else so that I caught the line of her throat and had to deal with that instead of basic rationality.
By the time we left, I was in a worse mood than I’d arrived in and decided I wanted to claim her.
The walk back out to the cars took us along the marina boards under strings of lights and salt-heavy dark.
The group stretched ahead in pieces. Charlie and Hope.
Jeff and Miley. Avril and Kir. Michael and Britney somewhere just beyond them.
Enough distance. Enough sound from the water and the bars behind us that the air around Kelly and me felt half-private.
She’d dropped back beside me. For thirty seconds, we walked.
Then she said, “Ben really bothered you.”
I looked down at her. “More than he should have.”
She agreed as if that confirmed something. “It’s not about him.”
No. It wasn’t. He tensed but said, “It’s about the fact that I’m used to wanting you when I’m the only one who knows it.”
Kelly slowed half a step them met my gaze.
Moonlight, marina lights, the spill from the bar windows behind us, everything found her face and made it look softer. She sucked in her lip for a second, gazed at me, and then asked, “And now?”
I held her gaze. “Now I know other men would want the same thing.”
Her breath caught.
“I don’t know what to do when you say honest things like that,” she said quietly.
I stepped closer.
Not touching.
“You could say what you want back.”
She looked up so fast the movement was almost sharp. And then, we had thrown safety to the wind under the alcohol, she said, “I liked seeing you jealous.”
That one went through me like a strike. “That is a dangerous thing to say on a boardwalk at night.”
“I know.”
“You said it anyway.”
“I said it because it’s true.”
“Kelly.”
“What.”
“Because what I want to do with it is not appropriate for a public walkway.”
Her breath caught. I stared at her.
She stared back.
And if the cars hadn’t been thirty feet away, if the family hadn’t been close to become an immediate problem, I would have kissed her right there on the boardwalk.
She’s drank too much and I had too. I leaned down enough that my next words only went to her ears.
“And you need to know,” I said. “I’m not finished being possessive yet.”
Her whole body reacted.
And then Britney turned and called, “Are you two coming or should we leave you for the gulls?”
Kelly stepped back first this time.
Instead I watched her move toward the others with my entire body still lit up from the last thirty seconds and thought, I was done pretending.