Chapter Twelve
Max
Friday night’s ‘dinner’ has crawled into my head and won’t leave.
I’m aware of this because it’s Monday morning and I’ve been lying in bed for twenty minutes staring at the ceiling instead of getting up, which is not something I do.
I’m a morning person. I have always been a morning person.
I find morning people annoying too, but it’s a character flaw I’ve accepted.
Bart is stretched across the foot of the bed because he wants me to know that he was here first and my feet are an actual imposition.
I stare at the ceiling some more.
Cal’s hand on my back. The small circles.
The way my shoulders came down at his touch like my body knew before my brain did that it was safe to relax.
The restaurant, the pasta, the argument about Halbrook that he let me win—let me win because I was right, but he knew it and the look on his face when he realized it was maybe the best thing I’ve seen in years.
If you want me to call it a date, Sims, I will.
I make a sound into my pillow that Bart finds alarming enough to jump off the bed.
“I’m fine,” I reassure him.
He puts his head back down. He doesn’t believe me. I don’t believe me either.
I’m aware this is a completely reasonable and adult thought to have at seven in the morning while lying in bed making teenage shrieking sounds into a pillow.
I want to call it a date. I want to call every lunch we’ve had for the past month a date retroactively, so they all count towards whatever this is.
I want to go back to the bar outside Wildhorse and kiss him instead of letting him decide not to kiss me. I want to walk into that office this morning and lean on his desk and say hey, you said if I wanted to call it a date…
And then the grossest thing happens inside my brain.
Patrick’s face appears in my head, uninvited and unwelcome, wearing the expression he had in the elevator when he looked at Cal’s hand on my back.
I groan.
I don’t want to think about Patrick’s feelings.
I don’t want to consider what it looks like from his perspective or how uncomfortable it might be to watch the woman he cheated on find something that looks like happiness six feet away from his glass office.
I don’t want to be the kind of person who factors in the feelings of the man who spent five years treating me like a decorative object.
But I’m apparently that kind of person at seven on this Monday morning, which is deeply annoying. I make a gurgled, frustrated noise.
And I sit up.
“Why,” I ask myself very seriously, “should I give a single solitary fuck about Patrick Ellison’s feelings?”
I can’t come up with an answer. Bart can’t either, judging by his expression and wagging tail.
I throw back the covers.
And the doorbell rings.
I frown, glancing at my phone. It’s seven-fifteen. Nobody rings my doorbell at seven-fifteen in the morning unless it’s a delivery driver who has been personally sent by the universe to interrupt whatever I’m doing, which is a thing that happens to me with suspicious regularity.
I pad downstairs in my pajamas—oversized t-shirt, plaid pants, fuzzy socks, the full indignity—and pull open the door expecting to see FedEx or UPS bright eyed and bushy tailed.
Patrick is standing on my porch.
I narrow my eyes. He’s in a suit, which means he came here before work, which means this was intentional and not accidental. How exactly would it be accidental anyway? His hair is slightly more disheveled than usual and his expression has a stiff look to it.
I stare at him.
He stares at me.
“I came to—” he starts, and I go to shut the door but notice the coffee in his hands.
“What’s with the coffee,” I ask, but it comes out like a statement with a cringe.
A beat. “I remembered your order and thought…”
I look at the cups. I look at him. I look at the cups again.
“Come in,” I say, because I’m tired and the coffee smells good and I’m not having this conversation on my porch in my pajamas. “But don’t… touch anything.”
He sits in the armchair across from the couch. I put the couch between us like a moat as I stand behind it. He looks awkward, staring at the couch, which I assume is where he thought I’d sit. And awkward is fine with me.
The coffee is right. That’s the thing I can’t get past. It’s exactly right—the temperature, the combination of hazelnut, mocha and caramel syrups that sounds ridiculous when you order it and tastes exactly like what it’s supposed to taste like: a glorious sugar rush.
I take a sip and feel a flash of betrayal at myself for enjoying something from a source I resent.
I eye him suspiciously, wondering how he did this right.
I can’t remember the last time he got my coffee right when we were together. Hell, the last time he even brought me coffee.
Yes, I can. It was the first year we were together, before law school, when he was still performing a version of himself that was worth keeping.
He used to show up to the library with two coffees, set mine down without interrupting whatever I was reading, and sit across from me and do his own work without demanding my attention.
He just wanted to be near me and make sure I had what I needed to exist happily.
I fell in love with that version of him.
That version was real enough to be convincing.
Then I started law school and became an inconvenience, and he stopped getting the coffee right and started getting everything else wrong instead.
I take another sip. Warm, caramelicious treachery. With whipped cream.
Patrick has one hand on his coffee cup and blows out a breath of air slowly. He looks around and stands, obviously uncomfortable, and walks away from me, towards my desk. He’s looking at it and I’m wondering what the fuck we are doing here.
He stops and taps the top of my desk, his eyes popping up to mine.
I make a face at what must be the remnants of his wedding invitation still spread across my desk in the corner—the lace paper, the torn envelope, the RSVP missing because it’s already in the mail—and he’s clocked it.
I can tell by the slight tension around his eyes when he looked over, but he hasn’t said anything.
“I sent it as a peace offering,” he says, tapping the desk again. “Knowing we were moving here. I thought—I don’t know what I thought. That it might be less of a shock if you knew first or… something.”
“It was a shock anyway.”
“I know.” He exhales. “Max, I know I don’t have any right to ask you for anything.
I know that. I know you will probably never forgive me for what I did and honestly, I’m not here to ask you to and I don’t think you should.
” He moves to stand in front of the chair, towards the couch and I take a step back.
“I just—I want to be able to be in the same building as you. I don’t want to have to leave a room when you walk in.
I want some version of this that doesn’t feel like open warfare every time we’re within ten feet of each other.
And I know I caused that, and I’m sorry, and I know sorry doesn’t cover it, but—”
He keeps talking.
I know he keeps talking because his mouth is moving and sound is coming out and Patrick has never in his life stopped talking in the middle of a thought. Because God forbid the man ever listens to anyone else.
But somewhere around ‘the way things ended wasn’t fair to you’ my brain makes a quiet and unauthorized departure to the memory of a restaurant two blocks from the office where pasta was ordered and a legal argument was made and a man with golden-green eyes and ink running down his forearms refilled my wine glass without being asked, and told me I could call it a date if I wanted to.
I feel my lips tilt in a small smile and my eyes which must still be looking at Patrick don’t see Patrick anymore.
Instead, I see a smile and the crinkle of gorgeous eyes across from me. The most perfectly pink lips sip wine. He looked at me like nothing else existed in that restaurant, barely even glancing towards the waiter with polite words before his eyes were back on mine.
I wonder if he’s awake yet. I bite my bottom lip, and my smile gets a little bigger.
I don’t even know where he lives, which is a strange thing to realize.
A few blocks from the office, he said once, which means somewhere in that grid of streets I walk every morning.
I’ve probably passed his building. He’s probably standing at a window with a coffee.
Maybe he has his own espresso machine. That kind of sounds like Cal.
Waking up, walking to the kitchen in his underwear and having an espresso before—
My mind makes a U-turn. I wonder what he looks like first thing in the morning.
Hair unruly. His beard soft without the day behind it.
The way his eyes look when he first opens them while he lies on his pillow.
I can almost feel the way his fingers would caress my cheek and his lips.
He would definitely offer me one of his fancy espressos.
I think about his lips again and the way his mouth looked around the rim of his wine glass last night.
The way he laughed at something I said and his entire face changed, and for a second, he looked exactly like the person he was at a Halloween party at twenty-three, sitting at a table with a beer and a cowboy hat and—
“Are you even listening to me?”
I stand up straight, my smile dropping, as I come back to the room.
Patrick is looking at me.
And I laugh.
Not a polite laugh. Not a contained, I’m-in-control-of-this-situation laugh. A real one, the kind that comes from somewhere unexpected, the kind that takes a second to understand. My free hand flies up to cover my mouth in shock.
“What—” Patrick starts. “Did you just laugh? What’s funny about what I just said?”
I press my lips together. Press them harder. It doesn’t work.
“Nothing,” I say, but it rides out of my mouth on another laugh that I can’t control. “Nothing about what you said is funny.” I take a breath and he frowns at me.
He shakes his head, opening his mouth to say something else but I don’t let him speak.
“No, you know what? Yes. What’s funny is the number of times that exact sentence left my mouth while we were together.” The air between us shifts. “‘Are you even listening to me.’ It’s funny hearing it from the other side.”
There’s a long stretch of silence. Something crosses his face. I think my words land harder than I intended them to.
“I didn’t say that to hurt you,” I tell him, slowly, and I mean it, which surprises me a little.
Two months ago, I think I would have said it to hurt him.
I would have curated it, sharpened it, said it at exactly the right moment to draw the most blood.
I would have bathed in the reaction he’s having right now.
But no, I mean it the way you mean a simple fact.
“I said it because it’s true. I don’t think I want to hurt you, Patrick.” I pause. “I don’t think I care to hurt you, because I just don’t care about you.”
I’m not making it better. Not that I need to, but I see the hurt in his eyes get deeper. I move closer, keeping the couch between us, and walk toward the window because I need to be moving and I need to be looking at something that isn’t his expression.
I need to find Cal before nine o’clock. I want to walk into that office and lean on his desk the way he leans on mine and say, you said if I wanted to call it a date…
I need to stop spending any more of my Monday morning on Patrick Ellison and give every available minute of it to whatever is happening with Cal because I’ve waited too damn long for whatever that is.
I turn around.
“Thank you for the coffee,” I say. “I’ll allow it.”
He blinks. “Allow what?”
“Your presence in the same room as me. At the office.” I hold his gaze. “I’ll allow it.”
He nods slowly and stutters, “O-okay.”
“Anything else?”
“So we’re—I mean, not okay, but—”
“We’re fine, Patrick. It’s whatever at this point.” I gesture toward myself, the pajamas, the general state of seven-thirty on a Monday morning. “But I need to get ready for work, so…”
He looks around the room one more time—at the invitation on the desk, at me, at the coffee cup in my hand—and whatever he’s looking for, he doesn’t find it or doesn’t say it.
“Right,” he says. “We got your RSVP. It said you were bringing a date? So, you’re seeing someone? Or should I save Becca a chair with her name on it?”
“Yep,” is all I give him instead of an answer. If he’s trying to be friendly, he fails.
He nods slowly. “I’ll—yeah. I’ll see you at the office.”
“See you at the office.”
He lets himself out. The door closes.
I look at the coffee.
I finish it—begrudgingly—then toss the cup.
Then I take the stairs two at a time, because I need to shower and change and get to that office and find Callan Reed before the day starts. I’m going to tell him yes, call it a date, please, for the love of everything, call it a date.
Bart appears at the top of the stairs, wagging as I run up.
“I know we are late,” I tell him. “Come on, hurry, hurry!”