16. Sixteen
SIXTEEN
Something was off about Huxley. I couldn’t put my finger on it.
He was a flirty man. I was almost positive it was flirting at least. Nobody had ever flirted with me, so I couldn’t be sure. It felt flirty, though. It was definitely a different energy than he’d been boasting earlier in the evening.
I was confused as to what I should do about it.
He’d had too much to drink or something, or so I told myself — that always lowered inhibitions — but he’d been flirty for the walk to my apartment.
He still hadn’t seen inside, and I couldn’t invite him up because the lights were on, meaning that Lucy was home.
She had no idea that we’d been hanging out with one another, and given the fact that she was still running hot and cold on me over the job — introducing her to Hayley had softened her stance some — I couldn’t risk telling her about Huxley.
She would use it against me and tell Mom.
We stood on the street in front of the building talking for a full 30 minutes.
He didn’t ask to come inside. He seemed reticent to leave, however.
Finally, I had no choice but to say goodnight.
My bladder was lodging a complaint. He hadn’t kissed me goodnight, although there was a moment I thought he might, but he had given me a long hug.
It wasn’t as titillating as a kiss, but there had been emotion behind the embrace, something real that I couldn’t identify.
Then he was gone. He walked down the block and called for his rideshare.
I knew because I watched from the window.
Lucy had even caught me watching, but I’d lied and said I was just amused at the drunk people on the sidewalk below. Did she believe me? It was hard to say.
She decided that the people on the street weren’t entertaining enough to keep her attention and went back to her room to pout. Or maybe it was to text Hayley. I knew there was a lot of that going on. I remained in the window until Huxley’s ride appeared. Even after, I stayed in my spot staring.
Was I wrong? I had to be wrong. Huxley liked me as a friend, which was a vast difference from how he’d felt about me when we were teenagers. It was an improvement. No, it was great. I liked hanging around with him, even if it was just as friends.
What if he wanted to be more than friends, though?
I threw out the possibility just as quickly as it had entered my mind. Huxley was never going to look at me that way. He’d just been drunk, and I was reading too much into the little touches and smiles. I wanted to see it, so that’s what I saw.
I believed that right up until I met him the next day at the coffee shop — we were due for another writing session — and he planted his feet on either side of mine under the table.
He didn’t move them once we brushed against one another.
He left them there. If anything, he moved them a little closer.
My mouth went dry when I looked up and found him watching me. “Were you hungover this morning?” I asked, expecting him to nod and tell me about his woes.
Instead, he made a face. “I only had one drink with dinner last night.”
“But …” I looked back over the time we’d spent together the previous evening. He was right. I’d only seen him drinking one cocktail. “Oh.”
“Oh?” He arched an eyebrow and shot me a crooked grin. It made him even more handsome, which shouldn’t have been possible.
“Lucy is talking to me some now,” I blurted because I was desperate to change the subject.
“Oh, yeah?” He pressed my feet between his. “Does that make you happy?”
“It’s better than sharing a roof with her — that apartment is only 1,000 square feet — and having her pretend she can’t see me.”
That had him frowning. “That sounds like emotional blackmail to me. She was trying to back you into a corner so she wouldn’t have to keep her job.”
“She hates her job,” I confirmed. “She complains about it constantly, about how her feet and back hurt.”
“I believe that’s normal when you’re waiting tables. I dated a cocktail waitress when I was in college. She claimed to walk 10 miles a night. I have no idea if that was true or if it just felt that way to her.”
Talking about his previous girlfriends was a risk, and yet I couldn’t stop myself. I treaded right back into dangerous waters. “Did you love her? The girlfriend, I mean.”
He shook his head. “No. Most definitely not. It was just a two-month fling. You know how those go.”
“Not really.”
He kept staring, and I swear it took him a full 30 seconds for my words to sink in. “Wait … are you saying that you’ve never had a fling?”
“What are you considering a fling? I once dated a guy for six months, and he didn’t want to put labels on anything. Is that a fling?”
“No, that’s a jackass,” he replied, not mincing words. “A fling is something that happens over a weekend, or even a few weeks. No more than a month, though.”
“Oh.” Well, that was disconcerting. I’d always filed Kevin away as a fling. Perhaps I needed to do some thinking on that.
“What guy didn’t want labels with you?”
“It doesn’t matter.” I shook my head.
“It does to me.”
Did he really want to talk about my ex-boyfriends? Because, if so, it was going to be a short conversation. “I … um … it wasn’t a big deal.”
“Were you in college at the time?” He wasn’t forceful with the question, instead offering up a soft smile of encouragement. There was turbulence brewing in his eyes, though.
“No. I was about 25, I think. It was when I was working at the publishing house as an intern. I was actually writing my first book, but it was going really slowly, and I kept second-guessing myself. My mother suggested the internship so I could learn about the other side of publishing.”
“That was actually pretty smart of her.” He bobbed his head in approval. “I wish my mother had done the same for me.”
“Oh, it turned out to be a disaster.” I tried to smile at the memory, but it was impossible.
“I met Kevin when he was working as an assistant in the art department. He acted like he was really into me — you know, he kept talking about how pretty I was, which should have been my first clue that he was up to something — but he really only wanted me to introduce him to Mom. He thought she might be able to get somebody to look at the graphic novel he was working on. They kept shutting him down.”
All traces of mirth were now missing from Huxley’s features. “You’re saying he tried to romance you because he wanted to get close to your mother?”
“Yeah.” My stomach constricted at the memory, and I reached for my latte.
“It was embarrassing. He kept saying that he didn’t want labels on our relationship, and I found out after the fact that it was because he had a real girlfriend and he’d told her he was just dating me as a way to get a leg up on the rest of the competition. ”
I took a huge swig of my coffee so I wouldn’t have to see the pity in Huxley’s eyes.
He didn’t say anything for so long, I assumed that he’d gone back to writing. When I lifted my chin, however, I found him glowering at me.
“What did I do?” Instinctively, I reached up to swipe at my cheek. “Is it food? I swear I washed my face this morning.”
“It’s not food. It’s that guy. Where is he now?”
That was an odd question, so I shrugged. “I think he’s still in New York. Last time I heard, they’d given him a permanent job in the department. It wasn’t doing a graphic novel or anything, though. He has to make those social media banners for everybody else’s books.”
“Well, at least he’s being tortured,” Huxley said darkly. “I can’t believe he did that to you.”
“Weirdly, he’s not the worst ex I’ve ever had.”
“I’m not sure I want to hear about the others.”
“It wouldn’t be a long story. I’ve only had a few relationships, and they all ended poorly. I think I’m too much of a geek for most men.”
“You’re not a geek.” It almost sounded like a reflex coming from him, and I smirked.
“I’m not?”
“No, you’re not. You’re … perfect. If anybody tells you that you’re a geek, don’t listen to them. You’re allowed to like what you like.”
“I believe you were the first one to ever call me a geek,” I reminded him. “Well, other than my mother. She always said it with baffled affection, though. She thought it was cute.”
“That’s because it is cute.”
“She’s the only one who ever believed that.”
“No, I believe it, too.” He was adamant as he leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. “I need you to listen to me for a second.”
He was so earnest, all I could do was nod. Whatever he was about to say was serious.
“I was the sort of kid who needed approval from other people,” he started. “It was important to me that I was popular. Do you know that whenever I started a new school — which was often, as I’m sure you remember — the first thing I told the kids was that my mother was a famous author?”
He waited for me to respond, so I searched my brain for what I should say. “I’m sure any other kid in your shoes would have done the same thing,” I said finally.
“Did you do that?”
“No, but I didn’t have to jump between schools. I was always at the same school. I had friends. Not a lot of them because, again, everybody thought I was a geek. I had friends, though. I wasn’t constantly expected to make new ones.”
He extended his index finger. “Stop with the geek stuff. I’m trying to talk to you.”
I shifted on my chair. This was getting more and more uncomfortable with each passing moment. “Fine.”
He waited another beat, then nodded. “When I was a teenager, at the last school I went to, I made my mother promise that we would stay for all four years because I couldn’t make new friends again. She agreed.”
I didn’t know this part of the story — Huxley had never talked about this stuff when we were younger — so I just waited him out.