Chapter Three
Three
She knew she wasn’t going to be able to come at him the same way twice.
He was just too practical a person, and would undoubtedly have plans to prevent another attempt at intruding on his life.
Structures to better keep her out. Obstacles to prevent further fence climbing.
Silent alarms rigged to her exact body temperature, in order to fire shotguns into her face if she came within a ten-mile radius.
And that meant thinking of another way.
Something that would catch him unawares.
Like waiting in an alleyway across from his favorite and monumentally dull-looking diner with a pair of binoculars in her hands.
Then darting in that direction the moment she saw him push through the double doors, paper rolled up under his arm, same uniform on as the day before, stay away from me expression already on his tomb-like face.
She used to think of it as a scowl, but it wasn’t really.
It was more of a subtle tension. A sense that just underneath the surface, every single muscle he had was tightly clenched.
Though they all definitely clenched harder when she slid into the seat opposite him, in the sturdy brown vinyl booth he’d picked, in some dark corner.
His back to the wall, of course, newspaper up like armor, one corner of it only dropping when she accidentally rattled the cutlery.
And then there it was: that tension at a ten, instead of a five.
In fact it looked so intense he couldn’t seem to speak for a moment.
He had to fight to force out some words, and sure enough when they came they were strained.
“You can’t possibly be serious. This cannot be what you’re actually doing right now,” he said.
What surprised her, however, was how much she had to fight not to sound strained when she replied. Breezy, she ordered herself. Light.
And sort of managed. “Well, that depends. What do you think the doing is in this instance?” she asked—a poor retort, really.
But she added her chin in her hands as she did it, and was pretty sure she had a teasing gleam in her eyes.
Plus she kept the shake in her voice to a minimum, even though her hammering heart was trying to force it into a warble.
Just like it always had back then.
Stuck in that ancient, yellowing workshop room, everything stifling even with the windows wide open, him sat across that table from her with the divide down the middle.
As if they were rival table tennis players.
Or visiting each other in prison. Or enemy combatants dragged to a peace treaty they both refused to sign.
Actually, I want another thousand years of torturing her, she had always imagined him saying.
And he stayed true to that form.
“Massive intrusion on my peaceful, delicious breakfast,” he said, as if what she’d done was a million times worse than what it actually was. Or she had any choice in the matter at all. Though naturally she knew why he had done it.
He understood, from too many moments when she had let it slip to him in college, that it would hit her hard.
He understood it would embarrass her I am not wanted here anxiety bone.
That place inside her that told her she didn’t belong, that made her think she had to make herself more useful to people if she ever wanted to.
So he went ahead.
And now the only way out was to focus on his foibles, instead of how frightening that was to her in almost every single way. “I think we both know that you’re hugely overstating the delicious part.”
“Listen, just because I don’t like anything too fancy—”
“Too fancy? You think waffles are frivolous pancakes.”
“Because they are. All that unnecessary fluff and patterning.”
He gestured at said imaginary fluff and patterning.
As if both things were obvious to even the most waffle-friendly person.
When really they were nothing of the kind.
“Oh my god, you make it sound like they’re the size of a truck tire and covered in doilies.
They’re a millimeter thicker and like a very boring chess board. ”
“I’m not going to be lectured on eating by a person who probably last ate in the middle of the night after forgetting to feed themselves. And the thing they fed themselves was most likely an out-of-date Ding Dong from an extremely questionable vending machine.”
“It was barely out of date,” she burst out, without thinking.
But his smug expression immediately told her what she should have been thinking about.
That she had just proved him right, instead of staying on his ass.
Now he’d scored a point. She was on the back foot.
Chin hands traded for clenched fists, her body leaning too far forward. While he hadn’t even dropped his paper.
He’d crumpled it a little, but it was still up.
She had to find a way to make it drop. To turn it back around on him—even though it meant digging deeper into her knowledge of him.
Reluctantly, and yet somehow it came so fast. Like he was always in the background of her mind, just waiting for his moment.
“And anyway, I don’t know why we’re talking about my habits when you’re about to get a plate of dry toast and eggs.
Not even eggs. Just the whites, because to you even a yolk is a step too far into experiencing a treat,” she said.
Then got the satisfaction of seeing him rankle just a little. And the paper lowered another inch.
“It’s not their treat-like nature I object to.”
“Oh right. It’s the toast integrity thing.”
“They reduce it back to the consistency of bread. Worse than the consistency of bread—five seconds of yolk seeping in and what you have is goop. Which not only renders the entire heating process pointless, but makes the mouthfee—”
“Jesus, not the mouthfeel, Miller. It’s too much to deal with on almost no sleep,” she cut in, intending something that sounded like an eye roll. But then his expression tightened, and she knew she’d made a mistake.
She had forgotten he knew that about her, too.
“So not only are you still forgetting to eat and then eating bullshit that will probably poison you, you also continue to exist on three hours a night,” he said, in a way that almost sounded annoyed.
Though she supposed it was pretty annoying to be so irresponsible, in front of someone who was the opposite.
And it made it easy to annoy him further.
“Actually it was more like five minutes,” she said, then watched his eyes flash wide.
Just a little—not enough for anyone else to notice.
But of course she did. He only had a few tiny default expressions, and she’d seen all of them a million times.
When awake. When asleep and dreaming. When in that state between.
Any deviation struck a gong inside her.
It was satisfying. Even though he recovered well. “Of course it was. People don’t get less irritating with age,” he said, so bone dry about it she was surprised he didn’t reach for a drink afterward. Though it wasn’t the tone that infuriated her.
It was him pretending he didn’t know the reason.
“Or, you know, people had to spend the night putting out your fires.”
“It is not my fault that you climbed my fence under false pretenses.”
“Oh, come on. You tricked me, and you tricked Beck, and you know it. I know you know it.”
“He heard what he wanted to.”
He waved a dismissive hand at her.
But she knew why. She caught how the magic trick was done, around the distraction.
“That is such bullshit, Miller. And you think so too, or you wouldn’t be doing that guilty-conscience eye thing,” she said, and jabbed a finger at the offending eye for good measure.
Always the right one, just a brief squint on one corner.
And usually reserved for people he thought more of than her.
People like Beck. People sweet and sensible.
“It doesn’t mean anything. You just want me to be nicer than I am,” he said.
“Feeling ashamed of treating someone that decent poorly doesn’t make you nice. It means you cross the bar for being human. Barely, considering the hell you made university for m—for everybody else.”
“Were you about to say me?”
“Of course not.”
“It sounded that way.”
“Yeah, well, you always did think too much of yourself. I never thought enough of you to be disappointed or hurt by your ludicrous opinions. Unlike your readers, who just started the official Caleb Miller Is a Fraud boycott of all of your books. I mean really, did you think you were going to get away with that god-awful miserable epilogue? And then the moaning about happy endings and love on The View, Jesus,” she said, and was pleased with herself when she managed it.
Even though it took everything she had to make her eye roll convincing, her laugh something other than hollow. Yes, she wanted to scream. Yes, I meant myself. Yes, you did. Yes, you hurt me. But if she went ahead with that, she knew what would happen.
She’d win the fight and lose the war.
Make herself forever weak in front of him.
Instead of keeping the focus and pressure on what mattered.
“I told Beck it’ll blow over. They’ll get over it,” he said, but she could hear a hint of doubt in his voice. She just had to push a little harder—maybe by getting out her phone and tapping to the right thing. Then showing him what was on the screen.
“This video of someone burning an effigy of you has a million likes.”
“Joke’s on them, I look nothing like that. My mustache is much thicker.”
“Oh my god, who cares about mustache thickness? They set you on fire.”
“Right, but look how poorly they did it,” he said as he shook his head. “That accelerant only got a B grade in Barbecue Monthly. The whole thing is going to peter out before my face has even finished melting.”
He gestured at it, as if that were self-evident.
Instead of completely deranged.