Authors: Lauren Gilley
“Talk?” She hated the sound of her voice: shrill and high and wavering. “Or
stalk
? I don’t sneak up on people in dark parking lots when I want to talk.”
He braced one long-fingered hand against the roof of her car and nodded. “You’re pissed.”
Oh, how she wished she was. She wished she was spitting, fuming mad, full of insults and
fuck you
s and elegant stormings off. She wished her unanswered text messages hadn’t wrecked her. Wished she was on the rebound and not wrestling with tears every time she rolled over in the middle of the night, reached for him, and kept reaching.
“No,” she said, because it was the truth, and lifted her chin with a bravery she didn’t feel. “I’m disappointed.”
“I- ”
“I’ve found myself,” she cut him off, “in a situation I never wanted to be in. I went against all my better judgment and trusted you. I got invested when clearly, you weren’t, and now I’m massively disappointed in my own stupidity.”
“Ellie.” The way he said her name left her teeth grinding together it hurt so much. He reached for her.
“No!” She flung her palm between them, gripped with the same fear that had crippled her the night he’d taken her bowling…only now she didn’t have suspicions, she had proof. She loved him and he’d never loved her and she couldn’t let herself do this anymore. “
Do not
touch me.”
He retracted his hand and she could hear him sigh, one of his deep, flared-nostrils horse sighs. “El - ”
“You had plenty of time to contact me,” she said in a tear-choked voice. “I’m sorry I slapped you – that was rude - ”
“
Noelle
.”
“ – but you made yourself perfectly clear on Thanksgiving and I’m not going to force myself on you anymore.”
She ripped open her car door, breaking two nails in the process, and threw herself down into her seat.
It gave her no satisfaction to be the one to drive away and leave him standing in the cold. She’d been perfectly content with her life, with her plans, and though none of them had altered, she’d started to form this new plan that slotted right in with her others. She’d started sketching Jordan into snapshots of her future. Cruelty couldn’t make losing him any less awful.
**
It finally happened. It happened about two weeks too late, after he’d already done what was most likely irreparable damage, but as he drove to the little blue Cape Cod through the vicious, early December wind, Certainty happened. It had bubbled to life when he spotted her coming across the parking lot, and now, behind the wheel of his Jeep, Jordan was full to the brim with the kind of complete, calming, all-consuming Certainty that had blessed him at every track meet of his life.
He’d been nervous and clammy-palmed and struggling for the right thing to say, but as he swung into her drive, all worry left him. He knew what he wanted, down to his bones and deep in his brain and even in the scrawny little heart he sometimes wondered if he even had. The words would come because finally, thankfully, he was so certain he swore the sounds and colors around him were more defined. His whole world was in perfect focus.
Paige met him at the door, in cobra mode, pink and nightmarish.
“I’m here for my woman, get outta my way, or I’ll mow your ass down,” he said as he pushed past her and headed up the stairs.
“About time, you friggin’ jerk,” she called to his back.
Ellie was standing in front of her open closet door, in her black socks and untucked black oxford she wore to work, hanging her black work slacks up, crying. He paused in the threshold, a hand braced on the doorjamb, and took stock of her. The Certainty stayed, and the crystal teardrops sliding down her cheeks put a hard knot behind his breastbone.
She started when she saw him, tugging down the hemline of her shirt over her pink cotton bikini panties like he hadn’t already seen every inch of her. She dashed furiously at her tears with her free hand. “Why are you here?” she challenged, voice stronger than he would have thought.
“I want to talk to you.”
“No you don’t.”
“Then why am I standing here?” He took a step into her room – he’d even missed the room, its white sheets and dark hardwood floors and the gentle smell of her that filled the air – and she abandoned her closet, going around the end of her bed in a rush so it was between them. “Baby,” he sighed.
“Don’t call me that.” She didn’t yell at him - and still wiping at her eyes, she was less than an imposing figure, standing in her panties and socks - but the rejection stung. “Please – I told you before not to play games with me, so don’t use that word just to get back in my good graces.”
“Baby,” he repeated, gently. “You don’t have to be afraid of me.”
“
Afraid
?” She drew herself up, hem of her shirt and pink panties forgotten. Her gray eyes narrowed to tear-filled slits. “I’m not
afraid
of you. I’m so angry I can’t even think straight!”
“Fair enough.”
“It is fair!” She came marching around the end of the bed and up to him, her voice getting stronger. Her hair shimmered like liquid chocolate in the lamplight, a reflection of how hard her shoulders were shaking. “I told you over and over that I
can’t
do casual, and you let it go too far anyway.”
“That’s
not
fair,” he said evenly. “Sometimes things just don’t work and it’s nobody’s fault.”
She groaned and tried to whirl away, but he snagged her wrist. Her pulse was a rapid flutter of butterfly wings against his fingers. She turned her face away from him, voice breaking. “Let go.”
“I didn’t say that’s what happened with us.” He squeezed her wrist and tried to pull her into him. “El, can you just…Christ.” He sighed. She wasn’t going to let him ease into things. “Paige told me what your doctor said.” She went perfectly still. She didn’t even breathe. “About you needing to have kids early.”
The look she threw him through a parted curtain of hair was wounded. Betrayed.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He released her and she went to her bed, legs giving out as she sat down on the edge of her white comforter. She banded her arms around her middle and rocked forward, hair hiding her face. He saw goose bumps on her legs and didn’t know if they were caused by stress, or if she was cold. He wanted to tuck them both into bed and skip the conversation process, but this was what Ellie needed, more than anything he could do for her physically.
“She shouldn’t have said anything,” she said to the floor.
Slowly, as if afraid he might startle a wild animal, he shrugged out of his jacket and hung in on a bedpost, sat down beside her.
“I don’t tell people that,” she said just above a whisper.
“Not even me?” He studied her profile, just the tip of her nose that he could see, and willed her to look at him.
She didn’t. “You don’t love me.”
It was bowling night all over again, only this time, her hurt was real instead of imagined. “You know what?” He tucked her hair back behind her ear, watched her lashes lay black and curled and heavy with tears against her ceramic cheek. “I’m getting really tired of you telling me how I feel.”
She turned toward him, face cautiously blank, eyes shiny and quicksilver.
“I was an asshole,” he told her, Certainty pounding through him, voice even. “I was awful to you when you needed me and I’m sorry, sweetheart.”
She blinked hard and glanced away, throat working as she swallowed. “Yeah, well…” She hadn’t expected an apology, he could tell. “My family’s insane.”
“I picked up on that.”
The corner of her mouth quirked in what might have been a smile.
“You saved my job.” He pulled his fingers through the long, slippery lengths of her hair.
“I wasn’t going to let you get fired over me.”
“Thank you.”
“Jordan,” she breathed. Her head tipped back and she sounded almost desperate. “Why are you here?”
Exhausting
, he’d called her before, and she was. But he’d never cared about anything he didn’t have to work for. She was a smart girl, a lover of all the little things, and he had to tell her what he wanted her to know in a way she would want to hear. He took a deep breath and circled his palm around her neck; his thumb stroked the tender patch of skin behind her ear. He wanted to touch her somehow when he said it.
“Because every time I start to tell you something, I realize you’re not there.” Her eyes came to his face, straining in the corners. “Because I can’t get anyone else to laugh at my stupid jokes.” She blinked hard. “Because I can’t sleep without your elbows in my ribs. Because you’re absolutely beautiful, too sweet to be real, and you frustrate the hell out of me.”
Her lashes fluttered shut and she took a deep breath. She wanted to believe him: he could feel it.
“I know you got hurt before, and I know he hurt you on purpose and you’re scared to death you’re making that same mistake again. But I’m not that guy – give me more credit than that.”
Her eyes opened and all the fight had gone out of them. She leaned into his touch and tilted her head back to regard him, her eyes liquid and so sad the knot in his chest tightened. “You got hurt too. Your girlfriend who married the orthodontist.”
“Kelsey,” he supplied, and wondered how he’d ever been so stupid as to worship a girl like her when there was an Ellie out there waiting for him. He let his hand fall away, trailing down the curved ridge of her spine. “I changed my whole future for her.”
Her eyes went across the room to the closet door –
“Of course, if I hadn’t stayed local, I never would have met you.”
And they came back again, latching onto his face.
“I just don’t want you to change your plans for me.”
“Change my - ” Her brows pulled together under her bangs. “When did I ever say I wanted to do that?”
The defensive edge to her voice was a welcome change. “You dropped out of my class - ”
“So neither of us would get in trouble! That didn’t alter my
future
. No offense, Coach, but your class isn’t exactly difficult.”
Jordan grinned.
“
No one
could get me to give up writing, not even you.”
Tam had been right: she wasn’t Kelsey. She wasn’t making that kind of blunder, wasn’t ruled by the moon or fashion or whatever women like Kelsey were ruled by. Money, most like. “That’s good.”
“Yes it is.” She lifted her chin in defiance. “I know I’m this miserable, crying…
mess
, but I do not
need
a man, Jordan Walker. I was perfectly happy by myself. I didn’t want a relationship.”
“I don’t think either of us did,” he said gently, and saw pain flicker in her eyes.
“I thought I had more self-control than this,” she whispered. “I really did.”
He sighed. “We didn’t have an affair, Ellie. This isn’t some dirty, teacher/student thing, even if that’s how it looks from the outside.”
“Then…what is it?”
“I love you.”
She stared at him one long, still, quivering moment. “Don’t say that,” she breathed, “if you don’t mean it.”