| |
––––––––
AS WE CLIMBED OUT OF the car back at her place, she stretched her arms up over her head and let out a long sigh. I tried not to let my gaze fall to the small strip of skin showing above her waistband. Damn, she looked good, and spending all that time with her so close on the couch hadn’t made it easier to deal with the want pulsing through my veins.
“I’m exhausted,” she remarked with a dramatic sigh. “I don’t think I’ve worked this hard since I left college.”
“Yeah, it’s crazy how big a toll it all takes on your body,” I agreed. “But you’ll get used to it.”
“Shit, I hope not,” she groaned, shaking her head. “I need to rest. I feel like I’m going to fall asleep right on the spot.”
“You should get some sleep,” I agreed. I needed to get back to my place, and take some rest myself, but it felt nigh-on impossible when she was right there in front of me, looking as cute as she did. I wanted this night to go on, the fun we were having to last just a little while longer.
“You want to come in for a coffee?” she asked. “Maybe talk about what we’re going to do tomorrow?”
“That sounds good,” I replied before I could stop myself. I should have known better than to allow myself to get pulled in closer to her, but I didn’t want this to be over. It finally felt like we had broken through whatever barrier had been there in the first place, and now the two of us could relax and talk like real people as opposed to a doctor and a patient’s daughter.
I followed her in. Her mother, I assumed, was already in bed, because Ellie dropped her voice to make sure she wasn’t disturbing her.
“I can’t believe I’m going to be sleeping in my childhood bedroom again,” she remarked as she brewed the coffee for us. “I haven’t slept there in years.”
“Has it changed much?” I asked as I leaned up on the counter and watched her take care of things. She had an ease to her, something calm and relaxed in this place, which she seemed to lack everywhere else. I figured it couldn’t have been easy for her, having to handle all of this, but in her mother’s house, whether or not she would have agreed with me, she seemed more comfortable than usual.
“I don’t think so,” she replied. “Hell, I probably still have all the posters of the boy-bands I was crushing on in high school up there.”
“I have to see that,” I replied, and she glanced at me and then shook her head.
“Not a chance in hell,” she replied. “That’s for my teenage eyes only.”
“Oh, come on,” I teased her. “There’s got to be something good in there, right?”
“Hey, unless you’re going to show me your teenage diaries, I don’t think you deserve to see it,” she replied. “Not a chance. That part of me is too private.”
“Why, because it’s too embarrassing?”
“Yeah, exactly,” she replied. “I tried to leave all of it behind when I got out of town. I’m not about to let someone into it after all this time.”
“That bad, huh?” I remarked.
“That bad,” she replied, and she handed me a coffee. For the briefest second, our fingers met around the mug, and I wondered if she felt the small spark of electricity dancing between our fingertips. She looked away at once, as though doing her best to ignore it.
“What about you?” she asked. “What was your cringey high school secret?”
“Oh, too many to count,” I replied, waving a hand. “I totally thought I could sing and play the guitar. Wrote a few songs for the girls I was crushing on, though none of them got me anywhere.”
“You were the guitar guy?” she asked, cocking an eyebrow with amusement.
“What do you mean?”
“The guy who would turn up anywhere and just start playing the guitar like he was a maestro,” she teased.
“I don’t think I was ever that bad.”
“I’m not hearing any argument,” she pointed out, and I shook my head.
“You know, I’d appreciate it if you were a little kinder to teenage me,” I told her, grinning. “He was sure he was great at all of it.”
“I’m sure he was,” she laughed. She took a sip of her coffee. Whatever we had come in here to talk about, it seemed utterly forgotten now, not that I was complaining.
She jerked her head towards the stairs.
“Come on, let me show you,” she told me. “I need to get this off my chest. If I keep trying to hide my past, it’s not going to change, is it?”
“It’s not,” I agreed. “And it’s my sincere recommendation that you let me see all the boy band posters you had on your wall when you were in high school.”
She led me to the stairs, lifting a finger to her lips to make sure I wasn’t going to wake her mother, and I followed her up, making sure to step as lightly as I could. The house was dark and quiet, and it made me feel like a teenager again, sneaking around like this, up to some girl’s room. Even though we were both grown adults, there was something fun about having to play it carefully in this way, having to make sure we didn’t get caught.
She paused outside her door, then planted a hand on it and pushed it open. She flicked on the light and filled the place with a bright orange glow from the dusty lightbulb dangling from the ceiling.
“Okay, you weren’t kidding,” I murmured as she closed the door behind us.
“Yeah, I know,” she replied, looking from one poster to the next. The place was plastered in images of boy bands, men with long floppy hair falling into their eyes gazing mournfully into the camera with just the right level of frown on their faces.
“I can’t believe how obsessed I was,” she added.
“It’s not so bad,” I replied. “I totally thought I was as cool as all of these guys.”
“I mean, you probably were,” she pointed out. “In that they were desperately uncool even though they pretended not to be.”
I smirked. She had a point. Standing here, in her room, looking around at all the posters, the books still scattered on the desk pressed against the wall, it looked as though she had just walked out of here one evening and decided she was never going to come back. I wondered how long it had been since she had called this place her home. The whole last decade of her life seemed to be missing from it, just her teenage self-preserved here, while everything which had come with her adulthood had fallen away as though it was nothing.
She sat down on the edge of the bed and looked around, and I could tell she was thinking the same thing I was. How strange, to be back here after all this time and to see so little of herself in this place—for it to look as though it could have belonged to anyone. She had grown up here, and yet, I couldn’t see much of the person she was today, the person I had gotten to know over the past few days.
I saw sadness cross over her face, and I felt a little guilty for asking to see her room. Maybe I should have given her the space to come here by herself. It was clear the weight of this, everything she held in here, was a lot for her to handle, and I didn’t want to be the one who dropped it on her like it was nothing. It couldn’t have been easy for her, being back after all this time. Whatever had driven her from this place in the first place, after all, must have been big for her to stay gone for so long.
“You okay?” I asked, a little awkwardly. I didn’t know what I was meant to say right now, but I wanted to say something. I wanted to make sure she understood I was there for her, even if I was having a hard time wrapping my head around what I was supposed to do and how I was supposed to do it.
She looked up at me and nodded, a small, sad smile on her face. I wasn’t sure if she was just going with it for the sake of keeping it from getting awkward, but I knew it was none of my business. I should keep out of it.
“I’m good,” she assured me, and she got to her feet. “Maybe I should get some rest, though, it’s been a long day.”
“It has been,” I replied. She stood there before me for a moment. The room was small enough that we didn’t have a whole lot of space between us, and I was distinctly aware of how close we were.
Just a few inches apart. She was looking up at me, her eyes locked on to mine, and I was sure she could feel it, too—whatever it was between us, suddenly growing and morphing into something neither of us could deny. Her lips parted, like there was something she wanted to say, but I wasn’t sure speaking was on either of our minds right then.
“I’ll walk you to the door,” she added, and she lowered her gaze and brushed past me and out on to the landing once more. She picked her way quietly down the stairs, and I took a second to pull myself together before I did the same thing.
What the hell was I thinking? Just because we had spent some time together today, just because we’d had fun, it didn’t mean anything was happening between us. I was helping her with her house, and that was all. I was here because of her mother. The two of us would never have even met if it hadn’t been for Celeste’s fall.
I followed her down the stairs and she opened the door for me. We hadn’t talked about what we were going to be doing in the house, but I was sure it didn’t matter, not right now. We could deal with it when we got to it. I needed to get out of there before I did or said something I knew I wouldn’t be able to take back.
“Thanks for helping out today,” she told me, a warm smile on her face. Whatever melancholy had overtaken her for a moment while we were up in her room, it seemed to have vanished now, much to my relief.
“Sure,” I replied. “I’ll come back again soon, okay? We can pick up where we left off.”
“Sounds good,” she replied. She stood there for a moment, as though there was something on her mind she wanted to tell me, but then, she stepped back and allowed me space to go through the door. I took it. I wasn’t sure what the heck had just happened there between us, but I was sure I needed to get out before I allowed it to get the better of me.
I went to my car and climbed in, gripping the wheel as though it could work out the tension rushing through my body. My heart was telling me to turn around and go back to her as soon as I got the chance—telling me to reach out to her and tell her she must have felt the same thing I did, the two of us had something here and we shouldn’t waste it.
I shoved it down. I wasn’t here for that and I needed to keep reminding myself, no matter how easy it might be to allow my desire to get the better of me. She wasn’t going to be here for long, and neither was I. I would have been stupid to do something like try to flirt. It would be over before it even began, and there was no way I was going to let myself fall into the mess of those feelings when I was meant to be here to help.
I drove away from her home, the smell of her still lingering in the car from where she had been sitting next to me. And I wondered, at the back of my mind, if she was wishing I had stayed, too.
