Page 88 of Reckless
Instead I stood there in the garden, holding tea glasses I’d never meant to accept, looking at a man who was beautiful enough to be a problem and sincere enough to be worse, and said the only honest thing left.“It means I’m trying.”
That terrible, bright line between us where romance stopped being a joke and started becoming something with weight.He stepped back first.
And God help me, somehow this moment was more intimate than the entire weekend.
We went back inside after that, and I carried the box to my room like contraband.
I set the box on the bed and stared at it for a long time.
Then, because I was a fool and because my life had become one long series of emotional experiments in bad judgment, I opened it again.The glasses caught the light from the window and threw it back light mixed with gold.
I touched one rim lightly with my fingertip and let myself tell the truth, just once, in the privacy of the room with no audience at all.
I liked them.
I liked that he’d thought of me.
And in the end this was all I’d ever really have.Memories and a pair of cups.
Ten
Jealousy
Xerses
By the time the sun went down, I’d spent the better part of a day trying not to think too hard about tea glasses and Kelly.
I’d bought them because I wanted to.That part was still true.I’d seen them, thought of how she softened around tea before she softened around anything else, and I’d bought them without thinking through what that would mean when the gift moved from intention into her hands.
And then she’d looked at me in the garden and told me, without dressing it up, how that kind of thing landed and we were never going to be more.
I had heard her.
My gut had this deeply unpleasant awareness that I was not good at being kind.Somehow I hurt Kelly.
With other women, things stayed cleaner.Simpler.Terms agreed to early.Expectations leveled.Money created solutions.I couldn’t even remember faces.
But with Kelly, It was becoming impossible to stop thinking her.
I was leaning against the stone wall outside the back bar at the compound when Charlie found me.
Charlie grinned and dropped into the chair across from me like his bones had never once been taught restraint.Music drifted faintly from inside and the ocean moved below the bluff in silver-black lines under the moon.
“I don’t want to talk yet.Give me time.”
The doors behind us opened again, and the night shifted.
Kelly.I felt her before I fully saw her.
She stepped onto the terrace with Hope and Avril, both women still mid-conversation about something I didn’t catch because my attention had narrowed too far, too fast.Kelly had changed after dinner.Simple jeans that made her legs look criminally long.A fitted black top.Hair down again.Mouth a little darker than usual.Not dressed up exactly.Just sharpened.
She met my gaze and the now-familiar little current sparked inside me again.
Hope and Avril kept moving toward the lounge area near the railing.Kelly slowed half a beat.
Charlie rose before I could answer and called across the terrace, “Tell me we’re going into town.If I stay here one more hour, I’m going to start another family game and no one wants that.”
Hope made a face.“That’s because all your games become combat.”
