Page 47 of Go Back to December
Baz doesn’t want me at his appointment. He didn’t even tell me he had an appointment, which feels like a slap in the face, considering we just spent a major holiday together pretending we were a couple.
To distract myself from the ridiculous sense of betrayal punching at my chest, I clear his dishes from the counter. Like every other breakfast at the café.
The plates clink loudly as they hit the dishwasher. Dooley’s head swivels nervously between the kitchen and the door before he tells Baz, “I’ll go get the car.”
As I reach for Baz’s half-finished coffee mug, his fingers clamp around my wrist.
“Hey.”
I wriggle free of his grasp, but his eyes don’t surrender. “What’s bothering you?”
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit,” Baz sings. “Is this about Dooley taking me to PT?”
“Are you that afraid of letting me drive your car?”
The muscle that threads in his jaw screams he’s terrified of me driving his car.
As I laugh blackly, he heaves a defeated sigh. “The therapist I’m seeing is a friend of Dooley’s. Dooley offered to drive me, and take me to the running shop afterward.”
I huff in the general direction of his very braced leg.
“To pick up some looser pants that will fit under the brace. Shopping is Dooley’s drug of choice, and I didn’t think it was your scene.”
It’s irritating that he understands this about me without us ever having had a conversation about it. I probably wouldn’t mind shopping with Baz if it involved searching for the right clothes that would frame the attractive lines of his body.
If it meant seeing more of said attractive body.
Baz’s phone pings, and he curses as he fishes his keys out of his pocket and leaves them on the counter. “Dooley has the only spare key. We’ll make a copy while we’re out. Are you okay here?”
He’s the one who should shiver at the prospect of leaving me alone in his apartment. “Go. Don’t be late for your appointment.”
Baz hesitates.
I seize his keys. “Unless you want me to drive?”
With a smirk, he shuffles out the door.
The ensuing silence that fills the apartment is deafening. I clean up, then stop. It’s automatic, the urge to put everything away and scrub and dry. I stumble back into the living room, and the sight of the file box on the table turns my stomach sour.
It’s okay for me to keep watch over Baz through the night. But in the morning, everything is different. With him gone, everything is clear.
Last night, I enjoyed his touches in the dark. It’s made me hungry for this to be more than some deal. For it to be real. I’ve forgotten that my true mission is to protect the café, and myself. And that means hustling to find something that will give me leverage over Baz.
It won’t be his family. They’re Moneys and they’re far from perfect, but so am I. Regardless of what happened between them and Baz, I already care for them too much to hurt them. I’ll have to find something else.
I abandon the mess in the kitchen, then pause in the corridor, conflicted about where to begin my search. Would Baz hide something here that will lead to his undoing?
The most logical place is the bedroom. With his scent assaulting me, I force myself to look anywhere but the tumbled sheets on the bed.
His workbag slouches next to the bureau. I haul it onto the bed and rifle through it. There’s not much besides the computer, a tin of those curious cinnamon mints, and the Moleskin notebooks he’s always scribbling in.
When I flip one open, the pages contain dates and a series of dots and x’s.
“Bingo,” I murmur.
Baz’s bullet journal. I recognize the system from a tutorial video I once watched when all these gorgeous posts flooded my social media feed. I never made it through one day in my bujo; I was too damn bored to sustain it.
