“You’re safe with me. Just don’t make it a habit.”
She holds the coffee to her chest, right above her breasts, as if I might try to take it back. “It’s good. Where’s it from?”
This time, it’s hard to speak for a different reason. I’ve had a bag of Quench coffee in the freezer for a year. I couldn’t drink it after Sadie left, that shop the coffee came from was something special between us, but I couldn’t get myself to throw it out either. Now I realize I’ve filled the entire apartment with the smell of Sadie but am only now noticing it. I don’t want to be thinking about Sadie when I’m here with Halston, so I say, “Quench Coffee, a few blocks over.”
“I’ve been there,” she says. “They have a location in Chelsea Market, right?”
I nod. “Best coffee in the city, if you ask me, but like you said, Lait Noir is more convenient.”
“Not if you take Lexington. It’s probably about the same, distance-wise.”
I rub my chest. “I’ll go grab your journal.”
“Where is it?”
“My bedroom,” I say before I realize how it sounds.
“Your bedroom?” she asks.
Shit. It sounds bad, because it is. “I was just, you know, keeping it where I could see it.”
“Sure,” she says as I turn. “Leave the lotion and tissues, though.”
I look back, my eyes wide.
She’s busting my balls, and I have no comeback. Just a flushed face. I can slink off, shamed, or I can give it right back to her. “I’ve made no secret of the fact that your words do something to me. So, yeah, I did something to them. I’m sorry if that’s overshare, but why else would I practically hunt you down?”
She bites her bottom lip with all her teeth, hard enough to turn the skin around it red. “Finn . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.”Boyfriend. Fuck off, Finn. This is dangerous territory. I go into my room and grab the leather book from my nightstand. I should return it to her and ask her to leave. It seems unfair, but as long as there’s a third-party, I can’t risk getting too close.
She has to go.
When I return from my room, she’s sitting on the couch, and I know right away that I don’t have what it takes to make her leave. If she does it on her own, it’d be hard not to stop her, but asking her to go? I can’t. I’ve never been able to flip fate the bird, as many times as I probably should have.
To put some distance between us, I take the loveseat. It came with the couch, or I wouldn’t know fuck all about loveseats, but now I’m glad for it. As tempted as I am to get physically closer to Halston, distance is my friend right now. Too close, and I might forget how it feels to lose what was never mine to begin with.
To her credit, she holds my gaze, even though I just admitted to jerking it to her words. She’s getting braver with me. I can practically feel hernotlooking at the journal until she caves and drops her eyes to my lap. “You read it,” she says quietly.
“Not all of it. But yeah. A lot.”
“And you can still look me in the eye?”
“I was caught off guard at first.” My hand sweats around the leather. “But you’re talented. You drew me in and I’ve been unable to get out since.”
I think I see tears in her eyes, but then they’re gone. “It’s just a bunch of random stuff. I wouldn’t have thought anyone would even get it.”
I wish I could explain how it felt to read through her pages. Like she’d been inside my head. “I get it.”
“Because of the sex?” she asks.
I sit back a little. “It’s more than that, you know it is. It’s really moving, the way you write.” She stares down so hard, I wonder if she’s even listening. “I don’t understand why you tried to deny it was yours.”
“I looked at your website,” she says quickly, glancing up again.
“Oh.” The subject change leaves me scrambling to shift gears. “My website?”
“It took almost ten seconds to load.”
