“I know you’ve been having a hard time disentangling yourself,” I say uncertainly, everything I hadn’t been willing to acknowledge in the heat of our argument, everything I owed her. “I wanted to be supportive, but I was impatient. I just wanted you to see things the way I did already. But I wasn’t seeing how it was for you to be living in that. I’m sorry for the things I said.”
“I appreciate you saying that.” She smiles before her expression grows a little distant. I squeeze her hand reflexively. I want to reach across the table and crush her to me. Her voice tight and hushed, she says, “If you want to end things...I’ll respect that. I won’t push you on it.”
“You’ll be ok with that?”
Her lower lip wobbles a little as she looks away from me. She delicately brushes a finger against the side of her face I can’t see. Lacey swallows and raises her chin, gathering her confidence. “Yeah, I’ll be ok. After a while, yeah.”
“Just a while?”
She lets out a small, defeated laugh that makes me a little misty-eyed. “Yeah.”
“Damn, ok.”
“Ellis—”
“I’m just saying, I don’t think I’d ever get over you.”
“It’s not a contest,” she scoffs with a wrinkle of her nose, and half of a noise that sounds an awful lot like a laugh escapes her. I tug her hand closer until I can press a kiss to her knuckle, her palm, her wrist.
Her hand turns over against my face, her thumb toying with my lower lip as I sigh. “Yeah, but it’s you. If it was a contest, I’d totally win.”
We sit in the cool, quiet evening for several moments without saying a word. Somewhere in the last twenty minutes, the sun slipped behind the skyline and the night crept in. The darkness shrouds us as if we’re the only ones around.
The tiny tealight on the table between us flickers in the wind, its gentle glow brushing Lacey’s cheeks with warmth. “No, you wouldn’t.”
18
Lacey
“Ugh, can you believe it?” Ellis groans, flipping through the tabloid as we exit the store and turn out onto the sidewalk.
“Yeah, I can. I wasn’t kidding when I said you wouldn’t want to kiss me like that in public.” I roll my eyes. He’s complaining, but he’s the one who bought a copy and hasn’t stopped looking at it since.
On the cheap paper cover there’s a picture of us kissing, tucked to the side of a headline about some monster being sighted in the swamp with dubious blurry photo evidence. When he gets to the page inside, there’s a number of relatively tame snapshots of us crossing the street holding hands scattered around the more damning kiss.
I remember that kiss, the way his body pressed against my hips as his fingers fit into the curve of space between my ass and my thigh, the sweater dress that he just couldn’t stop touching.
“God, we look good though,” he mutters to himself, teeth worrying his lower lip as he checks out a different page. “Is it weird if I get this framed?”
I snort, following him down the sidewalk. His fingers link through mine, and he pauses only to press a kiss to the top of my head.
We aren’t dating. Yet. At least, we said we weren’t. We talked a lot about trying to ease into this whole thing, take thingsslowly. And, yet, in the couple weeks since the incident, we’ve barely spent any nights apart. It doesn’t feel like I could possibly ever get enough of him.
Even just walking down the sidewalk together, I can’t help but get lost staring at him. Ellis looks more back to his old self. He hasn’t trimmed the shaggy fuzz that crept along his jawline, and I kinda hope he won’t. It looks good on him. His incisor teeth are still more pronounced, but he’s been filing his claws down.
After a couple blocks, Ellis stops and hands me the paper bag—shower curtain rings, dish soap, and two pints of ice cream. It’s already growing damp with condensation. “Here.”
“Wooow.” I drag the word out. “You’re gonna make me carry it all the way home?”
“You hold the bag, and I’ll hold you,” he clarifies, rolling his eyes. He nods to the overpass ledge that leads down a steep hill. “Walking is, like, for the birds.”
“Specifically birds.”
Ellis carefully rolls up the tabloid magazine and stows it in his pocket before he puts an arm around my back and then dips a little to thread an arm under my knees. In a second, I’m swept off my feet, pressed against his chest. The feeling of it has become so familiar my arms loop around his neck before I even fully settle against him, his arms secure around me.
“Don’t drop me,” I tease, poking the soft part of his cheek. Ellis lets out the most aggrieved sigh ever, but there’s fondness in his eyes.
“It was one time,” he scoffs, putting a foot up on the concrete barrier. In another step, the world tilts and we glide down from the overpass, catching a breeze that pulls us up into the sky.
