“Can I get you anything?” I asked. “Coffee?”
“No, thanks.” He pulled a slight face. “The hospital coffee tastes like shit.”
“I remember. I packed you a thermos. It’s in the bag.”
He grinned. “Marry me.”
My heart jolted. I looked into his wicked dark eyes, and even though I knew he was kidding, for a second I couldn’t breathe. “Ha-ha.”
I poured his coffee and added sugar, fussing over the simple service like a Victorian maiden over her auntie’s tea tray.
“Thanks.” He cocked an eyebrow as I sat beside him. “None for you?”
“No, I’m good.”
The words reverberated through my memory, setting off a sweet ache in my chest.
“You good?”
I kissed his shoulder. “I am excellent.”
“Yes, you are.”
The machines whooshed and beeped softly. His grandfather’s chest rose and fell. The sounds of the hospital at night—squeaking shoes and rattling carts and lowered voices—seemed very far away.
“Why didn’t you ever call me? After Paris,” I asked.
Trey slanted a look at me, a smile teasing his mouth. “You want to do this now?”
I flushed. There were things between us that had never been said. Questions that had never been answered. I was too much a March and he was too well-bred. Both of us were good at avoiding pain. “You’re right. Forget it.”
“I did. Call you,” he said.
“You most certainly did not.”
“I texted.”
I rolled my eyes. “Everybody texts. It’s one step up from sending a dick pic.”
He looked away. The lamp illuminated the edges of his profile, hard and perfect as the stamp on a coin. “I guess... I didn’t want to make things any worse.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” I said, and he laughed, his face relaxing in the way that I loved.
“It was wonderful. You were wonderful,” he said. “You were so bright. So busy. So sure of yourself and what you wanted. I didn’t want to mess that up. I wasn’t part of your plan.”
“Clearly, I wasn’t part of yours.”Jo was the plan, he’d said back then.
He looked straight at me, his eyes deep and vulnerable. Almost bleak. “I didn’t have a plan,” he said. “Why didn’t you call me?”
Because you still loved Jo. “Because I was avoiding you. Duh.”
“I thought we were better friends than that.”
“We were. We are.” I struggled to explain. “Which is why I didn’t want to be another Brittany.”
“Who?”
“Exactly. Or Jennifer or Ashley. Some Tinder date whose last name you can’t remember.”
