My heart is pounding as if I’m about to defuse a bomb. Which, emotionally speaking, I might be.
I walk over before I can talk myself out of it.
“Hey.”
She stiffens. Doesn’t turn around. “Hey.”
The bartender—Jake, his name is Jake—sets her drink down, and she takes it but doesn’t move. Like she’s waiting for me to say whatever I came to say.
I have no idea what I came to say.
“I’m sorry about this,” I try. “The whole... running into each other thing. I didn’t know you’d be here. Dominic just told me to meet him here and?—”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s clearly not fine.”
She turns then, finally, and looks at me. Her eyes are a little glassy from the whiskey, her cheeks flushed pink. This close, I can smell her perfume—the new floral one that still makes my chest ache from unfamiliarity. But the walls she’s been hidingbehind have slipped. Not all the way, but enough that I can see the person underneath.
The person I hurt.
“You’re right,” she says. “It’s not fine.”
I wait. She takes a long sip of her drink, and I watch her throat move as she swallows. Something about that small motion—the vulnerability of it—makes it hard to breathe.
“You really hurt me, Logan.”
The words are quiet. A little slurred. But they hit like a punch to the chest.
“I know.”
“Do you?” She sets her glass down too hard. Whiskey sloshes over the rim. “Because I spent all that time I was in Sweden trying to figure out what I did wrong. What was so awful about me that you couldn’t even—” She stops. Presses her lips together. “I flew to another continent to get away from how you made me feel.”
Nothing.The word screams in my head.Nothing was awful about you. You were perfect. You ARE perfect.
“And now I’m back, and I have to work with you again, and I don’t—” Her voice cracks. “I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how to be in the same room with you and pretend it doesn’t still hurt.”
“Audrey—”
“I’m not asking for an explanation.” She holds up a hand. “I don’t want one. I just needed you to know. That it wasn’t nothing to me. That you… It hurt.I’mhurt. And I don’t know when that’s gonna stop being a problem for me.”
I want to tell her everything. About the panic that seized me when she leaned in.
But I can’t.
Because if I tell her the truth—that I’m a thirty-four-year-old virgin who panicked because he’d never been kissed before—she won’t be angry anymore. She’ll be something worse. She’ll pity me. Or she’ll realize that the person she thought was her intellectual equal is actually just a broken thing pretending to be human.
I’d rather she hate me for the wrong reason than see me clearly and leave anyway.
“I know,” I say instead. “And I’m sorry. I’ll spend the rest of my life being sorry for how I handled that night.”
For making you think you were the problem. You were never the problem.
I swallow all of it. Give her the surface apology because the real one isn’t happening.
“But we have to work together. For the next eighty-two days at least, we have to be in the same room, solving the same problems. And I’m asking—” My voice cracks. “Can we try to be friends? Or at least... not enemies. For the sake of the project. Please.”
She’s quiet for a long moment. Behind us, someone has hijacked the Bluetooth speaker, and a song I don’t recognize is playing—something with a heavy beat and lyrics about dancing with strangers.
