I’m pushing through the kitchen’s swinging door on my way back from the storeroom with ketchup refills when I sense the air in the dining room has changed.
There’s a shift in the quality of the space, like the diner has taken a breath and is holding it. My skin prickles along the back of my neck and down both arms before I understand why.
I look up. To the booth by the window. My section.
A man is sitting there. Broad shoulders, dark hair. Leaning against the vinyl seat back with the boneless exhaustion of someone who has been traveling for a long time and has finally stopped moving. His light-blue button-down shirt is wrinkled and untucked. His jaw is covered in stubble so heavy it’s almost a beard. The shadows under his eyes are purple.
Alec.
My hands go numb. The ketchup bottle is suddenly very far away, in someone else’s fingers. The air between us feels thick and warm, like the room has been heated from the inside, and I can feel my heartbeat in the base of my throat, in my wrists, in the soft skin behind my knees.
He hasn’t seen me yet. He’s staring at his folded hands where they rest on the table, and even wrecked, even haggard and unshaven and visibly running on fumes, his forearms on my diner table make my stomach tighten. Those arms. Those hands. The memory of them is so specific that my body supplies it without permission: his fingers threading through my hair, his palm flat against my lower back, the way he’d pull me against him in the dark like I was something he couldn’t afford to let drift away.
I can’t breathe. No. I am breathing. My lungs are doing their job. It’s everything else that has stopped functioning.
I put the ketchup down and cautiously approach the booth, uncertain what to do or say. Part of me is convinced I’m hallucinating. I pull the order pad from my apron out of pure reflex, because I’m a waitress and that’s what I do.
I pause at the edge of the booth. “Welcome to Red Rock Diner. What can I get you?”
The words come out steady. A miracle of muscle memory and years of serving people while my personal life burned in the background.
He looks up. His eyes meet mine and the impact goes through my chest like a hand reaching in and closing around my heart. I was right. He does look terrible and exhausted. He’s also the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen, and my knees feel about as mushy as Tony’s baked macaroni.
“Ella.” That deep, low voice of his has a rough, unused quality to it. The raw sound reaches a place between my thighs that has nothing to do with this awkward reunion and everything to do with the fact that I know what that voice sounds like at two in the morning with his mouth against my neck. Not to mention other parts of my body.
I clear my throat. “You want coffee? We just brewed a fresh pot.”
He shakes his head, barely a movement. “No coffee, thanks.”
“We have a lunch special,” I say, because apparently, I am going to die on this hill. “Soup and half sandwich. The soup today is tomato basil.”
A crease forms between his brows. “I didn’t come here to eat.”
“The pie is good too. Lisa made it this morning.”
“Ella.”
The second time he says it, quieter, and something in my chest pulls tight like a thread attached to his voice. I grip the order pad harder.
“Then why are you here, Alec?”
He reaches into his pocket. “I wanted to bring you this.”
He holds it out to me, the square of turquoise silk with the sea turtle painted on it. The scarf he gave me. The gift I couldn’t bear to keep but have missed like one of my own limbs ever since.
I can’t take it from him. My hands refuse to move from my sides. I stare at him, at the delicate silk in his hands. He’s holding it the way he’d hold something fragile. The way he held me.
“You left it at my place,” he says.
“I know.” My voice is barely there. “It doesn’t belong with me.”
“Yes, it does.”
He still hasn’t told me why he’s here, and as much as I long to throw myself into his arms and tell him I forgive him and I hope he can forgive me, I still have some dignity left to preserve.
I look at him. “You came all this way to bring me a scarf?”
“No.” His handsome face is solemn, his voice rough with unspoken emotion. “I came all this way to try to make things right between us.”
