But because I’m good—I’m so, so good at seeing every single thing, atwatching—I notice it. I notice the way the corner of his mouth, right there on the left side, twitches. Barely a split second of movement, a pull of his lips that’d be entirely hidden from the casual observer.
“You’re lying.” I stare right into those eyes, those sea-glass eyes I’d avoided looking at last night, and I hope mine are burning right into his. I hope I’ve put into them all the accusation I mean to level at him. Kit’s heart is probably broken—all her plans for him this weekend, all the things she meant to show him about her new home. All the time she’s been waiting for him to come.
I remember: I can do more than just watch. When it comes to the people I love, I can do anything. “You can’t do this to her. You can’t leave.”
The look he gives me—it’s nothing like what I saw in his face last night, nothing like the gentle, indulgent smiles he gave to Kit, nothing like the low, laughing surprise he’d had for Zoe’s bold sense of humor. Nothing even like the open curiosity in his eyes when he’d seen me forthe first time.
It looks like anger.
“I can,” he says, and his voice is forceful. Unapologetic. So, soconfident.
There’s a thick silence between us, the sounds of the café tinkling and vague. But I hear his voice like an echo.
I can.
It sounds so—it sounds sotrue. There isn’t anything stopping Alex—he’s healthy, he’s successful, he’s made his own way in the world. Someone—his sister, me, anyone, probably—may tell himyou can’t, but he doesn’thave to listen.
He could get up and leave right now. He could pick up his rucksack and take his coffee with him, walk out this coffee shop’s doors. There’d be a trail of women’s undergarments in his wake.
Instead he shifts in his seat, puts his elbows on the table, and holds his to-go cup between his hands. The movement puts him closer to me, the steam from his coffee wafting between us, warming the space between our bodies. For a split second I’m back in that dream, and I drop my eyes to the table. There’s a stray penny, tail side up, beside hisright forearm.
“Out there,” he says, nodding toward the door, his voice softer now, a still-rough texture to it that now doesn’t sound quite so unapologetic. “Out there is the thing I waited formy whole life.”
I press my lips together, roll them inward, a habit I seem to have picked up since I started my college classes. Trying not to over-participate, trying not to get a reputation as the eager adult degree student while the slackers in the back roll their eyes at me, hoping for an early release from class.
Alex’s eyes dip to my mouth, and suddenly I don’t care so much about seeming eager. I use a fingernail to tap out the curiosity I feel building in my shoulders, my elbows, my wrists. I hear theplink, plinkof it against the ceramic. “What’s that?” I ask, my voice hardly above a whisper.
And then he smiles. He smiles like he—like he somehowknows, like he heard me make that wish six months ago, the night Kit and Zoe and I had all joked about our possible lottery win, a win that became a shocking, I’m-still-not-over-it reality. The night I’d told my friends that all I’d want was an education.
“Freedom,” he says, and he could not have cut me deeper if he’d held a hot knife against my body.
My secret wish, the one I’d made silently that same night our numbers came up, the one I’m working so hard to make come true—with my winnings, with my college classes, with every small effort I make to be stronger, healthier, more independent.
I lean back in my seat, lengthening the distance between us. I let the moment stretch a beat too long, my eyes on my mug, my book, the penny. Strangely, even though we don’t know each other well—at all, really—I can feel him waiting for me to argue, to push back. And when I finally meet his eyes, that’s what I see there.
Expectation. Anticipation.
Maybe not quite what I saw in my dream, but maybe not all that different either.
But Alex isn’t who I thought he was, not if he’ll leave Kit this way. And his freedom isn’t the same as mine, not if it looks like this—a beat-up bag, a faraway look, no limitations, no attachments, no debts, no thought to who or what you leave behind.
I let go of that electric, curious heat he makes me feel. I replace it with all the disappointment I feel on behalf of my friend. I pull my book closer to me.
“I’d better get back to studying.” I keep my gaze level, uninterested, aloof—the corollary gift of my shyness for moments like these.
He doesn’t wait long. Maybe a few seconds of taut silence before he stands again and hoists his bag over one shoulder, his cup of coffee still steaming in his hand. Oblivious, clearly, to the way so many eyes in the café are newly drawn to him.
“Greer,” he says, tipping his chin down in some old-fashioned gesture of acknowledgment that—despite my new opinion of him—feels like a brand on my skin. His smile is different now: smaller, sadder. “Maybe I’ll meet you again sometime.”
And then he’s gone, ducking out the same door he came in, and I don’t see him again. Not for almost two whole years.
Not evenin my dreams.
Chapter 1
Greer
“He’s right. You can’t leave.”
