Deacon winced. “I know. Just, can we talk about it?”
“No,” Jenna replied, voice clipped and final, as if she could cleave their entire history in two with a single monosyllable.
He wasn’t sure what he expected, but he hadn’t prepared himself for this flat, practiced indifference. She was the same woman who’d let him see her heart, and let him past the sharp edges, and now she stood in front of him as if she’d never met him before in her life.
“Why?”
“Don’t you remember?No, it’s a complete sentence.” For a split second, her humor softened the moment, but then the wall went right back up.
Before she left, he just needed to know one thing. “Can you just tell me what happened? Did I do something? Why did you tell Martin you didn’t ever want to see me again?”
Jenna hesitated, her keys clutched in a death grip, the small plastic fob trembling between her fingers. Her gaze flicked away, then back, as if she was trying to assemble new rules for engagement on the fly.
“I said that?” she asked.
He nodded, uncertain whether he felt vindicated or destroyed. “Martin said when he asked?—”
“Oh, I wasn’t listening to what he was saying,” she interrupted, almost incredulous, as if that detail should have been obvious to anyone with half a brain.
“You weren’tlistening?” He repeated, incredulous himself.
“No.” She shook her head.
“What do you mean you weren’t listening?”
“I mean, he was saying stuff, and I was saying yeah and no.”
“All this time, I didn’t look for you because you told him you never wanted to see me again.”
She squinted up at him, then tucked her chin to her chest and bit her bottom lip as she stared at the pebbles in the gravel as if she was counting the stones. “I did?”
He could have laughed, but the laugh stuck in his throat because the months of uncertainty, the endless nights of replaying their time and wondering what he’d done to deserve that, weren’t funny at all. He ran his hands through his hair.
“He said he was joking, trying to lighten the mood because you seemed stressed,” Deacon explained, tiredly. “He said, ‘You’re acting like you don’t ever want to see the man again,’ and you said ‘Yeah, no.’ Then he said, ‘No you don’t?’ And you said ‘No.’”
Jenna looked at him, eyes wide with confusion or disbelief or maybe both. “Oh… I didn’t mean, I didn’t know he asked that.”
“All this time I’ve been killing myself trying to figure out what I did to make you run away like that. What did I do?”
“Nothing.” She glanced around, looking like she washoping no one was witnessing the exchange. “You didn’t do anything. It wasn’t you.”
Was she ashamed that they knew each other? Or was ithowthey knew each other? It was clear she hadn’t wanted her friends to know that they had met before.
“I was just… I was having some, you know… I had a lot going on in my life that had nothing to do with you,” she snapped defensively. “I didn’t even know you. Idon’tknow you.”
It was obvious to him that she was trying to de-personalize what had occurred between them, to downplay it, but why? It wasn’t just a cheap one-night stand. They shared more than that. What they shared in that hotel— hell, even in that bar—was real.
“Shit,” she muttered, barely above a whisper, and Deacon watched her shoulders tense before she turned and started walking back towards the bar.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, not bothering to hide the edge in his voice.
“I forgot to cash out,” she said. Her voice caught on the last syllable like it physically pained her to admit a mistake.
“I took care of it.”
She halted so abruptly that the sole of her shoe slid on a patch of slick gravel, causing her to reach out and grab onto the side mirror on the truck beside. Once she steadied herself, she turned back around and walked back to him, stopping in front of him.
“What?” she asked, blinking as if he’d spoken in ancient Sumerian.
