Chapter twenty
Tessa
My key scrapes the lock twice before I get it in.
I step inside and stop.
The hallway is dark, and I don't reach for the light switch. I just stand there in the quiet, still in my coat, listening to the sound of my own breathing. It takes me an embarrassingly long time to notice I'm still wearing it, but I hang it up carefully doing my best to behave normally.
I've carried all of it in with me, the cold, the dog park, the whole impossible afternoon.
I run my hands under the tap. The water is cold, then warm, and I watch it run over my wrists and think about nothing. I concentrate very hard on thinking about nothing.
I put the kettle on to warm.
I pick up my phone. Put it down. Pick it up again. There are no messages from George, and I stand at the counter for a moment trying to determine what I feel about that. The absence is either a mercy or it isn't, and I genuinely cannot tell which.
I pour the tea.
And then without entirely meaning to my fingers drift up toward my lips, just briefly, and I yank my hand back down so fast I slosh tea onto the counter.
Absolutely not.We are not doing that. We are not going to spend the whole evening thinking about how George kissed me.
I sit at the kitchen table and stare at the wall. The paint is a slightly uneven shade of cream that I've never bothered to fix, and I've looked at it a thousand evenings without seeing it, but now it feels like something to hold onto. Something still and reliable.
But in my mind I hear the way he said my name before he leaned in to kiss me.
I stand up. I straighten the dish towel on the oven handle. I sit back down.
He got caught up in the moment, I tell myself.Baxter, the crowd, the adrenaline, all of it arranged itself into something that wasn't real.
George Maddox is not impulsive. I have worked beside him for years, and this is a thing I know about him with complete certainty. I have watched him agonize over restaurant reservations.
Which means it was either a mistake, or it was deliberate.
And both of those are unbearable in entirely different ways.
I open my texts to Callie and look at the blank message box for a long time. Then I type:Does every kiss mean something?and hit send before the sensible part of my brain can intervene.
My phone rings eleven seconds later.
"You kissed him," Callie says. Not a question.
"Technically he kissed me," I say, and I hear immediately how that sounds worse.
A short, loaded silence settles across the line.
"Tell. Me. Everything," she says, "and do not leave out a single thing."
I give her the abbreviated version. The dog, the crowd, the moment collapsing in on itself. I edit it down to almost nothing, tidy and clipped, and Callie lets me finish before she says, very calmly: "You're doing the thing where you summarize so you don't have to feel it."
I open my mouth. I close it again.
"Was it good?" she asks, and her voice has gone completely serious.
I look at the ceiling. There's a faint watermark up near the light fitting that I've been meaning to have looked at since February.
"Yes," I say quietly, like the word costs me something.
