Chapter thirty
Tessa
The engine hums low and steady, and I can't make myself reach for the door handle.
George's hands are still wrapped around the wheel at ten and two, like he might actually put the car in drive and escape his own answer. I turn toward him before I can talk myself out of it.
"So that's it?"
He frowns at the dashboard instead of at me, which somehow makes it worse. At least look me in the eye when you do this.
"What's it?"
The streetlight catches the line of his jaw, sharp and familiar, and I hate that I notice. I hate that I've memorized it.
"The part where dating me is bad for the company."
He exhales through his nose. It's not quite a sigh, and not quite a scoff, but something that lives unhappily between the two. His grip tightens on the wheel, just slightly, just enough for me to catch it.
Then he launches into it like a man reading from a prepared statement he rehearsed in the shower. ERS credibility, he says,investor optics, he says, and I nod along like I'm taking minutes at a very boring meeting about my own humiliation.
I stare at him for a long moment, cataloguing the genuine seriousness on his face. He actually believes this is a reasonable thing to say to a woman in a parked car at midnight. The laugh comes out before I can stop it. Short, involuntary, not kind.
"Wow."
His jaw tightens, and I feel the small, terrible satisfaction of having landed something.
"You really know how to make a girl feel special, George."
He finally gives me a sidelong, careful glance like he's checking whether I'm actually hurt or just sharpening a knife. The answer is both, but I'll never tell him that.
"That's not what this is about."
"It never is with you."
The silence after that sits differently than the one before it — heavier, warmer, like something just shifted its weight in the room. His profile goes very still, and I file that away without meaning to. I'm always filing things away when it comes to him. It's an involuntary reflex I've never managed to unlearn.
"You're the one trying to turn this into something emotional."
"Something emotional?" I gesture between us, and my hand passes close enough to his arm that I feel the warmth radiating off his sleeve. "We kissed, George."
He looks at my hand, then back at the windshield, and something at the corner of his expression cracks, just slightly, just for a second. He reaches up and rubs the back of his neck, and I've catalogued enough George Maddox gestures by now to know exactly what that one means.I know I'm wrong and I'm not ready to say it.
"That doesn't change the structural problem."
I stare at him.
"Did you just call our relationship a structural problem?"
He opens his mouth, and for one ridiculous half-second I think he's going to double down, and I almost admire it. Almost.
"You're acting like this was supposed to be permanent."
My laugh this time is sharp enough to cut glass.
"Trust me, that was never my assumption."
The car goes quiet in a way that has texture to it, like static before a signal drops entirely. I look down at my hands in my lap and say it quietly, because quiet is so much sharper than loud, and I've always known it.
