“Only because you’re losing,” Lark snickered.
The teasing rolled on, easy and overlapping, and for a few minutes, it was enough to keep me anchored in the game instead of in my own head.
We played three more rounds of increasingly terrible throws.Wren got too ambitious and overthrew one hard enough that it bounced off the floor and nearly took out a man walking by with nachos.Lark wheezed with laughter after Alice tried some kind of underhand trick shot that hit our side nowhere near the cans.I made one and missed the next two, which Alice took way too much joy in narrating.
At some point, I forgot to keep track of who was technically ahead.
At some point, that didn’t matter.
Then I looked toward the bar again.
And everything in me locked up.
Jude was coming toward us.
Two drinks in his hands.
Oh shit.
Oh shit.
Why was he coming this way?
For half a second, I thought maybe he wasn’t.Maybe he was just cutting through.Maybe those drinks were for somebody at one of the nearby tables.
Then he kept walking straight toward us.
My heartbeat kicked weirdly in my chest.
Lark was in the middle of saying something to Alice, Wren was bending to pick up the kickball, and I stood there like my brain had forgotten how to send signals to the rest of my body.
Jude stopped at the edge of our little playing area.
He was close enough that I could see details I hadn’t let myself look at all night.The slight roughness along his jaw.The faint crease between his brows.The way his fingers wrapped around the glasses like he was very aware he was carrying them and very unaware of what else to do with his hands.
“Penny had to run to the back for something,” he said.
His voice should not have done that to me.It should not have gone sliding through my chest like it remembered exactly where to hit.
He held one drink out to Wren, his mom, first.
“Oh,” she said, straightening up.“Thank you, handsome.”
“Yeah,” he muttered.
Then he turned to me.
And for one awful second, I forgot every smart thing I had told myself.
Forgot Jesse.
Forgot all my big declarations about being done and moving on and not wasting any more time on a man who had never once given me a reason to wait for him.
But how exactly were you supposed to shut off feelings that had lived in you for years?
How were you supposed to look at the same man you’d always looked at and suddenly feel nothing just because you had finally decided you should?
I couldn’t.
