Dell kept looking at her. At the freckles visible on her nose as she bent over the paperwork, her long eyelashes against her pale cheeks, how they started dark and ended light, almost translucent, at the tips. Her blunt, unadorned fingernails, the thin gold necklace that swung underneath the ripped collar of her T-shirt, hiding its pendant against her skin.
He broke the stare when she flipped to the third page, forcing his gaze instead to the surf outside the window.
“It’s not personal,” he said. Mae snorted. Something curled in his gut at the sound, at the fire of the person he’d met four weeks ago breaking through the ice wall she’d shown up with today.
“I think you should look up the meaning of that word, McCleary. Considering you are literally not selling me this property because of who I am.”
“That’s not—” Dell cut himself off with a slight shake of his head. “A year,” he said, confirming the conciliatory nature of his deal out loud. Most commercial leases required much longer terms than a single year. “This lease is good for a year. If you’re still here, if your business is up and running in a year and you still have the means to buy, the property will be yours.”
Mae exhaled slowly through her nose.
“Six months,” she said.
Jesus Christ. “The lease”—he shoved his poke bowl to the side, tapped the paperwork between them—“is for a year. I maintain my position that this isn’t personal, Kellerman, but I’m not changing this paperwork for you.”
Her lips thinned.
Six months.God, they’d gone over this a hundred times.
“We’re still going 50/50 on all TMI?” she asked after a lengthy pause.
Dell didn’t hold back his sigh. He knew Mae’s lawyer had already double checked all of the details last week. Because he’d received approximately twenty emails from Mae and Mae’s lawyer, checking all the details, last week.
And the 50/50 deal on all taxes, maintenance, and insurance was still a point he wasn’t fully certain on, so he didn’t appreciate being pushed on it. Most landlords made business tenants responsible for TMI on their own, but he’d decided, in a fit of foolishness, that helping Mae out with the technicalities and the repairs—and there would be a lot of repairs—was both an olive branch for not selling her the building outright and his own penance to the town for letting the Main Street property languish for so long.
It was possible the reason he was doing this entire venture at all was because that comment Mae had made—marring the downtown of the place you purport to care about—had stuck in his craw.
Still, the reminder of the fact that he was willingly tying himself further to this thing—and that Mae refused to be grateful for it—grated his already inflamed nerves.
“And I have first right of refusal?”
He let another sigh fly.
“I wouldn’t sell the place out from under you.”
“I don’t know you.” Finally, Mae lifted her eyes to his. Those blue-gray irises were a winter storm. “I don’t know anything about what you would do.”
He fisted his hands on his thighs beneath the table and stared back out the window.
“You have first right of refusal and you know you do. You know what’s in that contract. I don’t know why you’re prolonging this.”
“You’re right.”
And while Dell refused to look at her again, he could hear how she pressed her fancy pen into the paper with extra vengeance, how she flipped through the final pages and moved on to the second copy with sudden efficiency. Could feel her fire, burning across the table between them, punching further into his stomach.
When she reached the final signature, she pushed his copy of the contract across the table and stood from the booth before he could double check it.
She folded the key neatly into her fist.
“I’ll be seeing you in six months,” she said, and walked out of the restaurant.
* * *
Mae stood in front of 12 Main Street and hugged Vik’spilea peperomioidesto her side.
“Would you look at that, Becks,” she whispered to herself.
And felt, immediately, conflicted. As she had every time her mind had drifted to Becks over the last month. That old, familiar ghost of guilt haunting her shoulders once more.
