“You want to argue with me about an apology, too?” Something eased at the corner of his mouth. “You really are a piece of work.” He pulled me against him and my face went into his neck. “My piece of work, though.”
I closed my eyes and let him hold me.
“I should not have walked away,” he said quietly. “That wasn’t fair to you either. I wasn’t all right that morning.”
“It’s okay.”
“It is not okay, Lyss. I’m sorry too.”
“Okay.”
After a while I pulled back, just enough to look at him. I reached over to the coffee table. The keys to the Genesis were in the dish. I held them up between us, dangling.
“You want to go for a ride?” I smiled.
His face softened — the lines at his eyes, the set of his mouth, the whole of it easing into something I had not seen in three days. I watchedit happen, and for the first time since Saturday morning I felt that the man I had hurt was going to be all right.
“Yes,” he said. “I want to go for a ride.”
We walked out to the car together.
Sleek. Beautiful.Mine.I still couldn’t quite look at it like it was mine. We crossed the garage side by side, holding hands, the keys in my right hand. When we reached the driver’s side, he put his hand out for them, palm up.
I looked at his hand. He looked at his hand. I held the keys against my chest.
“Julian.”
“Hm?”
“What are you doing?”
He stood there a second with his hand still half-out, looking from the keys to me, and I could see him running math in his head, the way he did when something he hadn’t planned for walked up on him.
“This is my car, Julian.”
“I know it is.”
“You bought me this car.”
“I did.”
“So why are you about to drive my car?”
He was quiet for a beat. He had the look he got when he was being asked for something he didn’t have a counter-argument to. I’d seen it maybe twice before. I enjoyed it.
“Habit.” He stepped back from the driver’s side and took a breath that wasn’t quite a sigh and wasn’t quite not one. Then he walked around to the passenger side.
I watched him do it. His shoulders were tighter than they’d been thirty seconds ago.
I opened the driver’s door and got in, and the first thing I did was move the seat forward six inches, because he had clearly sat in it at some point when he’d parked it. I adjusted the mirrors. Put my hands on the wheel.
Julian closed the passenger door and pulled his seatbelt across his chest, and he didn’t slouch. He sat upright, both hands on his thighs. He didn’t look relaxed, and he didn’t look like he was about to be.
I started the car and drove.
And he let me. He sat in the passenger seat of the Genesis he had bought me and let me drive his three-day argument around Lennox Fallsin the dark, and he didn’t say anything, and I didn’t say anything, and after about a mile he reached over and put his hand low on my thigh — the careful, possessive weight of a man who needed his hand on me — and I didn’t flinch.
I drove out of town.
