“I’m not just anyone, am I?” He smiles, smug but warm.
“Spoil me with one coat and next thing you’ll be buying me a fucking yacht.”
Lance laughs under his breath. “Only if you promise to take me out on it and complain the whole time about rich people bullshit.”
“Asshole.”
“Your asshole,” he says, grinning at me like I hung the damn moon.
We leave the store like that, the new coat warm around my shoulders. I don’t argue anymore. He’s happy. Maybe, just maybe, I can let him do this one thing.
He keeps me with him for a few hours that morning at Hearthside. While he's in meetings, I get left in a small common room off the main corridor. Good light. Window overlooking a garden that's empty this late in the year. I grab a magazine, read the same page three times, then give up and watch the trees instead. Sitting around while everyone else gets on with their day has never sat right with me.
The door opens and Lance sticks his head in. Still clearly mid-meeting, jacket off.
“G.” He looks at me. “You good?”
I grunt.
“Water station’s just down the hall, left at the nurses’ station. They know you’re with me.” A pause. “Probably another twenty minutes?”
“Lance, go back.”
He doesn’t move immediately. He stands there in the doorway looking slightly restless, like he doesn’t fully want to leave.
“Twenty minutes,” he says again, sounding apologetic.
“Go.”
He does.
He comes back in fifteen, finds me in the corridor, and falls into step beside me without saying anything about the meeting. On the way out, he pauses to speak to someone at the front desk. Without breaking the conversation, he reaches back and deposits a coffee in my hand. I never even saw him pick one up. I stand in the background, waiting for their chat to be over. Lance doesn’t take me straight back to the house.
“Come on,” he tugs, already walking the other direction. “I’ll show you around.”
He takes me through Capitol Hill, the neighborhood he grew up in. The streets are narrower and older, lined with coffee shops and record stores that look like they’ve been there forever. Lance walks pointing things out as we go.
“That’s the diner my dad used to take me and Marcus onSaturday mornings. He always ordered the same thing but pretended he was going to try something new.”
We pass a worn basketball court where he used to play, a bus stop with a faded bench he used to stand on, and a corner store he says used to sell his favorite orange soda that no longer exists.
Small pieces of a life I never got to see. He shows them like it’s no big deal, but I feel every one of them.
We end up on a path overlooking the water, Eastlake spread out below us. Boats cut slow white lines across the lake. The wind coming off the water is cold enough that I shove my hands into my pockets for a while.
Lance keeps drifting closer as we walk, close enough that our shoulders bump. Close enough that our hands keep brushing every few steps.
The first couple of times, neither of us says anything.
The third time, he catches my hand. He reaches over and threads our fingers together like he’s been meaning to do it the whole time.
He keeps looking down at our joined hands every few minutes. I shake my head.
“You’re ridiculous.”
“Yeah,” he says easily, squeezing my hand once. “Probably.”
His grin stays put.
