Page 14 of Never Too Late

“I told you I don’t have a phone,” he said when I finally ran out of places to search and stepped back.

“Fine,” I conceded. “I believe you.”

An awkward standoff followed, with the two of us eyeing each other. It was Cillian who finally broke the silence. “So… what I’m getting is that you don’t want to eat here. I thought you liked this type of place.”

I stared at him, aghast. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

“You not saying anything to the contrary. But then”—he let out a sigh—“you didn’t say anything about a lot of things.” He took a few steps away from the restaurant. “Come on.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere else. Your choice.”

“Really?” There was no keeping the disbelief out of my voice. “I thought you’d booked a table.”

Cillian shrugged. “They’ll give it to someone else when they realize I never showed up. It happens all the time. It won’t be a big deal to them.” He hooked his arm through mine, the gesture not intimate enough that I could raise a complaint without making myself look ridiculous, but bringing me close enough to trigger a cascade of unwanted feelings. Feelings that were supposed to be dead. But then, if they were, I wouldn’t be here, would I? I would have stood my ground and told him to get lost.

If Cillian noticed my sudden silence, he didn’t comment, seeming happy to carry out a one-sided conversation about the previous times he’d visited Paris.

“Have you ever brought anyone here?” I asked as I steered him left down a side street.

Cillian pondered the question for a moment, appearing momentarily perplexed. “No.”

I lifted a disbelieving eyebrow. “I don’t care if you did.” A blatant lie if ever there was one, but I had pride. And I’d rather know if he’d brought a string of men here over the years. It would make it easier to walk away when he fucked up again. Maybe that’s why I’d agreed to this, to gather ammunition to make myself feel better when things invariably went to shit.

Cillian shook his head. “I’ve never been the romantic getaway type.”

“You don’t say,” I drawled. “I can’t say I noticed.”

“I should have taken you away,” he said, his voice quiet.

“Where?”

“Barcelona. Milan. Here. New York. Amsterdam. Anywhere where there was something worth seeing.”

“We were only together for six months,” I pointed out. “If we’d gone to all those places, you’d never have gotten any work done.”

“Maybe not, but we might still be together.”

I tried to visualize the scenario he’d painted and just couldn’t. “It wouldn’t have mattered where we were. You’d have been on your phone, and I’d have been left to my own devices.” I tugged Cillian through a doorway before he could argue, the next few minutes spent being shown to a table by a smiley waitress and furnished with menus. The place I’d brought Cillian to was more of a cafe than a restaurant, his suit looking completely out of place amongst the relaxed clientele. He didn’t seem unduly bothered, though, as he perused the menu. Feeling my eyeson him, he lifted his gaze and offered me a smile, something lurching in my chest. “Have you been here before?”

I nodded. I had. Enough times that I didn’t need to check the menu to know what I wanted to order. “This is one of Laurent’s favorite places to eat.”

“Your friend who likes to kiss you?”

“My friend, who is so supportive, he was worried for me, and did what he thought was best at the time.”

Sensing blood in the water, Cillian’s eyes narrowed. “Why was he so concerned?”

The timely return of the waitress to take our orders saved me from answering. “The food here is great,” I said quickly once she’d departed, determined not to let Cillian resurrect the previous topic of conversation. Because, the one thing I had to cling on to was never having admitted how deep my feelings for him had run. It was possible he’d worked it out from my decision to put so much space between us, or from me blurting out the previous day that it had taken me a while to get over him, but I didn’t feel there was anything to be achieved by laying it on the line.

By the time the food arrived, Cillian had remembered his other mission of pretending this was a first date. “Tell me about yourself,” he said, chin propped on his hand as he gazed across the table, brown eyes sparkling, and a small smile on his lips.

“You already—” I stopped myself for two reasons. If I was going to refuse to play this game, the right time would have been back at my flat when he’d first started it, and because it wasn’t true. Cillian and I had skipped all the niceties of getting to know each other and gone straight to fucking. He might know exactly how I enjoyed having my cock sucked, and what made me come quicker. But beyond that…

So, I told him about my upbringing in Oxford with one brother and one sister, before I’d moved to London for work. I told himhow I’d gotten into data analysis, Cillian doing an excellent job of pretending interest when I went off on a tangent and enthused about the simplicity and beauty of numbers. And I told him about my time in Paris so far, the things I’d seen, and what impressed me about the city.

Cillian shared amusing stories of the escapades he and his brother had gotten up to when they were growing up, their similar ages meaning they’d hung out together more than siblings with a larger age gap might. I found out about the early days of him setting up the advertising agency, the trouble he’d had getting a bank to lend him the start-up money making me see his work ethic in a whole new light. He told me about an early advertising campaign that had gone badly wrong, and how it could have been curtains for the agency had he not handled the fallout so well. I didn’t mind that the conversation had strayed to work when it was telling me so much about the man himself.

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