Page 21 of Every Heartbeat After

Mo scratches his temple. “Something with an L?”

Mara’s nails clack rapidly, the light reflected on her face changing as a new screen loads. “Llewellyn.”

“He was asking for you. Said he was meeting you here.” Jenna’s eyebrows rise. “Is that not— Did you not invite him?”

My chest flutters like my heart has grown wings and is desperately attempting to fly away. Or I’m having a heart attack. The odds are fifty-fifty, favoring no one. In a matter of seconds I’m thrown from grief to something else entirely, with no way for my body to make the journey between the two.

Heaviness settles in my limbs as the image of a dark, broody cop fills my belly with unwelcome warmth. Kit is here.Here.Either in a room that looks too similar to mine or at the lima bean–shaped pool where I learned to swim or in the ocean, the water tousling his hair and making his skin at once sticky and deliciously salty. He’s at the Carmen.Right. Now.

Did I invite him?Well, yes, I guess I kinda did. In a joking way, though, right? I was being flirtatious, drunk on ice cream and the scent of his hair gel and filled with the kind of confidence that only comes from conversations held in the dark cabin of a car. I never thought he’d actually show up. Never actuallyhoped.

That’s a lie, if only a small one. For that brief moment after the words spilled from my lips and before they tripped into other, more scandalous thoughts, I allowed myself to imagine it. Lying close to him in a cloud of white bedding, the sound of the waves drifting through a cracked balcony door. But in my wildest dreams I never thought it would feel so thick with terror and vulnerability. That beneath it all would be a thread of anticipation, bubbling up like an unwelcome illness in the midst of the overwhelm.

“Tess? Should we be concerned?” Jenna asks.

“I’ll call the police on him if you’d like,” Mara offers with a shrug.

“No, no.” I suck in a breath. When I open my mouth again, I pray my voice comes out level. “I’m just…surprised, is all. We haven’t talked in a while, and I… I guess I assumed he wouldn’t come.”Haven’t talked at all, actually.Not since that night outside the Horseshoe.

Everyone is staring at me. Even if I couldn’t see them, I’d feel their gazes on me like a thousand tiny pinpricks in my skin.

I stuff fisted hands into the oversize pockets of my boyfriend jeans. Grip. I need to get a fucking grip. “Sorry, what room is he in?”

Never mind that I don’t know what I’ll do with that knowledge. I’m teetering between avoiding him like the plague and hunting him down to rip him a new one for not calling first.

“We’re not really supposed to say—” Mo starts.

“It’s 326,” Mara interjects, eyebrow raised.

Fuck.Fuck.“Okay.” I grab my key packet from the counter and force a smile. “Thank you.” Mo fights me for control of my bag, a question still in his gaze, but I pry it away in the end. “I’ve got it,Tio.See you all around?”

Jenna takes a step toward me. “Tess, if?—”

“So good to see you again! Really!” I toss over my shoulder, already making a break for the elevator bay down the hall. An alarmed family plucks their toddler from my path. I don’t slow down. Don’t apologize. Heat is flooding my face, my throat, my head until I can hardly see to press the button that will summon the elevator.

By some miracle of the universe, it’s already on the ground floor and closes behind me blessedly fast. I want to sag into the railing, but I can’t, because realization is sweeping over me like a splash of cool water. Kit has to leave. I can’t trust myself to be levelheaded when that man is around, if our making out on the porch of the Horseshoe Inn is any indication. The raw, aching grief that I only allow this close once a year… I can’t do that with him here, distracting me. Because there’s no doubt in my mind that he will if given the chance.

I press the button for the third floor. My spine is rigid. My stomach twists with anticipation. I’m going to see Kit again for the first time since our kiss. A fist closes around my heart, whether to protect it or wring my feelings dry, I couldn’t say.

A bell chimes and the doors slide open. I spill from the elevator and turn right, then left, climbing the spine of the L-shaped building. My feet move without needing instruction on where to go. Of course they don’t. We’ve walked this path a thousand times before.

At the end of the long hallway, I stop, the wheels of my suitcase nearly taking out my ankles in the process. I become my pulse. Every nerve ending in my body flickers with its beat. With a trembling hand, I knock. It doesn’t take long. Almost like he could sense me coming.

He appears from behind the opening door like an apparition. The way my parents would still be standing in the kitchen in the days after their funerals. Something I willed into existence. Now I have to will him right out of it.

Our gazes meet, green grass and the earth that lives beneath it, and he smiles, stealing my breath away. “You’re here.”

“I am.” My voice is surprisingly calm. Stronger than I feel. I stand taller, even as I white-knuckle my suitcase handle. Every ounce of fear, I siphon into some sense of authority, praying it hides the truth well enough. “But you shouldn’t be.”

ChapterNine

Kit

I’ve spentthe last twenty-four hours thinking I made a huge mistake. Pacing my living room. The airport. Fuck, even this long hallway after I realized the woman at the registration desk knew Tess. And why wouldn’t she? It’s not like Tess has been coming here for God knows how many years or anything.

I’ve had ample time to stew over my bad decisions. To wonder what in the hell I was thinking, being so confident as to show up here without a single word shared between us since that night last July.

But that all disappears when I lay eyes on her beautiful face.

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