Page 139 of Your Place or Mine

Couldn’t let anyone in like that, could I?

My phone sat face-down on the bar where I’d left it, Lydia’s last text still unread.

Because reading it meant responding.

Responding meant taking a step I wasn’t sure I could take without falling flat on my face.

But sitting here wasn’t doing me any good.

I swiped the phone off the bar, flipped it over, and opened the latest message.

Hope today’s not kicking your ass.

That was it.

Simple. Kind. A thread of humor was tucked in like a safety pin holding something fragile together.

God, she was good.

Better than I deserved, maybe. But I wasn’t gonna sit around and let that be the excuse anymore.

I stood up, tossed my keys in my pocket, and headed out before I could talk myself out of it.

I didn’t know what I was going to say. Hell, I didn’t know what Iwantedto say. But I figured it was about time I showed her that I wasn’t all bark and shadow.

I reached the building with the bakery and her apartment above it. I looked up at the windows and imagined her in there…hair up in that messy bun, probably surrounded by color swatches and secondhand furniture she somehow made look like a magazine spread.

I climbed the stairs before I could chicken out.

I hesitated when I reached her door and raised my hand to knock.

A full three seconds.

Which, with a man-who's-scared-of-his-own-heart time, felt like an eternity.

I knocked twice, hard enough that she’d hear it but soft enough that I wouldn’t scare her.

She opened it so fast that it startled me.

Like maybe she’d been waiting on the other side.

Her expression was unreadable. Guarded. But her eyes flickered with something I hoped wasn’t regret.

“Hey,” I said, scratching the back of my neck like a twelve-year-old with a crush and no game.

“Hey,” she said, voice flat.

Okay, deserved.

“I was just—” I paused. “I figured it’s probably past time I showed up. Properly.”

She arched a brow. “You mean not as a ghost in my bed or a no-reply text bubble?”

I winced. “Yeah. That.”

She leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. “What do you want, Callum?”

I sucked in a breath. “To talk. To not screw this up more than I already have.”

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