Page 19 of The Likelihood Of You

“Christ, Jacob, you scared me!” My shaky hands clutched my chest, trying to stop my heart from beating five times the rate it should be.

“I know, I know, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I was just leaving, I promise.” His words came out all rushed and flustered, his face frozen with panic as he yanked his cap off his head. It was comforting, in an odd way.

“What are you doing here? Did you..did you follow me?” I ask, twisting my body and resting a hand on the back of the bench.

The brown in his eyes gets wider, like a fox in a lorry's main beams. “Oh God, no! No, I..um. I found this place years ago, and I come here sometimes to just…I don’t know, to sit here. I didn’t even think anyone else knew about this place.” He pauses to catch his breath. “I swear.”

I narrow my eyes at him. “Cross your heart?”

He nods, his index fingers making an X over his chest, while I hold back my smile.

I suck in a breath, which seems to calm down my heart, before locking our eyes. “You can join me if you want. Or I can go if you need…space. I’ve had my, uh.” Self-pity hour? Sob session? Daily cry about how my life has turned upside down? “Time.”

Sure, that works.

I stand up from the bench, dusting off my jeans with my palms. “It’s all yours.”

“No, no. You can stay. But I’ll join you if that’s okay?” He says, pushing himself away from the tree he’s leaning against to stand upright. A soft smirk danced on his lips, subtle smile lines appearing shortly after.

I nod at him and sit back down, watching him take a seat on the other end of the bench before I shift my eyes back to face the lake.

I only found this place today. I’d walked these paths of Central Park for a few months now and had blissfully followed the instructions of the ‘KEEP OUT’ sign, but today was the first time I’d ignored it and walked straight through without a second thought. I hadn't known what lay beyond the rusting sign, but regardless, I wanted to find out.

And I’m glad I did, because I seemed to have stumbled across heaven. Literal heaven.

My eyes ditch the lake and wander over to Jacob. The fact that he’s sat next to me still isn’t really sinking in. What was he even doing here?

“No glasses today?” I ask, breaking the silence.

He twists his head to face me. “What? Oh. No, I didn’t pick them up before I left this morning.”

“Too sunny for them today?” I ask, feeling a smirk crescent on my mouth.

“Precisely.”

His head bobbles back over to the lake, but I keep my gaze stuck to him.

Unfortunately, I’d realised today how easy it was to get lost in his eyes, made easier by the fact that he couldn’t see my staring with all those stage lights on him. They almost got me in trouble at one point; about halfway through his monologue with Addy, I stumbled backwards and fell into one of the boom mic guys. Thankfully, said mic guy was cool about it after I’d whispered ‘sorry’ twenty times, and the blinding stage lights hid my identity well enough that no one knew I’d been caught gawking on the job.

If only this lookout was a set and came fitted with lights to hide how I was losing myself in his eyes that were still scoping out the lake, admiring how little flecks of light from the water were bouncing off them. Realising that sunlight wasn’t a good enough substitute, I shifted my head back to the lake.

I zero in on a flock of ducks paddling across the water, and it takes a while for me to notice his eyes have stopped roaming the lake, and are now on me, that familiar burn I felt the last time they were on me being a dead giveaway.

It’s almost like we were silently taking turns to look at each other. Study each other. The scorched trail of embers his stare was leaving behind confirmed to me that he was tracing the edges of my face, and I was distracting myself from how much I liked it by trying to figure out what I could do to make it stop.

“You doing okay?” He asks, eyes still on me.

I don’t budge. “Me? Yeah, fine. All hunky-dory over here.”

I feel his eyes narrow. “Hunky-dory?”

My lips roll together as I try not to laugh at how that phrase sounds with his accent. “Means I’m doing okay.”

“Oh.” Silence graces us for approximately three seconds before he asks, “Were you crying just now?”

I dread the way my stomach falls from its place the second his words lather in my ears, and for the life of me, I don’t know if I can answer him. I know I can’t look him in the eyes, not like before anyway, because then I hadn’t realised he’d caught me crying. Now, I felt more vulnerable, like a barrier of professionalism had been broken between us, and things were about to get personal. I didn’t want them to.

“No…no. Just something in my eye.” My eyes were trying so hard to focus on the ducks.

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