Page 41 of Always Meant for You
Heat kicks through my chest. My pulse spikes. I forget how to breathe.
I want to close the gap between us. I want to touch her. Kiss her. Say her name. Pull her back into the life she abandoned and make her remember what she once loved about this place.
I want to make her mine.
Jesus. No. I cannot go there.
We study each other. Frozen. Wordless. The hum of the diner dulls around us.
For the space of a breath, I catch the grief welling behind her eyes, raw and heavy. But it vanishes in the next blink.
Her spine straightens. Chin lifts. Her armor locks into place.
“It doesn’t work on me, Cal. It never has,” she says, her voice sharp enough to draw blood.
She’s the same firecracker. Ready to blow.
I can’t take my eyes off her. “What doesn’t work on you?”
“Your broody sulk of a glare.” She waves a hand through the air, dismissing me.
She might’ve learned that attitude in New York, but she’s not there anymore.
This is my ground.
“I’m not broody,” I snap, and the second it leaves my mouth, I hear how broody it sounds.
“Whatever,” she coos. “But I must say, I never pictured you waiting tables. When did that happen?”
I scoff.
Did Elias not tell her a damn thing?
“I don’t work here, Mabel.”
She shifts in her seat, crossing and uncrossing her legs.
Is she nervous?
“I’m waiting for my father. Go glare at someone else.”
I’m ready to fire back a reply when her hand moves to the chain around her neck.
And I almost forget how to stand.
“You still wear that?”
She holds the M charm between her fingers. “Not that it’s any of your business, but yes. I treasure it. It makes me feel closer to . . .”
She doesn’t finish, but I feel it all the same. The ache and the grief that connects us like an invisible thread. It’s Jamie, it’s loss, and it’s the space neither of us knows how to cross.
She releases the M charm and brushes her knuckles against her collarbone. Her bottom lip trembles, and I know—I know—she’s thinking about that night in her room. How, for one brief second, the noise stopped. The bickering, the barbs. It all faded.
Now we’re left with this messy, magnetic, maddening pull between us.
She thinks I ignored her for all those years.
She has no idea.
