Page 20 of Awestruck at Dusk
“What kind of surprise?” I shouted back. Damn, I was curious.
“Get dressed!”
Ugh. I did as I was told and walked back a few minutes later shouting, “It better be good, William! You made me cut my shower shor—”
I trailed off when I opened the door, my jaw dislocating.
“Dave, this is my neighbor Billie. Billie, this is my friend, Dave.”
I offered him my hand, speechless, gaping.
This was DavefreakingMatthews standing in front of me.
“Oh, my God!” I squealed as the elevator doors shut behind Dave when he left. My hands shook with excitement. “He’s so nice—wow. I can’t believe I just met him!” I couldn’t stop beaming. We only talked for a couple of minutes since he was on his way out.
William leaned against my door frame, smiling, shaking his head with his arms crossed at his chest. “That’s the kind of reaction I expected when I first met you,” he admitted. “I guess I should’ve been a rock star instead.”
“It’s never too late to find your true passion,” I joked. But that made William frown, for some reason. “You—okay?”
“What? Yeah.” He smiled again. “Anyway, I can’t say I wasn’t frustrated by the fact that you didn’t recognize me. It’d never happened to me before that a girl around your age didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know how to act at first. It was—I don’t know, strange but also liberating. Like for once, I had a real chance of testing out if beingmewas good … enough.”
“William,” I said, tilting my head.Of course,you are.
“And shit, I guess I didn’t make such a good first impression, did I?” he said with a laugh, dragging a hand over his lips. “But Joel kept messing with my head. He was like,there’s no way she doesn’t know who you are, and it fucked me up.
“Ineededto know if you were genuinely unaware or if it was just something you were trying on me. But after that weekend at the cottage, Joel finally believed you.”
I snorted. “Lily mentioned that about Joel a few months ago. How he couldn’t believe it at first. But yeah … I’m justthatstupid.” I chuckled.
“No, you’renotGuille,” he said with a slight grimace and a frown. “You’re one of the smartest, most cultured, and interesting people I know. And even if you would’ve been faking it, I wouldn’t have fucking cared because it was working like a charm. I couldn’t stop thinking about it—about you.” William stood up straight and took a step forward, crossing the threshold. “I wanted to decipher you. To knoweverythingabout you. I wanted so bad to peek inside your head.”
Waiting for the violent cascade of emotions to settle was useless. I swallowed hard and looked away for a second, but they never ceased. William needed to take a step back, or maybe I had to, but I knew I couldn’t. And apparently, neither did he.
I looked up into William’s light sapphire-blue eyes instead, listening to my lungs say,fuck you,I quit, hoping he would say something to break the breathless stillness. But I was helpless against William’s raw honesty and his powerful presence. Always. Every single time.
“But then I realized it wasn’t so hard to do,” he continued, and I took a slow breath in, realizing my lungs werejust kidding. “That’s one of the things that endeared me the most about you. That you don’t have to say a word for me to know what you’re thinking.”
That was a recurrent theme. How transparent I am. Caleb used to say something similar, how he could read my every gesture.
God…I miss him.
I parted my lips to speak, to say whatever nonsense my brain had whipped up for me at the last minute, but apingin the distance released me from the William-induced-trance I was under as Nathan stepped out of the elevator and headed our way. No …marchedour way.
“Hey, you!” I said to Nathan, looking over William’s shoulder with an unnaturally wide smile—cortisol flowing through my veins, stress tackling my nervous system.
Nathan quickly closed the distance between us, the heels of his dress shoes clicking hard on the floor with each step he took.
He leaned in and gave me a quick peck on the lips. “How’s everything, mate?” he said with a blank face, offering his hand to William, who instantly shook it.
“Great, thanks,” William said, his upper lip tight with the usual indifference. “I was wondering if we could talk.”
What?Please say no!
“That’s a great idea, actually,” Nathan replied. He looked away as if thinking how convenient that was. “Do you mind, love?”
“Of course not. I’ll be inside.”Pulling my hair out.
William shot me one of his fake studied smiles that I hated so much and walked out to talk to Nathan in the hall.What the hell are they going to talk about? I had an idea of what Nathan had in mind, but William?
