The message hung there unsent because my thumb decided to sit in the space between nerve and nerve. You can talk a big game about brave. Sometimes brave looks like pressing a blue arrow on a screen.
Before I could commit, the lobby doors whispered open behind me on a gust of damp December, and her voice rode in with it.
“I swear, if one more person bumps me with a stroller, I’m moving to…the Alps.” Shopping bags rustled; heels clicked. “Or a monastery.”
Melanie walked in carrying the city like a coat she couldn’t decide whether to keep. Two bags hit one hip, another dangled off her elbow like it had opinions. Her hair was up in a high, slightly defeated bun, which somehow made her cheekbones criminal. The cold had painted her cheeks and the bridge of her nose, the kind of pink you only get from weather you survive.
She was mid-conversation when she saw me. The sentence snapped clean in half.
For a second, the whole lobby went quiet. Or maybe it didn’t; maybe the traffic kept doing what traffic does, and the elevator kept protesting, and Tad kept auditing my soul. But her face did a thing—tight to bright, cautious to lit—and I felt something in my chest answer like a dog hearing its name.
“Drew?” she said, careful and warm in the same breath.
“It’s me.”
She’d finally given herself permission to feel what her eyes had already done. “Drew.”
“Hey, Babe,” I said.
The bags slid out of her hands. One tipped, disgorging tissue paper and a sweater the exact shade of December cheer. She didn’t glance down. She just crossed the distance between us in five of the fastest steps I’ve ever seen anyone take in heels and launched herself into my space like she’d been practicing in her head for days.
We collided with the kind of relief that rearranges posture. I got an arm around her without dropping the pancakes, pulled her in, and breathed. She smelled like rain and peppermint and a department store candle that swore it was a fir tree. Her laugh landed somewhere near my heart.
I remembered Tad and turned my head just enough to say, “See? I’m not a bad guy.”
Tad’s mouth twitched. “I never said you were.”
“You implied it with your eyes, Tad,” I chuckled.
He coughed into his tie and found something urgent to look at on his screen.
Mel pulled back enough to look me over, hands staying at my sides like she didn’t entirely trust I was real. “You drove? Or did you…teleport?”
“I drove.”
“You absolute maniac,” she said, and then softer, like an apology for every ship that had passed in fog this week, “Hi.”
“Hi,” I said. I lifted the bag and the box. “Brought provisions. Pancakes. And, uh, scones.”
Her eyes went soft. “Riley?”
“Label says ‘For Brave Idiots.’ I think she meant both of us.”
“I’ll thank her when I visit,” she said, giggling.
Good sign, right?
A giggle.
We stood there grinning like actual idiots until the elevator chimed and a small parade of humanity flowed around us, an elderly woman with a dog in a sweater, a guy balancing six Amazon boxes like a circus act, and a teenager wearing headphones the size of planets.
Mel noticed me noticing. Her smile twitched at the edges, a little fond and a little sad. I could see the thought moving through her. City magic. City noise. Cityeverything.
Reckless River couldn’t compete with this kind of constant.
Before melancholy could assign seats, I tipped my head toward the desk.
“Ready to be underwhelmed by my apartment?”
