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“Can I read it?” she asked softly, mischievously as she eyed me with a raised brow.
I nodded toward the note, silently urging her to.
She bit her lip, her eyes lighting up as she unfolded the paper, her mouth breaking into an unrestrained smile when she read the words.
“Charmer,” she whispered, her attention fixing on me. “What made you start writing the notes?”
I leaned forward to take the paper from her fingers. Setting it to the side, I gripped her hands in mine. “I had to say something to you. Whenever I saw you, I wondered what could be so bad about your life that even your smiles looked sad. But at that point I still couldn’t bring myself to come near you. And then I noticed there would be days where you would write in a notebook. Just for a minute or two. But your friend would spend the whole hour reading whatever you’d written, and you always had this look like you were in denial and waiting for your life to change. And then I had to know. So I wrote to you.”
“I kept them all,” she admitted shyly.
My eyebrows lift in surprise. “Yeah? Is that what your friend spent hours on?”
“No.” She huffed, but the amusement was suddenly gone from her face. “No, she, uh . . . she has a thing with trying to understand dreams and nightmares. I would write down my nightmares, and she’d try to figure them out.”
“Just your nightmares?” I asked. “Do you have a lot?”
“Only one. It’s recurring.”
I could tell from the tense way she held herself she didn’t want to explain, so I didn’t push her. I wouldn’t want to relive my nightmare over and over again.
Unable to avoid it any longer, I lowered my voice and asked, “Why were you gone?”
Her expression fell, panic and pain so intense flashed across her eyes before she was able to drop her head to stare at her lap. “I’m sorry. I—” A pained sigh ripped from her, her jaw clenching in response.
I slipped out of my side and into hers, wrapping my arm around her tensed shoulders and pulling her close. “Elle, hey . . . what happened?”
“You knew I would have to come and go.”
“Yeah, but I thought you’d say bye.”
Her face pinched and mouth opened to respond, but nothing came out.
Pressing my knuckles under her chin, I lifted her head until she was looking at me again. I pushed the glasses back up her nose, the corners of my mouth tilting up in response to her amused huff. “Elle, what happened?”
“I panicked,” she said with a shrug. “You knew I couldn’t stay as long as I had to. I should’ve been gone as soon as those doors unlocked, but I fell asleep. As soon as I woke up, I panicked.”
My chest rose and fell roughly once when I picked up on the catches on some of her words.
She was telling me the truth.
Kind of.
There was something she was keeping from me.
But she’d warned me this was what she was going to do, and I’d begged her to lie to me just so I could keep her in my life.
And I was a bastard for being frustrated with it, because there were about a dozen things I was keeping from her.
“If I pushed you too fast that night—”
“No. No,” she said adamantly. “I needed to get home. I was already so late. That night . . . God, Dare, I can’t explain—”
A body slammed into me just as a voice cried out, “Oh, oh!” from behind me.
I glared over my shoulder at Diggs as he pushed Elle and me farther into the booth, but quickly forgot about him when I found his brother sliding into the other side. “Hey, hey, newbie.”
“Leave,” I demanded on a low growl just as Libby walked around the corner of the booth and pulled Diggs out from behind me.
