Was she calling Elliott the weirdo, or her? Either way, she wasn’t wrong.
“Clare?”
She spun to face him. “Elliott.” Yup. She’d said nothing but his name to him, three times and counting. While she might have enjoyed how her tongue felt around it, he probably already knew his own name.
An uncertain smile spread across his face as he opened his arms. Was he going to hug her? Cheese and crackers, hell no. If he did that, she’d be forced to feel him all around her, and she might do something even more embarrassing than covering him in boxes of Tampax…like…sniff him. Did he still smell of soap?
She held up her two bags as though they were enough of an explanation as to why she couldn’t return his hug.
“Long time.” His sad eyes almost made her want to drop her bags and throw herself into his arms.
Almost.
“Yeah. Long time.” It was the understatement of the century, but she nodded.
“How are you? You look good.”
And he was still a lying liar who lied. He told her he wouldn’t leave to play hockey. And when he did, he told her he’d come back. He never came back.
A zebra never changed its stripes. Or whatever the hell the thing about people never changing was. Clearly his presence still fucked up her ability to think straight.
“You too.”
He tucked his hands into his back pockets and rocked back on his heels like anaw shucksteenager asking a girl out for the first time.
She almost laughed. “Well, I better get going.” She lifted her bags again. Another reminder of the Big Red Emergency. Peachy.
All she needed to do to complete her mortification, was to trip over thin air and land on her face as she left.
“Clare?”
She was almost at the door before that voice crashed into her again, stopping her in her tracks and warming her all over.
That was her name, don’t wear it out. Pausing, she turned her chin over her shoulder, but he didn’t say anything else. She turned a little more, enough to see his brows knit into a frown and a huge sigh escape him.
He tossed her a half-shrug. “It was good to see you.”
Liar. A pap smear would have been more enjoyable, and he didn’t even have a fucking cervix. Rolling her lips between her teeth in a bid to stop a salty response from breaking free, she nodded. “You too.”
She sank into the driver’s seat of her car and tossed the bag over her shoulder into the back seat. Then she slammed the door. She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t look at the door to CVS because he’d undoubtedly be standing there, watching her hot mess self having a nervous breakdown at seeing him.
She was pulling out of the parking lot when movement in the rearview mirror caught her attention. Catriona stood at the entrance to the drugstore, waving both her hands like she was stranded at sea and flagging down a rescue.
Clare slammed on the brakes. She’d forgotten her fucking daughter. Though the way the kid stood swinging her hands over her head was testament to the fact she had indeed been hiding inside the building and ignoring Clare’s hollering outright.
Jerking the door to the passenger seat open, Catriona erupted into a fit of giggles. “I can’t believe you were going to drive off without me, Mom.”
“And I can’t believe you hid in the drugstore and pretended I wasn’t asking you questions about your period products.”
The mother of all eye rolls preceded a tut. “I can’t believe you were asking me questions about my period products in a voice that was not what anyone would have considered a suitable indoor voice.”
It was her turn to eye roll. There was no mistaking where her kid got her sassitude from.
“Know what else I can’t believe, Mom?”
Clare quirked her brow as she pulled out of the parking lot for the second time.
“I can’t believe you’re just driving home as though we’re going to ignore the fact you were just talking to a hottie in the drugstore. Well.” She held up a palm before another fit of giggles hit. “I don’t think we could really call that talking, can we?”
