“She loved them,” Sierra told me, not quite pulling off neutral.
“I did.” Lauren looked at the prints on the wire, their voice going quieter. “She makes me look like I’m worth paying attention to.”
The room went soft.
Sierra faced the window, pretending to check something on the counter, but her ears had gone pink. She was standing in a room with someone who’d said something true, and she was trying not to disturb it.
I stayed for twenty minutes. Drank half a cup of coffee. Watched Sierra refill Lauren’s mug before her own without noticing she’d done it.
Walking home, the October cold biting at my collar, I thought about what it looked like to love someone quietly. Not the way I was learning with Ellis. All chest-first and terrified. The way you’d add someone to a room and watch the light change.
Sierra had found her person. And her person made her brave enough to hang the pictures.
Chapter fourteen
We were at the loud espresso bar on Vanderbilt on a Saturday morning when it happened.
Not our usual spot. Ellis preferred the quieter café two blocks from his apartment, the one with the wobbly tables and the barista who already knew his order. But they were closed for renovations, so we’d walked the extra ten minutes to a spot on Vanderbilt, which was louder, more crowded, and had the exposed-concrete aesthetic that made every twenty-something feel like they were starring in their own documentary.
I didn’t mind. The coffee was good and Ellis looked stupidly handsome in the morning light coming through the floor-to-ceiling windows, reading something on his phone with his brow furrowed in that way that meant either a work email or a recipe he disagreed with.
“Stop staring at me.” He didn’t look up from his phone.
“I’m not staring. I’m admiring. There’s a difference.”
“The difference being?”
“Staring is creepy. Admiring is romantic.”
“It’s creepy when you do it, too.” But the corner of his mouth lifted, andhe reached across the table and stole a piece of my croissant without asking, which I took as deep trust and emotional intimacy.
That’s when she walked in.
I didn’t notice her at first. Tall, blonde, athletic, the kind of woman who ran half-marathons and had opinions about protein powder. She was ordering at the counter when Ellis went rigid across from me.
Not the work-call rigid from a few weeks ago. Different. Deeper. His body clocking someone before his brain caught up.
“What?” I whispered.
“Nothing.”
“Ellis.”
He set his phone down. “My ex just walked in.”
I didn’t turn around. Wanted to, badly, with every nosy bone in my body screaming at me to look. But the flat, careful, bracing way he’d said it told me this wasn’t a moment for my usual theatrics.
“Which ex?”
“The closest thing to one. Hannah.”
The closest thing. Because Ellis hadn’t had a parade of them the way I had. He hadn’t really had any. Just Hannah, a long stretch of months he’d never put a label on, dates that weren’t dates, sex that was supposed to be casual, sleepovers he’d told himself didn’t mean anything. He’d ghosted her when she’d asked for more. The way I would’ve. The way he’d watched me almost do that first week. And then a stretch of nothing, and then me.
“Does she know about…”
“No.”
“Okay.”
