Why I was pushing him on this, I had no idea. But I needed something from him. Some sign that I wouldn’t regret coming here. Some sort of emotion that didn’t make me want to run back to California.
“Thirty-six,” he said without missing a beat.
I raised a brow.
“One thousand, nine hundred, and seventy-three,” he rattled off next.
“Oh?”
His eyes darkened a degree. “Zero.”
My breath hitched, even though I had no idea what any of this stood for.
“Do I get a translation, or do I just get to wonder what they mean?”
He rubbed his jaw and then shrugged. “You’ll figure it out, Ms. MIT.”
I groaned, but there was a hint of a smile on his face now. Even if it was tilted, more of a smirk, and only a fraction of the Sully smile I knew well. But it was something. It was everything, actually—all that I needed right now.
“You don’t have to carry my bag,” I said, gesturing to his hand curled around the handle of my worn canvas tote.
“It’s fine,” he muttered, raking a hand through his messy blond hair, which was longer than I’d ever seen it. I really wished his indignation were a little less adorable. At least until he said, “For the record, if you didn’t want me showing up here to help, you shouldn’t have called my goddamnbrother.”
Yeah, I’d been wondering when he was going to bring that up.
“He was the only person I knew who might be nearby, what with the proximity to campus,” I tried to explain, not wanting to mention that Theo had texted me.
Sully’s expression hardened a little, and he looked like he was biting his tongue—holding himself back from saying something—and I couldn’t decide if I wanted him to let it out or not.
Eventually, he just said, “Let’s go,” and then gestured toward the exit.
My legs were wooden as I walked across the cafe, my heart beating in odd rhythms.
He was silent behind me—an odd thing in and of itself. As we walked out the door, I felt his fingers brush against the small of my back before his hand flattened there, guiding me to the left.
His touch was just as electrifying as ever, and I unconsciouslyslipped away, quickening my steps now now that I saw his car parked right by the entrance.
It was too much—feeling his hands on me. There was over a decade of memories that coincided with that touch, but there was also one night in particular that I couldn’t get out of my mind. One night not that long ago, when his hands had been all over me. One night that my brain had been playing on repeat for most of the summer. One night I couldn’t afford to think about right now.
“Wow, Eleanor.” Sully’s husky voice tickled the back of my neck while I felt him purposefully falling back, putting distance between us. “With how fast you’re trying to get away from me, you’d think youweren’tjust on your knees begging for?—”
“Can you…not?” I stopped in my tracks and whipped around.
He lifted a brow, that charismatic smirk lifting the corner of his mouth. Something about it was off, though. “What?”
I glared. Because he knew exactly what, and I hated how flippantly he was doing it. Like that night had just been fun, casual sex that hadn’t meant anything. Like we hadn’tbothbeen begging each other for things we couldn’t entirely give.
“Oh, are we going to pretend it didn’t happen?” he pressed, and a muscle in his jaw seemed to jump at the idea. “That I didn’t fuck you so hard you saw stars a few weeks ago?”
A humorless laugh left my lips. He had no idea how impossible that was going to be—to pretend it didn’t happen—but I just wasn’t convinced this was the time or place to bring that up.
“I assumed that was what you wanted,” I shot back. “Considering you left Boston without saying, I don’t know…goodbye?”
His lips pressed together, his smirk vanishing. “Is that why you came all the way to Minnesota? To yell at me for that?”
I shook my head while taking a step backward. “Not exactly, but I’d love to know why you just left like none of it mattered. LikeIdidn’t?—”
I cut myself off, choking on words I shouldn’t say. A rabbit hole I shouldn’t go down. He didn’t need to know how much ithad hurt to wake up alone that morning. He didn’t need to know that I wondered constantly if that night had mattered to him the way it mattered to me.
