Page 229 of One of Those Amnesia Stories

His teeth clenched. I could see the muscles working along his jaw, the effort it took to keep his voice from shaking.

“You might think all of this will last forever, but it won’t. You’re ruinous. You don’t deserve—”

I sighed.

“Oh, Michael.” I leaned closer to the glass, taking in the way his eyes flickered, the way his hands gripped the edge of the table. “It must be so hard. Leading a terrible life. Being so alone that you have to make up stories to make yourself feel better.” I tapped the glass with my finger, once, twice. “I hope things never get better for you.”

Then I smiled.

“Gotta go now, Baylee. My husband is waiting.”

His mouth opened.

Something sharp was coming. Something desperate, probably meant to hurt me. But I had already hung up the receiver.

I didn’t wait to hear it.

I didn’t need to.

Outside, Cassian was leaning against the car, his arms and ankles crossed, the picture of patience. His face shifted when he saw me. His shoulders relaxed. A familiar light appeared in his eyes. When I reached him, he pushed off the car and opened his mouth.

When you said you wanted to stop somewhere,” he said, “I didn’t expect it to be prison.”

I reached him and clicked my tongue. “I’m disappointed, Sterling. By now, I should have become predictable to you.”

He shook his head, taking my hands in his. They were cold. They’d gone cold in the few minutes since I’d left the car, despite the fact that he’d spent the entire drive holding them, rubbing warmth into my fingers and pressing them to his lips whenever he thought I wasn’t looking.

“You could never be predictable,” he said.

His thumbs moved slowly over my knuckles. Then he sighed, his shoulders finally dropping as though seeing me again had released some tension he hadn’t realized he was carrying.

“I should have gone with you.”

“Absolutely not.” I squeezed his fingers. “You would’ve just glared at him. It wouldn’t have been fun.”

He frowned—that particular frown he wore when he was trying very hard to be offended and not quite pulling it off.

“I can be fun.”

I tapped his cheek. “Of course you can.”

I turned toward the car. He was already moving, stepping around me, pulling open the door before I could reach for it.

I slid into my seat. He walked around to the driver’s side, got in, and started the engine.

I buckled my seatbelt and turned toward him.

“Are you finally going to tell me where the date is?”

This was something new.

Something we’d fallen into without really meaning to—dates every weekend, taking turns surprising each other. One week mine, the next his. Sometimes, though, we planned them together, sprawled across the couch with our phones in hand, scrolling through lists of things we’d never tried and places we’d never been, arguing over which ones sounded fun and which ones sounded like potential lawsuits.

In the last few months, we’d done things I never would have imagined us doing. A glassblowing class, where he made me a lopsided little bowl that I kept on my desk. A midnight hike to watch the sunrise from a hill neither of us could name. We held a cooking competition in our own kitchen that ended with flour in his hair and my laughter bouncing off the walls.

Last month, I took him indoor skydiving. He screamed the entire time, and then the moment we were back on solid ground, he demanded we do it again.

His turn had been a nighttime picnic in the middle of nowhere. He’d spread out a blanket beneath the open sky and pointed out constellations he had clearly looked up the day before.