Page 101 of Fate Fiction

Save you the train cost.

I can walk.

Maybe: Evan:

Even more of a reason to pick you up.

It wasn’t worth the fight. He clearly wasn’t good at letting things go, if him talking to me again in the first place was any indication. I poured myself a shot of the only liquor I had in the house—cheap vodka I used to make pasta sauce—then hesitantly sent him my address. I quickly scanned my living room in case he could see a glimpse of it through my front door, a new layer of myself ready and waiting to be perceived by Evan.

All my Thorndown artifacts were gone, it was clean, and my decor made it seem like I was a normal, interesting adult. He wouldn’t be able to look too closely and see the messy piles of laundry in my bedroom or the empty bag of chips stuffed into the trash can.

I sucked in a shaky breath. Evan McLeod was en route to me. He’d text me. The chauffeur would open the back of the hired car. I’d slide in the back seat beside him. We’d ride to the restaurant in painful, tortuous silence. It would likely be one of the less uncomfortable parts of the night.

My bedroom mirror was sick of seeing me as I checked my reflection for the nth time. I fussed with my hair until my curls flattened. I couldn’t sit still, and I couldn’t go for a run, so I paced, and paced, waiting for the “here” text.

What would I say after “hey”? He’d wrecked my plans to walk over by myself. The fifteen minutes in the late summer air would be the closest thing I’d get to a run tonight, and now his chivalry squashed that.

The door buzzed.

I prayed to the universe that it was a delivery driver at the wrong address. I knew it wasn’t. Evan had a tendency to show up when I wasn’t ready for him. As I grabbed my purse off the crooked hook in my entryway I could see a tall, broad silhouette waving through the frosted glass window.

A sheepishly smiling Evan was revealed once I opened the door. He was in a linen button down shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the top few buttons unbuttoned. His hands were shoved into his pockets, making the veins in his tanned arms pop.

Slut, I thought.

Silence hung between us like lingering summer humidity. We were in a standoff. A competition to see who would be the first to break and greet the other person. This was a terrible start to the evening.

“Hey,” he said. Soft. Gentle. Like a passing breeze. Not at all like a standoff.

All that mental work to get myself into a neutral headspace went out the window. My palms grew sweaty. My knees trembled. Evan Fucking McLeod was standing in front of me. The emotions I’d felt during that week in June came rushing back. Like. Lust. Loss.

“Hey, uh, let me lock up and we can go,” my voice warbled through the greeting. I was remarkably flustered. The same as I’d been when we first met. Any comfort between us had been swiftly undone.

Did he feel it too? Logic told me to doubt that he also had a flint strike of a spark in the back of his mind when he saw me.

I peered around him down the street, seeking out a limo or a black car with tinted windows. “Where’s your car waiting? I'll meet you there.”

“I drove myself,” his brows furrowed a bit. He looked mildly offended, but the emotion cleared from his face quickly. “I thought we could walk over together. It’s a nice night, and I’ve been stuck inside conference rooms all day.”

“It is nice out,” I agree. We’d relegated ourselves to talking about the weather. Off to a great start. I shut my front door and stepped out beside him, my nose nearly pressed into his sternum. “Aren’t you worried about other people approaching you?”

“I figured I’d take my chances,” he shrugged casually.

We descended my front steps side by side. Evan almost extended his arm for me to grasp onto as we walked down, but it snapped back against his torso. Reaching for me came second nature to him.

“You look great,” he said. He could barely look up from staring at his shoes as we walked.

So that’s what the mood of the night was going to be. Perfunctory compliments. Small talk. First date fodder. I could manage that and pretend that he was some random guy off a dating app that I’d reluctantly agree to spend my night with.

“You do too,” I matched his tone and energy. I wouldn’t show my cards and let any of my panic bubble up to the surface.

The amber light of the early evening cast a glow on us. Our shadows stretched long ahead of our footsteps as we walked down the sidewalk. The silence was hardly comfortable but it was tolerable enough that neither of us wanted to be the first to ruin it. Evan kept glancing down at me, studying me as if I had the answers to life’s questions painted on my skin.

“Why are you here?” I blurted out and he shot another not-so-subtle look.

We were both shocked by my break in the quiet. We stopped on the sidewalk and stood face to face with one another. Unsure if it was the shadows or the way he curled his lip slightly, Evan seemed tense.

It wasn’t in a frustrated way, more of a nervous energy he couldn’t dispel sort of way. I’d expected his fear and anger to merge together into festering lava, burbling beneath his skin, ready to burst. Instead, there was a coolness about him. The volcano had erupted and all that was left was obsidian. I squared my footing and pulled my shoulders back. I was on guard, a blockade built around me ready to reflect anything he might say.