Page 69 of Cherry Picking

“Ew. Not me. You.” I point at him. “That was beyond childish.”

He chuckles roughly. “It was. When we were interrupted, everything that’s gone wrong in my life came flooding back in. I put that on you, and it wasn’t fair.”

I raise a brow. “And tonight?”

“More shit has gone wrong.” His expression is stripped of its usual defenses. “But it doesn’t make me want to run anymore. It makes me want less space between us.”

Damn him. Damn him for saying it so plainly, in my living room, while he’s wearing that suit, when I’ve spent two weeks building a very nice wall between us.

I let out a heavy sigh and head for the cushions. “You want a drink?”

“I could do one. Got an early flight.”

I retreat to the kitchen and pull down the plum wine, the fancy stuff Tomás brought me back from his trip to Connecticut. I pour two glasses and carry them over, and when he takes his, his thumb brushes the back of my hand.

I do my best not to acknowledge the current that runs straight up my arm.

He looks around the room while I settle into the opposite corner of the sofa. He’s been here exactly once before, and we sure didn’t spend that night sitting politely on a couch.

“So you regret running away?” I ask, raising a brow. “You sure you weren’t driven off by the poster of Vincent Price in my bedroom?”

He grins, that small, stubborn lift of his mustache. “Not at all.”

“Or the altar to my dead houseplants on the windowsill.” When he shakes his head, I add, “Then it must’ve been my general lack of talent in bed. Were you bored or something?”

“Definitely not that.” His finger traces the rim of the glass. “I just got too far into my own head. Decided it’d be better if we didn’t bother trying to untangle the shit that’s up there. You—” He stops, starts over, his voice dropping an octave. “God, Evie. I could spend days in bed with you, and it still wouldn’t be enough.”

The admission lands like a hit. “What is enough for you?”

“What?”

“Tonight,” I murmur, “what was the shitty thing that drove you here?”

He sets the glass on the coffee table. For a long stretch, he doesn’t say anything, and I let the silence do its work. My dad’s the professional at this—thirty years of sitting across from people while they wait for the right combination of words to arrive. I know enough to mimic it, even when my mouth wants to have its merry way.

“I was engaged,” he says. “Before. To Ophelia.”

I blink. “You were?”

“We had four years together. I bought her a ring. We set a date, made the venue deposit, the whole thing. She was—” He shakes his head. “She grew up here. She knew me before any of the money, before the call-up. That’s rare in my life. People who knew me first.”

“Okay,” I say quietly.

The fact that he was engaged doesn’t surprise me as much as the fact that I care. I know Ophelia was important. I saw it in the way Murphy reacted to her, in the way she looked at the house, like she still had some claim to it. But knowing they were once going to get married makes something inside me tighten.

He watches my face.

“I was with her when I got called up,” he says. “She was there before Charlotte and the contracts, before people knew my name.”

I nod once. “And then?”

“Two years ago, I flew home in the offseason. Zig and I were sharing a place then, this shitty condo in Summerlin I kept so he’d have somewhere stable. He was out. His phone was on the counter, and I picked it up to order food because mine was dead.” He’s staring at the middle distance now, somewhere over the coffee table. “There was a text thread between them.”

The room goes quiet, and I wince as the heater ticks.

“Ophelia and Ziggy,” I say so he doesn’t have to.

“The whole time I was in Charlotte doing my season, my fiancée and my little brother were—” The sentence dies. He picks up the wine and takes a huge mouthful. “I read every message. Tortured myself. Sat on his couch and read the entire thing top to bottom like it was going to change if I got to the end.”