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“Tasha, you don’t understand—”
“I don’t understand what? That you’re falling head over heels and are miserable without him, or that you’re too chicken-shit to admit it?”
I glare at her, but, dammit, she’s right. On all counts.
“Look,” she says. “We’ve been friends for a while now. I know it’s not easy for you to take advice, but I’m going to tell you anyway. Don’t let this one get away. I’m not saying that because he’s crazy rich and hot as sin besides. I’m saying it because last night I saw the way you two look at each other.”
“Tasha—”
“He needs you, Avery. Maybe he won’t say the words to you either, but they’re right there in his eyes. And you need him too.”
I purse my lips as she finishes. “May I speak now?”
She gestures for me to go ahead.
“You’re the best friend I’ve ever had, you know that? Thank you for caring about me. Not just now, but ever since I walked into this place looking for work and you made sure I got interviewed ahead of anyone else.” I pull her into a hug. “I love you.”
“I love you, too, girl.” She draws back, holding my upper arms and giving me a stern maternal look. “Now go tell him how you feel.”
One of the other employees calls for her from behind the bar, and I take the opportunity to edge toward the door.
“Call me afterward,” she says. “I mean it. I’m working until eleven tonight. I want to hear from you before I go home.”
I nod as I step out onto Madison Avenue. As I head toward Grand Central under a cloudless blue sky, it seems as if years have passed since the last time I made this trek, not a handful of weeks.
It’s been almost three and a half months since I first laid eyes on Dominic Baine in that lobby elevator.
It’s strange how different everything seems to me now.
I used to feel as though this city and I were at constant odds with each other. I used to think New York sensed me as an interloper in its domain and wanted me gone—that each obstacle I met with since I moved here had been thrown into my path by some cosmic force conspiring to defeat me at every turn.
But it isn’t the city or anything else blocking my way.
It’s me.
Tasha is right. And isn’t that what Nick has been trying to tell me too?
Isn’t that what he’s been teaching me every time he touches me . . . each time he shows me what I truly crave but am too afraid to admit, let alone ask for?
Last night, he knew how badly I wanted to let him in. He promised I could trust him. He is giving me the chance to reach for what I want most of all—him.
Us.
My breath leaks out of me raggedly. My feet slow to a halt in the middle of the busy sidewalk.
“I can’t do this. I can’t shut him out. I can walk away.”
I hardly feel the bumps and jostles of the other pedestrians pushing past me as I dig in my purse for my cell phone. As I pull it out, I see the light is blinking with a new voice message.
Maybe Nick heard I was in Vendange and tried to call me?
I tap the icon, my heart throbbing in my chest.
A man’s recorded voice comes on, but it’s not Nick.
“Ms. Ross, this is Walter Stadler.”
What would my mother’s public defender want with me? Unless it’s about my mother’s parole board review. God, no. I brace myself to hear there’s been another delay or some other wrench thrown into the already slow-moving cogs of justice.
