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He winced. “Grace-”
“And now here you are, acting like nothing happened and I should just—what? Pretend nothing happened, too? Let you go right back to the way we were like it’s all fine? Well it’s not fine, and I’m not going to pretend. Not even for a second.”
His facial expression morphed into downright shocked, and she found that she didn’t much care for it. In fact, it ticked her off so badly she swore she saw double for a hot second before she was able to use the solid wall of graham crackers at her side to ground herself.
“Grace, listen,” Anton tried again, but the slap of Grace’s free hand against the box of graham crackers cut him off.
“No, you listen, Anton,” she said, punctuating her words with a tap of her fingers against the boxes.“You were my friend.”
“Grace-”
This time it was she who marched forward, backing him up, gesturing with her tablet. “For months we talked and got to know each other, and you don’t know how much those messages meant to me. How much hearing from you meant to me. You started to become more than a friend to me. I cared about you, Anton.”
His brows knit together in concern. “Those messages meant something to me too.”
“Then why did you-” She stopped speaking when her voice cracked, and she looked away from him. “It doesn't matter why you did what you did. You hurt me.”
“I didn’t mean to. You have to believe that. It was a mistake.”
When he made to shift toward her, Grace snatched up a 5lb bag of marshmallows, a risky move given that she still waved her tablet in the other hand, and pretended to give the marshmallows an assessing look.
“Mistake or not, it happened, and there’s no going back.”
“Why not?” Anton asked, voice soft. “Why isn’t there? We can be friends again. It was one day. We’ve had so many other days and conversations, Grace. Give me a second chance to make this up to you.”
She wanted to do as he asked and give him a second chance. It was weak of her, but she wanted to do it because that would mean she’d have him. She’d have her Anton back, but Grace couldn’t do it. It was a slippery slope of enforcing boundaries and all that. Her hand tightened on the bag of marshmallows and she forced a thin smile.
“Because out of all of those days, that one, Anton, mattered the most.” She blinked against the telltale stinging of her eyes that meant she was close to tears. She would have given her right arm for the ability to adopt an unaffected air in this moment.
Why couldn’t she be frosty and perfunctory when confronted with him? Why was she nearly in tears and clutching marshmallows as if her life depended on it?
Because you still care about him.
She didn’t like that thought and batted it away. It didn’t matter what she cared about and didn’t care about. She was not going to let him sweet talk his way back into her good graces. Anton was not going to get another chance to hurt her.
“Do you know how much I-” Her throat closed around the lump in it, moving her a little closer to the threshold of tears than she was comfortable with, so she did what any self-respecting woman waving a bag of marshmallows and a tablet with a stick figure drawing could do when she hoped to save face. “I have a lot of work to do, Anton. I’ll-well, if you have anything I need to take care of, have Mindy send it my way, please.”
His face darkened and his shoulders drooped. “Work isn’t what’s important here, Grace. We need to talk about what happened.”
She shifted the marshmallow bag, which she’d squeezed into a single malformed lump of playdoh, to the top of the tablet and gave both a shake.
“What happened?” she asked, eliciting a nod from Anton. “Okay, here’s what happened. You hurt me, but it’s okay. I’m a big girl, and that means I conveniently own a pair of big girl pants I can put on, which means we will work together just fine. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” She held up the tablet and marshmallow bag duo and gave them another shake. “I have to move all of this on my own.”
“Where are you moving it?” he asked.
“Nunya,” she replied, glaring at the mountain of treats in front of her.
When she had ordered it all, the plan had seemed simple: purchase copious amounts of alcohol and enough supplies for s’mores to drown a boy scout troop, and use said supplies to throw a s’mores party that would be talked about forever.
What Grace hadn’t really considered in her party supply buying frenzy was transporting her goods to the top of Mont Salève. To be fair, she had counted on the usual manpower normally roaming the docks in bountiful supply. All a lady needed on those days was a please and a thank you to get the wheels moving.
But now? Now she was going to have to resort to bribery at the very least. She scowled at the crew moving Anton’s tech. She’d be lucky if she could pry a dolly from them at this point.
“Real mature,” he replied, crossing his arms.
She stuck out her tongue. “It wasn’t intended to be. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get a move on, and I don’t particularly feel like talking to you because, big girl pants or not, I’m still mad at you.”
“Where are you moving all of this stuff to?” Anton asked again, ignoring her glare, which Grace might have been impressed at under normal circumstances, but all it did was feed her annoyance at the man.
