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“Drop it, Tansy.”
She didn’t want to. Her eyes blazed, but my sister held up her hands and let the subject drop. “Fine. Just ... promise me you’ll talk to her. Don’t be that dumbass who makes unilateral decisions without getting her input, okay? That shit makes me ragey.”
I stared at her for a few seconds. “I don’t know why I keep coming to you for advice.”
Tansy laughed, coming around the kitchen island to wrap me in a tight hug. I settled my arms around my little sister and sighed.
“Because you love me and you know that I only want you to be happy,” she said.
“I do know that.” I dropped a kiss on top of her head. “I’ll talk to her, I promise.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
CHARLOTTE
Someone, somewhere, should’ve written up a brochure for people who had been light on relationships in adulthood. Because I’d completely forgotten how to play this whole “Are we or aren’t we?” bullshit game with a man whom I wanted.
A man who clearly wanted me.
Before he had to leave, Burke Barrett was about ten minutes away from testing the strength of my bed frame, and I’d have bet my entire life savings on his ability to break it.
If he’d stayed, we would have crossed our last line.
My last line.
Every single night he was gone, I lay in that bed—completely and utterly alone—and played it on an annoying loop in my head.
All I could think about, in those moments alone, was how much I wanted him. Over me. Blotting out all the light in the room, muting all the doubts and questions in my head about what had happened.
The worst part was that it was so much bigger than want. That was the thing I didn’t know what to do with. It wasn’t just about sex. It was about the quieter stuff that made up a life.
He knew—physically—what to do with me. That much was obvious. The man knew how to kiss. Damn it, did he know how to kiss.
He did not know how to maintain healthy communication once he crossed state lines.
When I’d shown Daphne our midweek text exchange, she’d sighed quite dramatically. “He needs Richard to teach him a thing or two about how to woo a woman.”
“Didn’t Richard buy you a toaster oven for your birthday and you threw it at his head?”
She cocked an eyebrow. “That’s like foreplay to us. He made it up to me later.”
She wasn’t wrong, though. It became quite clear, after our strained phone call, that between me and Burke, neither of us had any clue how to navigate our fumbled interactions.
I eyed the clock as I wandered the hotel lobby, staring through the windows overlooking East Huron Street, knowing that his plane back had landed close to two hours earlier. There was still no sign of him.
In our text exchange, when we’d solidified his change in travel for the event, he’d said he would be there. There was no way he’d ditch me here by myself. And my stupid heart ached at the thought of seeing him again.
Because I couldn’t be trusted on my own, I pulled out my phone again and checked the arrivals at the airport.
Yup. Landed. Either he was dead in a ditch somewhere, he waswalkingto the hotel, or ... he wasn’t here.
My thumb hovered over the speech-bubble icon, and I tapped his name to read through the last messages before I could talk myself out of it.
Burke:I won’t be able to leave until the day of. Because it’s a night game, I’ll fly straight into Detroit. It’s less than an hour from Ann Arbor.
Me:What time does your flight land? I have a meeting with a stained-glass window vendor I’ve never met in person, and I need to talk to him about one of my virtual clients.
Burke:When’s your meeting?
