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Compartmentalizing was a gift. And the only reason she was able to force an easy smile onto her face as she pulled out the chair across from Colin.
His eyes tracked her movements. “I was starting to wonder if you were going to come.”
“Why? I’m notthatlate.” Allison would have dragged herself here bleeding if it had come to that. No way would she gift Colin an entire afternoon alone with their professor.
“You didn’t see Wendy’s email?”
Allison shook her head. “I’ve been in recitation all morning.”
He flipped over his phone, his finger brushing up and down the screen. “She had a cat emergency and isn’t coming. She wants us to go without her.”
Allison grabbed for her own phone. He had to be joking. The universe was not this cruel. Yet there it was, at the top of her inbox: a brief but apologetic email from Wendy encouraging Allison and Colin to attend the lecture and “report back on the interesting bits.”
Her first instinct was to bolt—she could not spend an entire afternoon alone with Colin Fucking Benjamin, like they were on a date or something—but knowing him, he would go to this lecture without her and send Wendy a fifty-page report. Letting him look more dedicated than her was not an option.
While she continued to white knuckle her phone with one hand, she flipped open her menu with the other. Colin had been observing her closely, and his posture relaxed when he saw her studying the entrees.
“I was going to order for us, but I wasn’t sure…” His voice trailed off the same way it had the other day after Wendy’s class. Uncertain and nervous.
Allison hated how the tone flipped her stomach. This new version of Colin was like an alchemical bomb to her body. Why was vulnerability in him so damn alluring? What she needed was one of his shit-eating grins or for him to give her a good ol’ “but actually” followed by a healthy dose of mansplaining. That would reset her equilibrium to “push Colin Benjamin off a steep cliff” mode.
She gulped down two large sips of water. “Sure of what?”
His fingers tapped the edge of the table. “I didn’t know if shrimp pad thai was still your go-to?”
There’d been a Thai restaurant the two of them had frequented when they were dating, and Allisonalwayschose the pad thai. Once you found a dish you liked, why branch out? That only led to regrets. Meal FOMO, as it were.
But, small as it might be, ordering her favorite meal would be admitting that she hadn’t changed. Allison needed Colin to know she wasn’t the same girl he’d treated so heartlessly two years ago. She needed to remind herself of that, too.
“I’m into drunken noodles these days,” she announced, reading off the first thing she saw on the menu.
Colin raised an eyebrow. “You like the heat now, huh?”
There was a playfulness to his voice that Allison hadn’t expected, and she couldn’t help but respond to it, that constant urge to pull where he pushed getting the better of her. “You have no idea.”
He narrowed his eyes devilishly.
Fire burned in her cheeks. She tried to hide it beneath her long hair as she studied the menu like it was a GRE practice test. She couldn’t do this with him. Flirt. Make allusions to sex like it was still on the table. As if their past didn’t exist.
As if it didn’t hover over their present, ready to strike again.
Allison cleared her throat, her eyes searching the table for a safer topic. A paperback book sat beside his arm, a spoon jammed in the pages to save his place.Perfect.
“What’s this?” she asked, reaching for it.
The corners of the faded cover curled inward, and the spine was bent enough from repeated use to obscure the title. It reminded her of her old copies ofThe Hunger Gamesseries, so well-loved the glue from the spine had given way. She bet the pages crunched rather than whispered and that it smelled like time and ink and old paper.
The light dimmed in his eyes as Colin trapped the cover beneath his palm. He drew the book into his lap like something precious. “It’s my grandfather’s copy ofSir Gawain and the Green Knight.He loves this stuff.”
“You’re reading ahead?” It wouldn’t surprise her.
“No. Just trying to feel closer to him.”
Colin had grown up with his grandfather and his mom. After having him at seventeen, his mother had put herself through college while working full-time, leaving Colin with his grandpa after school and on the weekends. He used to love to regale Allison with stories of the mayhem the two of them would cause: almost sawing down the big maple tree in the backyard trying to build a fort, racing to see who could read books faster until they both had splitting headaches, experimenting with whatever food was in the kitchen like they were on some chaotic reality TV show. Colin and his grandfather were the best of friends, same as Allison and her mom.
Family trauma had a way of doing that. Bonding you firmly to the person who seemed most safe. Least likely to disappear.
The times Colin had confided in her about his family had been some of the moments where Allison had felt closest to him. Maybe that’s why she asked, “Is everything okay?”
