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Huh. Somehow, I’m not too surprised. It adds up with her reaction when I accused her of coasting along. But I don’t want to talk about her anymore.
‘I should’ve tried to speak to you properly yesterday,’ I say. ‘I was never going to send those emails. They were just – cathartic. Helping me work through my own stuff, which I realize, now, I kind of took out on you … I don’t even knowwhyI … Anyway,I’m sorry they got out and I dragged you into this mess with me. I know your dad was … He didn’t seem too happy about the whole thing.’
He scoffs, but it’s resigned more than anything else. ‘You could say that.’
I wait, wondering if he wants to tell me – wondering if I have any right to ask, or if that’s unfair of me, after everything.
He catches my eye as if hearing my unspoken question anyway, then tells me, ‘He was furious to think I’d been screwing around with the interns –again. All he really knew about my ex from last year was that she broke up with me and turned down a job offer from Arrowmile a couple of weeks later – I was too embarrassed to tell him what really happened between us. He said I was putting our name and reputation on the line. How I should know better – but it’s like I told you, I never meant … That night we met … I was never supposed to …’
‘I’m sorry it got you in trouble.’
Lloyd sucks in a sharp breath, drawing to a stop in front of me. Rain trickles off the end of my umbrella and onto his face, slaloming down the slope of his nose. A frown puckers between his eyebrows, but when his eyes fix on me, they’re so serious it makes the rest of the world fall away.
‘I was never supposed to fall for you the way I did,’ he tells me.
Me either.
My breath hitches, a reply sticking in my throat. My heart starts racing, doing somersaults – doing a whole damn decathlon.
When I don’t say anything, Lloyd rushes on.
‘We had something, that night we met. I know you laughed at the idea of love at first sight, butIbelieved in it. I believed in that with you. We had something, and the smart thing to do would’ve been to stay away, but … Every time I saw you, I’d fall a little harder. I knew – I mean, Ithoughtyou didn’t feel the same way, especially after you said the internship meant more to you thanme, so I didn’t want to make a big deal of it. But the stuff you said in your emails … Annalise …’
Lloyd trails off; his breath shudders out of him, washing across my face. I can taste it – faintly like coffee, and something sweet. It makes me want to lean in to kiss him, drag my tongue along his lips.
He stands there, jaw tight and chest rising and falling heavily, his gaze locked on mine.
The frown is still there, but his eyes are wide and earnest, a glimmer of hope against hope illuminating them, stark against the grey world around us.Raindrops continue to land on his face, trickling down from his temples, his nose, along his lips and jaw, down his throat where they disappear beneath the raised collar of his coat.
Lloyd shifts forward slightly. Just an inch, maybe two, and hesitates. Terrified of being too sudden or careless with this brittle, barely-there moment that engulfs us, so breakable. Irreparable.
He’d prefer this limbo of longing for each other, doing nothing about it, so long as we got to stay in each other’s lives, than risking it all for the chance of more.
And I should be thinking that, too. I had been, up until recently. None of this should change anything: I’m still leaving soon, and we’ll spend the next year at different universities, in different cities, living totally different lives. We’ll part ways, and we’ll both be heartbroken.
It shouldn’t have changed anything.
And, yet.
I step closer, feet crunching on some loose stones on the path. It sounds so loud, even with the rain rippling onto the pond nearby and bouncing hollowly off the leaves of the plants around us. I step close enough to bring Lloyd just under the cover of my umbrella, close enough to feel the heat of his body radiating out.
His eyes flit to my mouth, but then he looks firmly back at my eyes.
And I raise my eyebrows, a smile playing at my lips.
‘You really wrote me poetry, Fletcher?’
I feel the tension sliding off his body, shed like an extra layer of clothing. He’s lighter for it, and the frown finally disappears from his face. He gives a breathy chuckle, rolling his eyes as he turns his head away – but I lift a hand to cup his cheek, warm and damp beneath my palm, turning him back to me.
‘Can I read it?’
‘Maybe one day,’ he says, and then – then, he kisses me.
He wraps an arm around my waist to pull me flush against him, pressing his lips to mine in a delicate kiss – barely a kiss at all, lasting only a heartbeat, our breath mingling as we stand wrapped up in each other – and then another kiss that’s so fierce and desperate he must be pouring an entire summer’s worth of want and heartache into it, or maybe that’s me, or both of us all at once.
I’m vaguely aware of the rain drenching me when I drape an arm over his shoulder, my umbrella sliding out of my fingers to dangle from the rope handle looped around my wrist so my hand is free to slideinto Lloyd’s hair. I’m not even sure which of us pulled the hood of his coat down.
I’m only aware of every place our bodies are touching, the searing heat of his kiss, the arms wrapped firmly around me to anchor me against him like if he lets go, if this ends, I’ll vanish.
