He lays the words down like a challenge, crossing his arms over his chest and inviting me to step up to the plate.
“You like me, even if you don’t want to like me, and you’re using this as a way to hide it from yourself.”
“You don’t know how I feel,” I shoot back.
“I know how you look at me.” He doesn’t move, but somehow he seems to get closer. “I know how your voice gets a little bit faster and a little higher pitched every time we touch. I know that when you kissed my cheek, what you really wanted was to—”
“I was drunk.”
For the first time, he looks like I’ve managed to wound him. A moment of heavy silence passes before he responds.
“Prove me wrong.” Now he does step closer. “Prove me wrong, Monroe. Look at me and tell me you don’t want more.”
“I...”
I catch a hint of his scent, all leather and spice like the air in his apartment, and my body screams for more, demands it with the insistence of a princess throwing a tantrum. Even my heart speaks up somewhere deep inside me, beats out its want and its longing in a flutter that travels all the way up to my throat.
Only my head offers the words I need to say to him.
“Even if I did want more, it wouldn’t matter. We’re competitors. Weareenemies. Everything I want is in direct opposition to what you want. Our jobs—”
“Forget about the jobs. Forget them for just one second.”
I know how difficult it is for him to say that, how much he’s laying on the line for me, and it’s just makes this even harder.
“I can’t.” I steel myself against the temptation to do otherwise. “I can’t, and neither can you. Your job, everything you’ve built, everything you want to build...It’s your life. You told me yourself. You already chose it over me that night at your apartment.”
I’m grasping at straws here to try to prove my point. I expect him to argue back, but his spine stiffens, and his features twist like he’s wracked with a surge of pain. The expression is gone in a second, shuttered behind that steely exterior he put on moments before. He’s not the man I know anymore. He’s locked that person away. He’s all business now.
“Maybe you’re right.” The words are clipped. “Maybe this was a mistake.”
He turns away, putting a few long strides of distance between us. I watch as he pulls his phone out and jabs at the screen before bringing it up to his ear. He paces the sidewalk, barking orders into the phone. His gaze only flicks to me once, and it’s like he sees straight through me, like there really was no him and me after all.
Eleven
Julien
BODY: The physical impression of a wine on the palate, often described in terms of heaviness or lightness
The shower poundsinto the muscles of my neck and shoulders, a steady blast that’s usually enough to ease some of the tension I’ve built up over the day. I wait for the knots to loosen, but if anything, they just coil up even tighter.
5AM. I didn’t get home until 5AM. The cops had dozens of pointless questions for me and then wanted inside my bar to investigate the damage. I don’t know what there was to investigate; a couple drunks smashed a few windows. It must happen every weekend somewhere in the city.
By the time the investigation concluded, it was too late for me to get a hold of Cavellia’s staff and see if I could offer them enough overtime pay to come help me board the windows up. By some miracle, a few good Samaritans from Taverne Toulouse showed up with a tool kit and some cardboard.
Monroe wasn’t with them.
“Câlice de criss,” I mutter, borrowing a curse from the Québécois. No one curses quite so emphatically as the French Canadians.
I was an idiot for thinking this time could be different, for believing that after all these years of telling myself otherwise, I was ready to try again.
I’m thirty-two. There’s no time for trying again. I’ve reached the age for settling down, and what I should be settling down into is the understanding that I’m not cut out to be with someone.
I should be grateful for what happened with Monroe. It seems I needed a reminder, and she was the perfect one. She woke just enough of me up to remind me how much safer it is to stay asleep, how much easier it is to live in dreams where you can wish someone else’s pain away instead of being forced to watch it eat them from the inside out.
I shut the water off and grab a towel before making my way to the bedroom. I’m just about to drop onto the mattress when the soft rap of someone’s knuckles on my door sounds through the apartment.
Madame Bovary lifts her head up in her luxury dog bed on the floor. I freeze and strain my ears to listen. Enough time passes that I think I must have imagined it before the noise comes again, louder this time.
