by Megyn Ward
Like I need it.
Pathetic. Shitsack.
I don’t know. All I know is that when my mom turned the hose on us and told me Henley left before unceremoniously kicking us both out on our asses, I jumped up and pushed past her. Ran through the house, stopping long enough to grab my bag from the landing and my keys off the table.
Before I know what I'm doing, I’m in my car and halfway to her place.
Coming to a screeching halt in front of her building, I pop my trunk and jump out before the valet can open my door. He stands there, expectantly while I pull off my coveralls and toss them in the trunk. He wants my keys so he can park my car. Like hell.
“Sir, you can’t leave your car here,” he calls after me.
“Watch me,” I ground out, skirting around the front of it. I’m halfway across the lobby before some guy in a suit jumps out from behind the front desk and plants himself in front of me.
“Can I help you, sir?” He looks at me, his face a mask of polite professionalism but I’m not fooled. He has me pegged as an undesirable and will use force to stop me from getting on the elevator if necessary.
I don’t blame him. I’m sure I look crazy. Muddy hair. Busted up face. Grimy-looking jeans. Soggy T-shirt. If some crazy-looking motherfucker who wasn’t me was trying to get up to Henley’s place, I’d be pissed if this guy didn’t do his job.
So, I take a step back. Force myself to behave like a rational human being. “I’m here to see Henley O’Connell,” I say. “14-C.”
“Of course.” He lifts his hand, motioning me over to a waiting area full of expensive-looking furniture, seeming totally unconcerned with the fact that I’m wet and my boots are covered in mud. “Have a seat, and I’ll announce your arrival.” When I just cross my arms and stare at him until he nods. “Very well. This way, sir.”
He leads me to the front desk, and I wait while he re-rounds it. Picking up the phone, he dials, watching from the corner of my eye. Probably expecting me to bolt for the elevator. After a few seconds, he looks at me. “Sir, there’s no answer,” he says, but he doesn’t hang up, which means she’s home.
I pull my phone from my pocket and dial her cell. She answers on the fourth ring.
“Hello?” She sounds like she answered the phone against her will.
“Hey, Daisy—you want to answer your phone and tell the desk monkey down here to let me up?”
“What?” Now she sounds mortified. “You’re downstairs?”
“Sure the fuck am,” I say, pushing each word past clenched teeth. “And I want to come up.”
She doesn’t say anything else, but a second later the concierge starts to talk, his voice too low and rapid to make out any actual words but a few moments later he hangs up to offer me a fancy desk pen. “Please sign in, sir.”
I scrawl my name across the page, making sure it’s sufficiently illegible before tossing the pen on top of the registry and stalking my way to the elevator.
A few minutes later, I’m raising my fist to bang on her door, but she pulls it open before I can like she’s had her eye pressed to the peephole, waiting for me so she can hustle me in without a sound.
“What are you doing here?” she hisses at me, grabbing the front of my shirt to haul me into through the door. As soon as she shuts it, she turns on me. “How did even you find me? Did Patrick tell you—”
“I’ve got 198 IQ points parked in my brainpan, Daisy.” I toss my bag in the general direction of her living room. “Trust me when I tell you, there’s nothing Cap’n knows that I didn’t know first.”
She stands a few feet away, staring at me like she can’t figure out what to do with me. Like I’m a stray dog she knows will chew up her shoes and piss on her rug the moment her back is turned.
“Well,” she finally says, throwing up her hands. “What do you want?”
What do I want?
I want her to hold my hand in public. Let me kiss her in front of my parents. Put my arm around her. I want her to acknowledge me.
Us.
It’s all I’ve ever wanted.
But I can’t. I can’t ask her for any of those things because they’re things she’ll never give me.
She’ll let me make her come on my kitchen floor after she’s climbed in my bedroom window at five o’clock in the goddamned morning, but take her to dinner? To see a movie?
That’s never going to fucking happen.
So, I don’t ask for what I want.
Don’t even try.
I just take whatever Henley will give me.
Same as always.
“What do I want?” I say, kicking off my muddy boots. “I want a shower and then want pancakes. After that, we’ll see.”
Fifty-four
Henley
“You want to shower?” I say it like I have noidea what he’s talking about. Like I don’t even know what a shower is. “Here?”
“Yeah,” he says, giving me one of his smart-ass smirks. “Unless you have some sort of objection to allowing the hired help to use your facilities.”
The hired help.
Because that’s how I make him feel.
Because it’s how I’ve treated him since the moment I slid onto that barstool.
I retrieve his bag. Carrying it to him, I hold it out, and he takes it with a carefully guarded expression like he’s sure I’m going to tell him to get the hell out. Like he expects me to reject him. Maybe even wants me to.
“Guest bathroom is through there,” I say, indicating the hallway that splits off the kitchen in the opposite direction. “Towels are under the sink.”
Thirty minutes later I hear the guest room door open and the soft slap of bare feet on my hardwood floor. I concentrate on incorporating my dry ingredients into my wet, counting every turn of my whisk rather than risk a look at him.
As soon as he disappeared into the bathroom, I ransacked my kitchen, gathering ingredients. When I called my concierge for flour and maple syrup, I think I actually heard him squeal with excitement.
“When I said I wanted pancakes—” Conner leans in over my shoulder, so close I can feel his breath, warm and minty, on my neck. “I didn’t mean I wanted you to make them.”
Under the clean scent of soap, I can smell him. Warm leather and axle grease. My nipples go tight under my sweater. A rush of warm pools between my legs. One deep breath of him and I’m ready to rip his clothes off.
It’s as nerve-racking as it is embarrassing.
“Then you should have been more specific,” I inform him, folding whipped egg whites into my batter. A few days ago, he had me pinned to his kitchen floor with his mouth between my legs after somehow persuading me to masturbate in front of him, and I’m nervous because he breathed on me.
I need professional help.
Yeah, you do.
Isn’t that why you came back to Boston in the first place?
“You alright, Daisy?” He slides into the space next to me, turning to lean his back against the counter, bringing our faces to within inches of each other. His proximity makes it impossible for me to look at him. “You look a little flushed.”
He’s laughing at me. I can hear it in his voice. He knows what having him this close is doing to me. What it makes me think about.
Makes me want.
“I’m fine.” Scowling at my pancake batter, I slide my bowl down the counter a bit, closer to the stove. Away from him.
I follow it, and he follows me.
I scoot over again. So does he.
“You sure you’re okay?”
“Yes.”
“Then why are you running from me?”
“I’m not running from you, I’m making you your goddamned pancakes,” I snipe back because I am running from him and he’s an asshole for pointing it out.
“Careful.” He reaches out and lifts the tail end of my braid off my shoulder to weave it between his fingers. “You keep talking to me like that, I’m going to end up giving you an encore kitchen performance,”
he says, giving my braid a playful tug.
“Not after you tracked mud all over my floor, you won’t.” I reach up to slap his hand away, and he catches it, pulling me against him, bringing us even closer. The air between us thickens and heats the moment we make contact.
“I want you to look at me.” He says it softly, so quiet I’m not sure he even knows he said it out loud.
My irritation bleeds away, leaving behind the sort of mindless need that scares me. Makes me wonder how I’m going to walk away from him when this is all over. How I’m going to go back to a life, I never wanted and pretend it never happened.
Like he never happened.
I try to pull my hand away because I can’t.
I can’t do any of those things.
Not if I look at him.
Still, I force myself to raise my gaze, finding his temple, letting it settle there. Trying to give him what he wants without exposing myself completely.
He doesn’t say anything else. He just presses my hand flat against his chest, over his heart. I can feel the fast, heavy thump of it against my palm, letting me know he’s just as terrified as I am.
“Conner…” my voice is shaking. The hand pressed to his heart, trembling under his.
“It’s all I ever wanted, you know.” He lifts his other hand, his fingers wrapping around the back of my neck, his thumb skimming along the curve of my cheekbone. “For you to look at me. See me.”
“I look at you.” Even though it’s true, I know what he means.
“No, you don’t. You look through me.” The resignation in his voice is like a knife in my gut. The understanding that I’ll never be able to make myself vulnerable. I’ll never be able to bend. Not the way he wants me to.
Needs me to.
He’s always been braver than me.
I just want to be with you. Why won’t you just let me be with you?
Shifting my gaze, I find his.
“Why are you here?” I don’t yell. I don’t demand. But I need to know. “You made it pretty clear this afternoon that you—”
“That wasn’t about you.” It comes out too fast. Too sure. It was about me, at least in part, but I let it slide. “It was about Declan. I wasn’t angry that you were there. I was angry that you came with him.”
“I wasn’t with him.”
His face goes still. The heart under my hand stops cold. That was the wrong thing to say. “So you were with Patrick, then?”
“What?” I shake my head. “No. I wasn’t with anyone.” I try to pull my hand away, but he doesn’t let me. Instead of struggling, I force myself to relax. Explain. “I woke up early and couldn’t go back to sleep this morning, so I went for a walk. Got some coffee. Ate enough pastries to stuff a horse and walked. And walked. And walked until I realized I was across the street from the park where we used to play baseball. I saw a team on the field, and I got curious. It turned out to be Patrick and your brother.” I shrug. It all sounds so ridiculous. Like something out of a movie.
“Anyway, Patrick and I started talking, and he asked me if I wanted to help coach the game.” I leave out the part where I called my concierge and had him bring me a pair of size seven tennis shoes. Having sneakers delivered by your butler in a town car is even more ridiculous than the rest of my story.
“After the game, Declan invited me to dinner.” I feel my fingers curl under his, hooking into the front of his T-shirt. “I knew it was a bad idea but he insisted that it would be fine. That you’d want to see me… so, I let him talk me into it.” I can feel my brow crumple and I shake my head. “I didn’t mean to ambush you. I didn’t mean to corner you. I know I keep doing that but—” I stop. I’m over explaining, edging toward groveling. “That was never my intention and I apologize. It won’t happen again.”
Ladies never beg.
“Why are you here?” I ask it again.
His face is a mess. The sharp, lean lines of his jaw are distorted, swollen from where his brother caught him with a well-aimed fist. What looks to be the beginning of a spectacular black eye blooms across his cheekbone to radiate across his temple. The bridge of his nose. His free hand comes up again, catching the end of my braid before letting it slide between his fingers. “Because I’m sorry and I want to make up.” No cocky grin. No smartass smirk. No careless, casual tone.
Conner.
My Conner.
Something inside me unravels.
Lets go.
Eight years later, Conner Gilroy is still the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
And I’m still in love with him.
Fifty-five
Conner
God, help me, I want to kiss her. I want to kissher so goddamned bad I can feel the ache of it in my bones.
I want to but I won’t.
Can’t.
I’m drowning as it is.
Kissing her would be like breathing underwater.
“Where’s your broom?”
As soon as I say it, her gaze drops to my mouth, and her brow furrowed slightly. “What?”
“Your broom,” I say, swallowing a groan. “I tracked mud all over your floor. I’d like to clean it up.” It’s never been like this for me. My dick has always been a tool. One I use. Apply appropriately and as many times as necessary to achieve the desired end result. One that responded and reacted on command. It’s never been about want.
It has always been about necessity.
That is no longer the case.
Now, want, and need are all I feel.
Getting her under me is all I think about.
I’m hard all the time. Every time I see her. Think about her. Hear her name.
My damn cock has gone rogue.
Thinking about sweeping her kitchen floor makes me think about my kitchen floor which makes me think about what I did to her on it Friday night.
That’s how bad this is.
Thinking about sweeping her floor is making me so fucking hard that passing out is a distinct possibility.
She pulls her hand from under mine and takes a step back. “There.” She indicates a narrow closet next to the fridge before turning back to her pancake batter.
I retrieve the broom and start to sweep, gathering bits of dried mud and grass while she lights the burner under a skillet. By the time I’m sweeping my mess into the dustpan and dumping it in the garbage, Henley has a stack of pancakes waiting for me on a plate.
“Here you go,” she says, handing me the plate. “Butter and syrup are on the table.” She tips her chin toward a formal-looking table on the other side of the living room, in front of a pretty spectacular view of Fenway Park.
I carry my plate to the table, sitting at the end of it, back to the window, so I can watch her while she builds her own short stack before joining me.
“Is something wrong with your pancakes?” she says, head angled toward her own while she doctors them with butter and syrup.
“I don’t know,” I tell her, trying to cover up the fact that I’m taking a mental picture of her. The way she looked when she made me pancakes.
This is the closest thing to a date I’ve ever been on. Tess is the only woman I’ve ever shared a meal with, but that’s not what makes this a moment worth remembering.
It’s that it’s with her.
When I don’t finish my sentence, she looks up at me, and I clear my throat. “I don’t know.” I start over, taking the syrup and adding a generous pour between each one. “I’m pretty picky about my pancakes.”
She raises her eyebrows, sliding the side of her fork through her stack. “Well, hopefully, they meet your impossibly high standards.”
I don’t want to tell her that they could taste like horse shit and have the consistency of an old leather boot and I’d eat every last bite. Instead, I give her a cheeky grin. “Either way, you get an A for effort, Daisy.”
“Shut up and eat your pancakes.” She narrows her eyes at me just enough to let me know I irritated her. “And stop calling me, Daisy.”
/>
“Sorry.” I grin at her, sinking my fork into the stack of warm, buttery cakes in front of me.
“No, you’re not.” She sets her fork down to lift her napkin from her lap, giving the corner of her mouth a dainty, lady-like dab, the refined gesture at total odds with the hard jab of her words.
“Yeah,” I say, forking up a bite. “I’m not.”
And fuck me if these aren’t the best pancakes I’ve ever tasted.
Fifty-six
Henley
I watch Conner polish off his tall stack in recordtime, his manners impeccable enough to impress even my mother. I remember his own had been such a stickler for them. Not that she was formal but that she expected her sons to behave like gentlemen. I can see that the training stuck, whether he wants to admit it or not.
“Don’t be surprised if I start showing up on your doorstep at all hours of the day and night, begging for pancakes.” He grins at me, wiping his mouth before laying his napkin beside his plate.
His compliment makes me giddy. “I take cooking classes when I have time,” I say, standing to clear his plate. “Wait until you try my—”
His hand closes over my wrist before I can lift his plate. “Nope,” he says. “That’s my job.” I remember the way his father cleared the table every night and washed dishes for his mother because she cooked dinner. When she tried to help, her husband would say the same thing Conner just said to me—nope, that’s my job.
When Mr. Gilroy said it to his wife, I always imagined he was saying I love you.
I nod, bobbing my head like an idiot because that’s all I can manage to do. Get a grip, Henley. It’s conditioning, not love. “Okay,” I finally manage, pulling my hand free.
He lets go of me and stands. Collecting our plates, Conner moves around me, carrying them into the kitchen. Moving to the window by his recently vacated chair, I pretend to enjoy the view. The almost frantic bustle below. Even on Sunday, Boylston is busy. Pedestrians hurrying home. Tourists posing in front of the ballpark across the street. Cars. Traffic. So much activity and I can’t really see any of it. I’m too focused on the sounds of him.