“I’m sorry,” I manage to eke out. “I’m … I’m going to step outside for a minute. I … I just, I need some air.”
I manage to look past the shock on Taryn’s face and the confusion on her date’s. I hear Mr. Ring say something, but it sounds like it’s coming from someplace far off and possibly underwater. Glancing around, I see Beth dancing with her cheek pressed to Ryan’s chest on the other side of the ballroom and sigh in pure relief. It’s a miracle how I reach the exit without attracting more attention than I do.
Of course, it takes another trip up an escalator, praying my dress doesn’t get caught in anything, and then a few more twists and turns before I actually make it outside. For the fresh air I suddenly need more than just about anything.
This hotel is huge. I’m actually more than a little surprised how something only half an hour away from my house is so nice. It’s got more executive levels, ballrooms, and conference halls than I’d have ever thought. I’m happy to find the little haven I manage to escape to is fairly remote and completely devoid of anyone else.
There’s a pool that’s oddly covered despite the weather already having made a turn toward hot and sticky, and an empty, sort of sad-looking tiki shack I’m pretty sure serves as a bar when it’s open. The barstools are all linked together with some sort of plastic wrapped chain so when I go to pull the one on the end out, the rest start to tilt and I nearly bring the whole line of them down.
I sigh and let my shoulders drop before marching over to the lounge chairs lining the side of the pool. And as soon as I see how not clean they seem to be, I turn back around and glare at the offending line of tilted stools. I don’t even know if I want to sit, but I know if I do, it won’t be near anything that’ll ruin this dress. This dress I thought would be a fantastic idea to wear, but has only caused me to freak the hell out as soon as anyone noticed its intended purpose. As soon as someone noticed its meaning.
I have two chairs righted before I decide it’s hard enough to breathe while wearing what I am, much less do so while wearing it and performing any kind of manual labor. And yes, while wearing heels, restrictive undergarments, and a form-fitting dress, even putting a few chairs upright counts as manual labor. If anyone wants to argue with me about it, by all means, they can give it a try.
Whatever. As long as one is standing, that’s all I really need.
I have one leg raised, my thigh almost fully resting on the seat when I feel the air change around me. That’s really the only way I can describe it. I don’t hear the door click shut, presumably too loud while grumbling to myself, and there isn’t a word said, but I know I’m no longer alone. A tremor works its way through my body, lighting what feels like each individual nerve along its way but, oddly enough, I’m not afraid.
I see it happening in my mind as I turn my head to glance over my shoulder. In my own thoughts, I look like the leading lady in some old noir film. I probably look like a little girl playing dress up to anyone watching, though. But when I notice him standing there, and the look on his face, I think maybe he sees me the way I want to be seen.
Drew steps away from the door, bringing himself closer and more into the light of the singular lamp post shining over this oasis. There’s a flash in his eyes as he stops a few feet away, and it makes me swallow. I have to remind myself not to bite the lipstick off my mouth.
“I swear to God, if you ask if I come here often”—I gesture to the empty bar—“I’ll get up and leave.”
I settle myself fully onto the seat and turn to face away from him again. A lock of expertly curled and controlled hair falls over my eye and I slip farther into my mysterious dame persona. For about three seconds before I push it away from my face and give in to the urge to look over at the boy now standing beside me.
He leans against the bar, not caring how the elbow of his fitted black blazer is less than an inch away from an unidentifiable blob of … well, of something. For a second, I’m afraid he won’t even look at me, but he turns his gaze upward and it’s like I’m back in the library all over again. Less than a foot of space between us and a whole lot left unsaid.
I watch as one side of his mouth slides up and he lets out a laugh.
“I was just telling myself not to use that line.”
His voice seems deeper to me, but somehow exactly the same. I wonder if it would feel the same ghosting over my lips and fanning across my face, the way it did the day at the library. I almost shake my head, like I’m trying to shake these ridiculous thoughts out of it. That would likely make me seem even more unhinged than he must think I already am though.
Instead, I take the moment to really look at him.
He’s dressed up, but not in a suit or tux. No, the black blazer fits him nicely though. It showcases his broad shoulders, and how he has it casually secured, only the one button actually fastened, emphasizes the way his waist narrows. Dark wash jeans—not quite black, I’d like to point out—skim his thighs I decided what seems like years ago must be nice, and lead down to a pair of dress shoes I really don’t pay much attention to. They’re men’s dress shoes. They all look the same.
My gaze falls to his tie. It stands out against the stark white dress shirt underneath, and I watch his Adam’s apple bob above the knot at the base of his neck as he swallows hard. I barely catch him as his gaze moves over the sweetheart neckline of my dress. A nervous, fluttery feeling starts to build somewhere in my stomach.
“You look,” he starts, and then does that totally cliché thing where he stops and looks like he’s at a loss for words. Cliché or not, it really does leave me feeling like I’ve taken hostage of all of the words in his vocabulary with only myself and the dress I’m wearing. “You look absolutely beautiful.”
I’m sure when my mouth falls open, I actually look more like a fish out of water, but I can’t help it. Even when a boy—a man, really—pays me a compliment, when he tells me I look nice, I never really expect to hear the word beautiful. I didn’t expect it anyway. Beautiful is reserved for things that make a difference, or for the way my mother smiles at my father when he walks into the room, or how it felt when I watched that first sunset with all of its colors bleeding into one another.
I don’t know how to reply to beautiful.
So I don’t.
“And you look like someone who knew what color my dress was going to be.”
I reach out and run my index finger along the edge of his nearly midnight-blue tie without thinking, and drop my hand slowly back onto the bar in front of me when I realize what I’m doing. He comes a half a step closer and leans farther onto his elbow. Despite pulling back when coming even close to touching him, I grab the crook of his arm and stop him from sliding any closer.
He stills immediately as my hands wraps around his bicep and he stares down at where my fingers are splayed over the sleeve of his jacket. There are still a few of the tiny jewels affixed to the polish on this hand, but there’s also that tiny chip on my pinky nail. I have to fight every instinct inside of me not to curl my fingertips farther into the surprisingly soft black material in order to hide it.
“There’s, uh… Well, I don’t even know what that is.” I tilt my head in the direction of the offending blob of stuff. “But yeah. This is a nice jacket. You probably don’t want to get it dirty.”
“You’re probably right,” he says, smiling a little as he pulls away. Not far enough for my hand to fall though. This seems important, so I don’t move it. “My mom’s pretty awful with laundry. You’d think with two sons who play soccer, she’d be used to the stains by now.”
“Oh, I can help her with that!” I blurt out a little too loud. Like the idea of laundry excites me or something. God. “I mean, if she wants to know what helps with certain stains…”
He’s smiling again, one side of his mouth lifting a little higher than the other, and… There it is. That damn dimple. I blink away the idiocy that’s surely come over my face and narrow my eyes a little.
“Are you lau
ghing at me?”
“Not at all.”
“You are,” I insist, and try not to think about it too hard when I take my hand away from his elbow only to shove at his shoulder. Yes, I’m flirting. And no, I’m going to try not to overthink it. Shit, I’ll probably overthink. In fact, I’m doing it right now.
But then he grabs my hand from his shoulder and wraps his around it loosely and I can barely think of anything at all.
“I’m really not. I…” He looks down at our hands and then twines his fingers through mine. He squeezes my fingers and I swear I feel powerless against that exact same hold he has on the heart in my chest. “It’s just, you like to help, don’t you? You’re always doing that.”
He runs his thumb over the inside of my wrist and my inhale is shakier than ever.
“I just really like clothes,” I mutter foolishly.
The moment is too much, too real, so of course I have to ruin it. I almost go on to tell him how because I really like clothes, and clothes with different textures and material, I’ve gotten really good at figuring out the best way to care for them, but then he laughs. It’s not at me, and with the sound spreading through the air, I start to think maybe nothing’s ruined after all.
“Yeah,” he says, nodding his head enough for a wayward curl to fall over his eyebrow.
I’m wondering if I should risk it and brush it away myself, and am so busy overthinking it he does it before I have the chance. I watch his hand the way I did during our first visit, entranced with his fingers and things like the width of his palm and remembering the way it felt pressed against the small of my back. “I knew that, too.”
It takes me a second to figure out what he’s talking about. It’s easy to lose track of things when I can’t stop imagining myself pressed up against the person talking to me. Because being kissed nearly senseless in a library isn’t the stuff of fantasies, or anything… Not at all.
Stay on track, Libby. Jesus.
Clothes. That’s what he’s talking about. He knew I liked clothes.
I must stay silent for a beat too long because he continues on, the words coming out a little faster now. Almost like he’s nervous. Even though it’s difficult for a voice as deep as Drew’s to actually sound nervous.
“I mean, it was a pretty well-known fact I had the best-dressed visitor on the schedule each week,” he says all of this in what has to be a single breath and I can almost feel the need he has to run his hand along the back of his neck. His stature suddenly changes though and he gets this almost mischievous look on his face as he glances over at me. “You, uh, you were pretty popular.”
I make a face and he laughs, and then steps closer. He barely hesitates before placing our still-clasped hands down to rest on my thigh. He’s close enough now so that I only have to lean slightly to the left to nudge him with my shoulder. It falls somewhere between his armpit and collarbone, and my head starts to swim over how close we are.
“Yes, I’m sure the top half of my outfits received a lot of running commentary,” I say, rolling my eyes and slicing a hand through the air to indicate a countertop view.
“Oh no. It was mostly the short skirts.”
His words, and the way he completely deadpans them, leave me with my mouth hanging open.
“Gross.”
Yep. That’s what I finally settle on. Because I’m a child.
“Them? Definitely. Your skirts? Not at all.”
“And I bet you went ahead and let them be gross, didn’t you?”
I mean it to come across as a light, flirty thing I say, nothing more. When I open my mouth to explain I was only joking, he talks before I have the opportunity to.
“You should probably understand I didn’t think I had the right to do anything in regards to you, Libby. I mean, yeah, defending you was fine. It was the right thing to do, but other than… Other than that, I wasn’t sure if you came to see me every week because you felt like you had to, or you wanted to, or because I was just someone else you wanted to help. Something you felt like you needed to fix. Or help fix, I don’t know…”
“I—I never meant for you to feel that way.” I swallow. “Maybe it was naïve of me to think I could waltz in there and have all of these answers handed to me. I mean, I know it was naïve now. And it didn’t really work out that way anyway, did it?”
He lets out one of those laughs that sounds more like a scoff and nods his head once.
“I had a lot of questions. About you, for you. And then you were so, I don’t know. I’d say angry, but that’d make me sound naïve again because of course you were angry. Anyone in your position would have been. You were really hard to read, though, and no matter how much I wanted to forget you after that first visit—and God, I really did want to forget you and I’m sorry if that makes you feel bad now, or hurts your feelings—after that first visit, I just couldn’t stop thinking about you.”
I pause, not able to look at him for a moment. Not because I’m scared of his reaction, but because I’m afraid I might stop—I might not say it all—if I do.
“And, yes, maybe it’s because I wanted to help you. But it was mostly for selfish reasons, so maybe you were right in your assessment. Maybe I was looking at you as a project. But you … God, you barely looked at me at all.”
The quiet between us is not uncomfortable, it’s simply there. He doesn’t offer anything, and I don’t rush him to respond. I think of his hurried, probably mostly provoked response about tolerance at the library and my mother’s words about allowing him the time needed to figure things out, and I let the silence surround us. His thumb makes absentminded sweeps across the inside of my wrist, and I find the courage in myself to lean a little into the cage of his arms.
He clears his throat and I lift my chin to look at him. Our faces are close. So close that if I wanted, I could count the individual long, dark lashes that line his eyes.
“Oh, thank God.”
The words, mumbled by a voice belonging to neither of us, pops the bubble we’re in. He pulls away at the same time I do, leaving a gap between our bodies I immediately want refilled. I twist in my seat to look at the doorway and barely catch sight of the side of Ryan’s face before he turns back into the building, his hand still wrapped around the side of the door to keep it open.
“I found her, babe!”
Of all the things to focus on, it’s the word ‘babe’ that grabs my attention. I don’t know… It feels like such a sappy, romantic comedy thing to say. I mouth the word to myself and catch Drew smirking at me as he shuffles himself closer once more.
I find myself smiling back at him, and the longer he stares, the wider the smile on my face gets.
“Oh, thank God.” Beth bursts through the door, and I see Ryan almost leap back to avoid getting smacked in the face with it. “Libby, where the…? Oh. Oh.”
“Yes?” I turn, trying to slide off my stool in the most casual way possible. My heel gets caught in one of the rungs though, but I jerk to a halt before I either pull my entire dress down or face plant onto the cement. Drew’s fingers nearly burn a hole through the fabric near my hip as he puts a hand on my waist to help steady me. I have to fight the want to turn my face toward his, and to keep my eyes locked on Beth instead.
Though I do totally take a second to appreciate how, even in heels, Drew is still towering several inches above me. Dainty. I actually feel dainty. In all honesty, it’s taking a lot for me not to twirl around like a ballerina or something right now.
Beth crosses her arms over her chest and smirks as she leans back to where she assumes Ryan will be waiting to support her weight. He is. Of course he is. He calls her ‘babe’ and looks at her like she hung the moon.
…And I’m getting giddy over the fact my Soulmate is taller than me. Ugh.
“So,” she says, looking me dead in the eye and tilting her head in Drew’s direction. “Did he get the tie right?”
“Did he…? Oh, you brat.”
I look over, careful to keep my eyes
trained on Drew’s tie and not his face, and then glance down to what I’m wearing. I guess he did know what color my dress was going to be after all.
I should have known. Maybe not this specifically, but I should have known she was up to something. I think of my car, still parked in the driveway at her house, and actually roll my eyes. She grins and kind of shimmies her hips from side to side in this weird victory-happy dance combination. I don’t know whether I’m happy about this though. I don’t know what I’m feeling, and it must come through by the look on my face because she stops mid-shimmy and turns immediately serious.
“Hey,” she says, extending a hand to me as she steps closer.
I take hold of it, and allow her to lead me back through the door Ryan holds open for us without needing any instruction to do so. I can feel the impression and the heat from Drew’s hand still on my waist after it slips away, but only turn for a second to give him a look I hope passes for something along the lines of ‘please, just give us a minute’.
If he’s bothered by this sudden departure, he hides it well. Though I do see his hand flex at his side, his fingers curling into his palms. I only tear my eyes away when the door closes between us.
“This is…” Beth starts, waving her hand in the general direction of the terrace we just vacated. “This is okay, right? You aren’t mad?”
“No, I’m not mad.” I sigh and lean back against the wall, letting my shoulders sag and not caring if it makes the top of my dress droop a little too low. “But I’m not … not mad.”
“And that means?”
“That I’m not mad at you. I’m… I don’t know, I’ve been giving myself time to think, and to accept the very real possibility of moving on. And giving him time to do the same. And now…”
“And now that you might not have to accept the possibility, you don’t know what to do with yourself?”
I blink and inhale deeply, letting the air out in a slow, exaggerated exhale. Is that what’s happening? I mean, we haven’t even had time to talk about anything. For all I know, he could be coming here to give me the ultimate kiss off.
What's a Soulmate? Page 24