And damn her twice over for every three seconds thinking about Dillon. It was like an addiction, or an infection, the way he wouldn’t get out of her head. She wanted to tell him about Elaine, and sound him out for things to discuss with Jonas, and sit in the sunshine with him.
Except she didn’t.
She wanted to do all of that without reference to him. She didn’t want to have wanted him to taste the restaurant’s egg strata. So he’d have loved it, so what? He could go get egg strata any damn time he wanted, he didn’t need her to find the best damn egg strata in the city on his behalf.
And the fact that she’d bought the restaurant’s cookbook didn’t mean she was planning to make it for him, either. Just as soon as he apologized. And as soon as she forgave him.
She happened to like egg strata in her own right, and Dillon had nothing to do with it.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Monday parking lot: Dillon's car, but no sign of Dillon.
Monday production meeting: no sighting through the doorway.
Monday lunchtime: no sighting in the lunchroom or out by the basketball net. Not that she went out there on purpose to look. It was just on the way to her car and she’d decided she wanted to go out for tacos instead of eating the salad she’d brought. Noted: his car, unmoved in the parking lot.
Monday right after lunch: overheard rumor that Dillon was over with Philip’s group working on some revisions to one of their projects.
Monday mid-afternoon: Almost half an hour spent composing an email about meeting for drinks after work. Should have been the easiest thing in the world, except Dillon still owed her an apology, and no way was she going to word it so that he would think it meant she was apologizing to him. She went back and forth several times before unclicking the ‘read request’ box.
Monday at five till five: still no sighting, and no reply. Third double-check that the message actually was sent. He was such a child. Pouting? Really? The silent treatment? Honestly? Well, she wasn’t going to go chasing him. She’d made an overture, taken the first step, built a bridge. All he had to do was respond, and then they could talk about his overreactions and his running away after dropping ridiculous bombshells and all of the things he’d stirred up. She was the mature one, and perfectly willing to engage in a dialogue to resolve their issues. It wasn’t like she was going to abandon ship at the first sign of a problem like some people. Gillian had accused her of that a few years ago with a guy who’d pulled a stupid amount of passive-aggressive BS. Gill had told Serena that she was running away instead of calling him on it and seeing if there was something to salvage. And maybe she’d been right. Serena was younger then. Kind of like Dillon now. Didn’t change the fact that that guy had been too much of a tool anyway, but Serena had listened to Gill, had learned. She was too smart to do the same thing now, not when Dillon had so many other good qualities. Gillian would have nothing to reproach her about, if Serena told her about all of this. Which she only hadn’t done because she was sure it would all be sorted out soon.
Monday at ten past five, on her way to her car: incoming email chime on her phone. Serena was dignified, so instead of grabbing her phone right away she waited until she was sitting in her car.
It wasn’t even from him. She turned to glare over at Dillon's car, which was sitting innocently a few spaces away, as if it had nothing to do with not showing up at her house since Saturday morning. Unfortunately, its owner caught the force of her glare as he approached his car’s passenger side. Dillon stopped almost comically mid-stride, then went ahead and beeped open his doors. Serena could feel her eyes widen like an idiot as he opened the door, but regained her composure somewhat when he turned away only long enough to sling his bag into the passenger seat. By the time he’d slammed the door and walked towards her, she was positively neutral.
Dillon was mad.
Serena had clearly been avoiding him all day. He’d gotten to work early, hoping to catch her in the parking lot, but she hadn’t even glanced his way when she pulled in seconds before nine. She’d managed to be behind closed doors all morning, and when he went looking for her at lunchtime, Janice said (all too damn innocently for his tastes) that she’d gone to the fridge and stared at her salad—her salad, which was right next to his own lunch bag—before saying something about tacos and leaving. Only the curt email about going to Frijoles indicated that she knew he was alive. And then she hustled out to her car without waiting for him to stop by her office, as had become their habit. Or maybe it was just his habit. His going out of his way for her, again. His putting himself in her orbit, playing by her rules, obeying her directives. Avoiding him all day, then asking him to go to a crowded happy hour where, like as not, other people from Lanigan would also be grabbing drinks and nachos?
Well, maybe it was past damn time for him to have some rules, too.
“No,” Dillon told her when she lowered her window.
“Excuse me?” Oh, she looked haughty. He wasn’t swayed.
“No, I won’t go for drinks with half our coworkers. You’ve been avoiding me all day, you haven’t called, nothing. I love you, Serena, but I’m not going to let you take me for granted like that. I’m going home now. You are more than welcome to join me. Ball’s in your court, but the game can only go on for so long.”
She hadn’t answered, and wasn’t doing anything more than narrowing her eyes at her steering wheel, so Dillon carried through with his resolve, and walked away.
Monday, quarter past five: Sighted, Dillon yelling at her about love, middle of the parking lot. Definitely Johnnie and Emily overheard, maybe Colleen, too. And okay, probably he wouldn’t classify it as yelling. She’d heard him yelling—at games; at Eddie once during a whole Jorge, Sr. prank; that time he slammed his fingers in the car door. But his “I love you, Serena,” wasn’t in subtle tones, and the hell did he mean, she’d been avoiding him all day? He was the one who’d been in hiding, the one who’d walked out because she expected a little common courtesy in her own home.
The one who walked away from her again just now.
Serena concentrated hard on drawing a deep calming breath, especially after she found herself rubbing irritably at her neck. Right where the rash from the cat used to show up. Maybe that had been prescience rather than farce after all—maybe she should have taken the hint and just stayed away from Dillon from the beginning.
With a sigh, Serena put her car into drive and followed as Dillon turned out of the parking lot, towards his home.
Chapter Forty
“For the record, I thought you were the one avoiding me,” Serena said when they met at his front door. “I just wanted to see you, and thought maybe Frijoles would be a neutral location. I wasn’t trying to put you off by suggesting it.” She hoped her face was calm and her voice not as pleading as it sounded to her ears. She had no need to plead. She wasn’t the one who’d walked out, she reminded herself.
Dillon let them in without comment and went about his after-work routine of shedding and putting away things. Serena had slipped out of her shoes and headed into his kitchen to get them drinks before she pulled up short with the realization that she, too, had an after-work routine at his place. Since when had they even been together long enough for her to develop routines? She put the beers back in the fridge and walked back to the living room.
Dillon looked up from the shelves crammed full of the sci-fi paperbacks he picked up at used bookstores every chance he got. He glanced briefly at her hands but didn’t comment about her lack of beverages. “Do you want to sit down?”
So formal. Okay, then. She slipped past the sofa and took his ‘Ikea version of futuristic’ arm chair instead. Dillon gave her a hint of a sardonic look, but just tensed his jaw and sat right down in his usual spot.
Serena resisted the urge to sit on her too-fiddly hands and met Dillon's eyes. “I wasn’t avoiding you,” she repeated.
“So you said.”
“Okay, so we’re clear. I looked for you, and I chec
ked for messages from you, and you were the one who disappeared.”
Dillon shook his head. “Okay, look, I didn’t disappear. We just missed each other. It happens, and I’m not going to go back and parse every second to figure it out. It’s not even relevant.”
Oh, he got to decide what was relevant now, did he? Interesting. So much for her using her own brain. Serena supposed she could just turn over all of the thinking to the man in this relationship, as she was clearly not competent to know her own mind or what was important to her own happiness.
“I suppose you’d like to tell me what is relevant? If it’s not too difficult for me to comprehend, of course.”
“Oh, come on, Serena, you know that’s not what I mean.”
“Do I? Well, of course, if you say so. You are the judge of what I know and what I need to know and what is important. Do you have a list of the topics I should consider, Dillon, or should I just wait for you to introduce them one by one? I don’t want to get confused or anything.”
“Great. Great, fantastic, you’re being very reasonable and rational. This is just how I hoped we could talk,” Dillon snapped.
“Oh, dear. Am I doing it wrong? I must have misplaced my Girlfriend’s Guidelines for Proper Conversational Etiquette, my deepest apologies.”
“No, no, my apologies. I violated Serena’s Relationship Rules by being honest about my feelings and what I want. We can’t have that. Everything has to go according to your plan, no matter what, and I dared to forget that the worst thing in your world would be you changing the tiniest bit to make room for me in your life.” Dillon stood up and paced back to the bookshelf then spun to face her.
Serena ignored whatever the pressure in her chest was encouraging her to do in the way of protesting or smoothing things out, and sat straighter in the chair. If he wanted to accuse her of things, she’d just sit and listen and let him have his say. That’s what she was there for, apparently, but certainly not to concede any points or give any ground. She reminded herself that he still hadn’t apologized for walking out on Saturday, or in the parking lot, either, and raised her chin to look straight at him.
“I never said anything about rules or plans.” Which might not have been strictly true. “I never said we couldn’t make changes for each other.” That was true. She was sure of that. “I just asked you to put my furniture back, and you reacted by getting emotional and storming out and not talking to me for two days. I had to make excuses for you at Natalie's birthday yesterday, and her mom was just smirking at me, I could feel it, but I did it anyway, because apparently I am that person, now, who covers for her boyfriend’s immature behavior by lying to her best friends.”
He winced, which was something.
“So if it’s allowed to be talked about, can you maybe clarify what the hell you meant by disappearing?”
He was back to glaring. “I told you, I didn’t disappear.”
“Not today. Well, today, in the parking lot, actually, yes,” Serena found herself advancing on him, without realizing she’d stood up. “It was the same thing. You got mad, spouted some emotional stuff, and drove off without giving me a chance to reply. That’s bullshit, Dillon, you can’t just drop a bomb like that and storm off and act like I’m the one who is behaving badly. It’s not fair and it’s not mature and it’s not what we said we were about. We were about having fun and being friends and fireworks and not rushing it and then you went and,” Serena stopped and turned away. She wouldn’t—would not—mention the love thing.
She tried to focus on the pod-like chair, to lighten her mood by imagining Dillon pretending to command a spaceship as he sat in it playing video games. All she could picture was his face breaking into laughter when they’d tried to figure out the logistics of making love in that chair, so she shut down her imagination, reminded herself that Dillon was behaving like a petulant child, and swiveled to face him again. “You changed the rules.”
“So, you admit there are rules,” he said, flat and quiet.
She threw up her hands. “Not like a rule book. But you can’t agree that we’re on one path and then suddenly say we’re on another path and get mad when I don’t agree.”
“I’m not mad that you don’t agree, Serena. You want to know why I’m mad? It’s not because of the table, either. You think it’s because of the table, but you want to know why? It’s because you think that you’re the only one who can have ideas about our relationship. It’s because you think that there’s one path that’s just sex and friendship and an entirely separate path that’s deeper, that’s love and making a future, yes, a future—no, let me say it,” Dillon shook his head fast when she started to speak, and went on in his low relentless tone, “a deliberate future, a place we go together, a place where you, apparently, don’t want to go.
“But those paths, Serena? They aren’t two different paths. The first one leads directly to the second one, and maybe I rushed ahead of you a little, but you know what? You’re not as far behind me as you think. You know I love you. You know exactly how that happened, because you have been right there with me every step of the way on this path, Serena, you know you have. And you can pretend that I’m violating some grand idea of yours about our relationship, but all it really is, all it comes down to as far as I can tell, is that I know I’ve been heading to this part of the path all along, and you’re trying to pretend that you’re not. So refuse to face your feelings if you have to, Serena, but don’t you dare stop me from feeling my own.” He shook his head again. “Just don’t you even try.”
Chapter Forty-One
Dillon sank back down on his sofa, dropping his head into his hands. He swore to himself he wouldn’t let her see that his arms were trembling. He heard her move, and knew it was too much to hope that she’d sit down beside him. Sure enough, when he looked up she was perched on the coffee table, way down at the end furthest from him.
At least her voice had lost the sarcastic edge, when she finally spoke. “I never tried to deny your feelings.”
After a moment’s consideration, he sighed. “I suppose you didn’t, no.”
“That doesn’t mean I agree with you,” she said.
What could he do but try to laugh? “No, I got that.”
She echoed his sigh. “Look, I will think about what you said. But I’m mad, too, Dillon. I’m mad that you’re not willing to give me time to adjust. I’m mad that you keep pushing then walking away, like you just don’t want to hear my response. If we weren’t at your house right now, I don’t even know if you’d have bothered to say all you did say, instead of leaving again after telling me I didn’t know what the important things to talk about were.”
“Don’t go back there.”
“Fine, right, okay. You didn’t mean to say that. But that’s my point. You’re mad and you’re saying, well, some volatile things, and then you’re walking away. I shouldn’t have to follow you or provoke you or corner you in your den to get you to talk this stuff out.”
He couldn’t help but glance at his front door, and might have stopped himself from muttering, “Speaking of walking away.” But he didn’t.
Serena’s whole torso twitched as if prodded. “That was a different time for us. I thought we’d dealt with it.”
“Yeah, maybe. Maybe not, though. Maybe I’m still not all that fine with the way you ran off and didn’t tell me why, not until I figured it out on my own. Sure, yeah, I understand it now, but face it, Serena, your gut reaction there wasn’t exactly about communication and honesty, was it?”
She glanced at the door herself. “I suppose you can read it that way.”
“Well, tell me how else I’m supposed to read it then! So far when things have come up between us, you’ve either gone all ostrich on me or come up with a seventeen point plan to keep me in my place. So don’t accuse me of walking away, if you’re not willing to face the same truth about yourself. That’s not fair.”
“It’s not? And you’re not suddenly sitting on the edge of the sofa be
cause your instincts are telling you to run right now?”
Dillon made a show of settling against the back of the sofa. It wasn’t like she could see his heart racing with adrenaline. He rolled his shoulders back and blew out a long breath. After a moment’s consideration, he asked, “Are you telling me you want to talk about my loving you?”
Now Serena was the one on the balls of her feet, about to stand. She gritted her teeth and glanced away before answering. “No. Not right now.” Surprising him, she shifted onto the sofa and briefly, lightly squeezed his forearm. “I will say thank you. It’s nice to hear, no matter what you think I think. But I’m still too—too full of feelings, negative feelings. I need to have some time to adjust. And I need you to not push me.”
“So you accept that I love you?”
“I,” she paused, too long for Dillon's taste, “I do accept that you think you do. And I know you have a point about the paths—well, the one path. But you know why I’m, a slow walker or whatever, with the steps—the stepparents. And there’s too much to—it’s too much, right now. Not when I’m mad, and you’re mad, and I’m not sure what I want. I think it’s better if we talk about it some other time.”
Dillon just looked at her. Her eyes, darker than usual, maybe a result of the unusual circles beneath them. The tilt of her tense jaw. She’d worn her hair tightly clipped up, in the style he’d always privately called The Sergeant for its fierce and purposeful air. He was looking at a losing battle. He just wished he knew if it was going to be one of many, or the loss that would allow him to regroup and eventually win the war.
“Do you want me to stay for dinner?” Serena asked him after a moment. She wasn’t sure if they were in the middle of a fight still, or done. There was sure as hell no vibe of make-up sex in the air, so she supposed that was the answer.
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