“Shhh, shhh.” Hayes’ hand reached out and brushed gently at the tears I hadn’t noticed on my cheeks. “Please don’t cry.”
“I’m sorry, Hayes. I don’t want to hurt you, but —”
“Don’t.” He tossed a wad of money on the table and rose, taking my hand and tugging me up with him. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
I followed without speaking. Outside, the wind cut through my coat and I shivered. Hayes looked up and down the street. “Where did you park?” I pointed, and we started walking. He hadn’t released my hand, taking it instead and tucking it into his own coat pocket. The feel of his warm fingers curled around mine in the tiny space was at once disturbing and comforting. This…right here…this was exactly what I meant.
I could feel the warmth of his thigh through the interior lining of the coat, the heat of his hand curled around mine. It was making me feel things, things I didn’t know what to do with. I wanted to rub my thumb over his palm and see if it made him shiver like it did me. I wanted to pull my hand loose, and retreat into my own space. I wanted to chase those feelings and run from them at the same time.
It was making me crazy.
I wanted space, but the little things like this that he did made me forget that.
When we reached my car, I leaned against the driver’s side door and he faced me, reaching out his free hand to smooth a stray hair back from my face. “Here’s the deal, Birdie. If you knew how much we loved each other, you’d never ask me to back off. But you don’t, and all of this—” He made a looping gesture with his hand. “It’s scary. Intense. It was like that for both of us in the beginning, so I get it.” He sighed and looked away. “I can’t just walk away. Especially not with you being pregnant.”
“Hayes, I —”
“No, let me finish. I won’t walk away. But I will take us back, to our starting point. You don’t remember, but I had to work for you a year ago.” He smiled ruefully. “You didn’t make it easy.” I saw his eyes harden infinitesimally. “All the more reason I’m not giving you up. You want to make me work for it again, no problem. You’re worth it.”
I didn’t know what to say. I had expected anger, irritation. Not this renewed sense of purpose.
Hayes wasn’t finished, apparently. Removing his hand from mine, he lifted both to my jaw and tilted my face up to his. No, no, no…my inner alarms were flashing. “But before I do, I want a kiss. To remind both of us of what I’m working for. To keep me steady when you make it tough.” His lips quirked. “To keep you unsteady.”
“But —”
He sealed off the words with his mouth on mine, and of their own volition my eyes drifted shut. I don’t want to be unsteady. But that’s exactly what his kiss did. It wrapped itself around me, binding me to him as though his arms were holding me close instead of the loose clasp of his hands on my face. His lips were warm and mobile and searching on my own, and I felt my mouth parting to allow him access, a tight, almost painful pressure in my chest unfurling as he stroked inside.
One hand slipped down to my waist, slipping inside my coat and around the flesh there. His fingers slipped under the waistband at my lower back and I startled from their cold press against me. They clenched and held me firm. His chest rose and fell against my own and I arched instinctively into him, feeling his heart thump against me, hard. Fast. This wasn’t only affecting me, I realized. It was both of us.
I heard a low, needy sound and realized as I felt Hayes’s mouth curl in satisfaction that it was me. He lifted his head and looked down at me. “You’ll ask for the next one,” he predicted, and then he was opening my car door and depositing me in the driver’s seat. “Drive safe.”
I sat for a full minute in bemused silence, watching as he walked back the way we’d come. Then, giving my head a slight shake to clear it, I pressed the start button and went home.
“Please forgive my hands when they can't stop finding you. please forgive my lips.”
Tyler Knott Gregson
November 29 │Hayes
I SHOULD’VE SEEN IT COMING.
It was all I could think as I made my way back to campus for my last class of the day. Birdie’s failure to remember the singular event that had driven her to get in her car and drive it into a tree was a disguised blessing, as much as I hated the thought. What she didn’t remember wouldn’t hurt her, right?
It seemed part of her did remember, though — at least on some level. And that part was putting up big old flashing reverse lights.
It was such a stupid non-event. If she hadn’t seen and completely misinterpreted before I could extricate myself gracefully, we’d be planning a nursery right now. And a wedding. The irony of it, the knowledge that we had every happiness a couple could wish for right there within our grasp and then lost it with such an epic fuck my life moment...it was brutal.
I made my way through my last lecture by rote, knowing that I was failing at being the exciting, interesting new professor who didn’t bore his classes to death. As an adjunct, I had to be twice as good as the faculty with greater experience if I stood a snowball’s chance of ever getting tenure.
Today, though, it didn’t matter. Today was a lost cause. A romantic relationship right now is too much for me, she’d said. I almost laughed in the middle of my explanation of game theory but managed to turn it into a cough instead. As if we were capable of anything else.
Birdie didn’t get it: together, we were bullets to the chamber. Rogers and Astaire. Left then right…one without the other was just an endless loop.
While on the surface I was engaged in the dynamics of my lesson, on the inside I was a riot of hastily conceived and discarded ideas on fixing things. Ultimately, I figured I was likely going to have to do what I’d told her and earn her once again. Which was fine. I’d never been one of those assholes that quit once he had the girl. The question, though, was how to go about this without pushing her even further away?
I brooded over the quandary as I drove home after my lecture.
It felt like she was already distancing herself from me in every possible way. She’d gotten a job, for God’s sake. Not that she was disabled, but she had amnesia. I snorted. It was actually pretty damn funny, not that I had any plans on telling her any time soon. She’d walked into my aunt Maggie’s shop, the same store she’d been making custom signs for during the past year. I wished I’d seen the look on Maggie’s face when it happened. In fact…
I called Maggie as I drove, placing the phone in the hands-free cradle and putting it on speaker. “Farmer’s Wife, Maggie speaking.”
“Hey, Aunt Mags.”
“Hayes! I was going to call you later. You will never believe what happened today.”
“If it’s Birdie coming in and asking for a job, then yes, I’ll believe it.”
“It was so out of the blue, Hayes. I don’t know how I managed to pretend like I didn’t know that sweet girl.” Her voice is troubled. “I wasn’t sure what to do. If I should tell her she’s worked with me before, that she made those signs…I didn’t want to throw a lot at her when it became obvious that she didn’t know who I was, and had just randomly wandered in.”