Page 75 of Tulips and Lost Time

“Excellent.” I whistle under my breath and grab the door to the building before my friend can. “I’m on afternoons on Tuesdays, too.”

“I know.” He steps in ahead of me, smiling like he thinks he’s funny. “I talked to X, who talked to the scheduling person at the hospital, who spoke with Kari’s supervisor. Somehow, I managed to slide her in so her first month of shifts correspond with yours. Familiar faces and all that.” He moves onto the stairs and starts up on my right. “If I can’t be there with her, then I figure my best friend is the next best thing.”

“Mmhm.” I’m a dead man. Dead, dead, painful dead. But I’ll be long gone and buried before I can take the smile off my face.

“How are you, Bear?” I sidle closer when everyone else is carrying boxes downstairs. It took a shit ton of maneuvering to time myself with Kari, but also with the other four, so my loitering doesn’t come across as strange and their brains would be busy with their tasks. There are six of us here today, and I’m having to manage them all just to get a single second alone with the one I want. “You look pretty today.”

“I look like a sweaty ape you visit at the zoo.” But she peers across the top of her box, hugging it to her chest, and smiles the smile of… well, someone who wants to hurt me. “Isn’t your type more along the lines of brunette, pierced, and skateboards?”

Okay. So she’s still pissed about that. Noted.

“We can talk it out calmly,” I offer. “Maturely. We’re adults now, and we’ve had years to process this clusterfuck since everything that happened back in the day. Or we can take potshots at each other until someone’s feelings get hurt.”

“I choose the second.” She bounces to readjust her box and starts toward the door. “I’m coming home to be with my brother and friends. You and I don’t need to co-exist, Luca. If you insist that we do, then I insist on cheap shots and general nastiness.”

“You want me to be mean because that’s the only way you can manage your grudge.” I move toward the door too, faster than her, so I block her exit before she can escape. “You’re a sweet girl, Bear, and your biggest flaw is your inability to stay mad at someone. You’re afraid of being my friend because you know you still want me.”

“Is that what we’re doing?” She looks at the ceiling and laughs. “You sent me away, Luc! You. Sent me. Away. Don’t act like I was the one who chose this.”

“I sent you away because you were a teenager who needed college life to see something, anything, outside those train tracks back home. You needed time to mature. You needed life experience. So that when you came back, you would know what the world had to offer. And only then would I allow you to still choose me.”

She scoffs, deep and piggish, and shoves through the door until the corner of her box scrapes my ribs as she passes. “An argument you might have had a right to… years ago. But time has gone on, Luc. How on earth do you expect me to still harbor those same feelings all this time later?”

She’s so fucking pretty.

So sweaty and dirty from the dust floating around the girls’ apartment. Her shorts, though she’s changed them, aren’t much better than the pair she wore to bed. The only difference now is that they’re made of denim and support the globes of her ass in a way the soft cotton never could.

“You’re delusional,” she adds. “Completely and ridiculously insane.”

“I’m a man who knows what he wants.” I match her steps, so we descend the stairs shoulder to shoulder. “I knew back then, too. But you were too young, and I wasn’t the man who was gonna tie an eighteen-year-old to the feelings she thought she had at the time.”

“And yet, you expect me to still have them now that I’m twenty-four.” She shakes her head, smiling to herself in the way some folks do when they think their companion is stupid and crazy. “I’m not even sure how you connect the dots in your brain to make your delusion work. My feelings back in high school were invalid, but now they’re to be honored? I was too young for you back then, but now I’m not?”

“Age doesn’t matter so much as maturity and responsibility.”

“Cute.” She stops at the landing of the third floor and meets my eyes. “I’ve been more mature than you since I was seven years old.”

She spins on her heels, hair flip and all, and continues down. “Let’s not pretend you’ve ever been anything but self-centered, egotistical, and self-serving.”

“Uh huh. But even as the less mature one, I was older.” I follow her down. She’s playing a game of Russian Roulette, walking toward her brother and spouting off at the mouth. Guess that’s a game she’s willing to play. “The fact that I was older, regardless of maturity, meant it was my responsibility to keep us both safe and emotionally undamaged. I was not going to date an eighteen-year-old, no matter how fucking mature you were. And I wasn’t gonna tie you down to a town with nothing in it.”

“But you will now? Since, obviously, my college degree somehow fixes everything.”

“Now.” I grab her arm at the next landing and swing her back until she crashes against the exposed brick wall, her breath coming out on a loud gasp, and her box, the only barrier standing between us. “Now, you’re grown. You’re fucking beautiful. And you still want me.”

She lifts a single, dangerous brow. “Presumptuous of you.”

“Is it?” I look down at her body, grinning because her pulse thunders in her throat and her lips firm into thin, unimpressed lines. “If you didn’t still want me, you wouldn’t carry so much anger. If you had no lingering feelings for what we could be, then you wouldn’t want to deck me right now.”

“You’re reaching,” she seethes. “I want to deck a lot of people in life. Doesn’t mean I want to date them, too.”

“Love and hate are a part of the same spectrum, aren’t they?” I lean in closer, folding myself over the box and crushing her against the wall. “You think you hate me, Bear. I’m patient enough to wait you out and see what happens.”

“Kari?” Marc’s voice floats up the stairs and echoes from wall to wall. God forbid the guy doesn’t see his sister for more than a minute. “You coming down or what?”

“Think about it.” I study her perfect green eyes and the freckles littering her cheeks. “Carry your anger, Bear. But when you wake up in the middle of the night, throbbing and curious, I promise I’ll take your calls. I’m not saying you have to choose commitment today and fall into line. But I’m saying we have unfinished business, and I think it’s high time we lay it out.”

“And Marcus?” Her nostrils flare, drawing my gaze down and my smile up. “My age wasn’t always our only red flag. You so easily dismiss your worries about my brother, all because I’m older?”

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