Page 59 of The Bookbinder's Guide to Love

Fifteen

Leaving the tavern with Sera, kissing her under the streetlamp, Wes told himself he was being the man she needed him to be. But he couldn’t help feeling like he was playing a part. He had been since he’d come to Birch Lake. He kept trying to tell himself he was changing, but the truth was he didn’t want to.

He wanted something he wasn’t going to find in Sera’s arms. He’d never allowed himself to admit before that as contented as he was with his life, he was lonely. With Sera, he’d found someone who looked at the world in a similar way. He wanted that. He wanted to just let down his guard and trust her.

Something he could no longer deny after seeing her and her friends. He had no real close friendships other than Oz. Hazel, his assistant, was probably the only other person he talked to regularly, and they weren’t friends. Sera’s group felt like family. Wes had never really wanted a family of his own because he thought they were all like the Sitwells.

Sera, who’d grown up drifting through the foster-care system, had stronger and more meaningful bonds than he did. He was tempted by that as much as he was by Sera herself. She was something different, and though he’d always been arrogant and assumed he could figure out anyone and anything, this time he couldn’t.

She broke the kiss and it seemed to him almost as if she were having a crisis too. His dad always said only one person could freak out at a time. That had been his one parenting rule when he and Oz were growing up, and it was the one thing Wes had taken into his adult life.

She was freaking out, so that meant Wes had to get his shit together.

“What’s going on?” he asked. She leaned into him, putting her face in the center of his chest and muttering words he really couldn’t hear.

But the tone sounded frustrated.

“I didn’t catch that. It’s okay if I wasn’t meant to,” he added. He kind of liked her having a crisis because it left no room for him to freak out on his own.

She lifted her head and shook it. “I’m a crap friend. Poppy could really use me right now, but I can’t be there for her.”

“That doesn’t make you a crap friend,” he said, linking their fingers together and starting to walk back up the street toward WiCKed Sisters and her home.

“It doesn’t? It feels like it.”

Their date had turned into something else. To be fair, he certainly had seen a different side to Sera tonight. It was no less beautiful than the other parts of her. She was so raw and honest—and that attracted him. She didn’t hide from her emotions; he envied that.

He tipped his head back, realizing he was a little bit buzzed. Also, as always when he was close to her, he was turned on. But she probably didn’t want to have sex when she was feeling the way she was.

“I don’t know the history between all of you, but I do know Poppy didn’t seem resentful you left. Do you want to talk about why we needed to leave?”

She shook her head.

“Do you want to talk about anything?”

She stopped walking and looked up at him. “I don’t know how to say this and not sound like an idiot.”

He put his hands on either side of her face and stared down into those big brown eyes of hers. “You could never.”

“Trust me, I can,” she said wryly. Then she took a deep breath and blinked a few times. “I started to feel like I belonged in that group with you by my side.”

He dropped his hands. Not what he was expecting. They’d said temporary. He wasn’t sure he could trust her; he was trying, but a part of him wasn’t sure he believed he ever could.

“I know. This was six weeks—nothing more. And we’ve wound down almost half of that,” she said as she turned from him and started walking up the street without him.

He was tempted to let her go. That he stood there and watched her really pissed him off. He hated this part of himself that detached from emotion and shut down.

But he saw that pink skirt and her curly hair all around her head and knew he couldn’t let her leave.

Not like this.

He ran to catch up. He caught her around her waist and pulled her back against his front because some things were easier to say when they weren’t face-to-face. “I felt that too.”

The words were sort of ripped from deep inside him and sounded like a hoarse whisper, guttural. Tonight in the tavern, drinking and having fun and taking part in uncomfortable conversations for the first time, Wes felt like he had people who he... He couldn’t make himself even think it.

“We suck at this, don’t we?” she said, putting her hands over his where they rested around her waist.

We.

---