Page 63 of The Incredible Kindness of Paper
He swallowed the lump in his throat. She hadn’t reacted with any kind of joy at receiving a message from him or having his number again. But then again, what had he expected? That sending eleven measly words would suddenly send her running back into his arms?
Oliver:Of course. I’ll be here when you’re ready.
And then he set down his phone and deflated. Because he had just gotten Chloe back, and now he might lose her again.
Chloe
The next morning, Chloe felt even worse than she had the night before. She’d hardly slept, instead tossing and turning in bed as she replayed the gala and what she’d done. Being with Oliver on the rooftop had felt like destiny, but in the moments afterward, Chloe had seen it for what it truly was—selfishness hiding behind the excuse of fate. On Oliver’s part, because he’d lied—by omission—to her. And on her part, because she’d been unwilling to let go of a very old dream.
She needed to go to Zac’s apartment and apologize. He had invited her to the gala, and her behavior was nothing short of disrespectful and, honestly, mortifying. When had she become the kind of person who would dance with another man while waiting for a different date to arrive?
And yet, Chloe knew deep down that there was more to it than that. She and Oliver had a history, and it was unfinished. Just like when they were teenagers, his touch during their dance and on the roof had been so tender, the underlying yearning delicate, rather than sharp. It was the opposite of how Zac touched her, all urgent unslaked hunger. Not better… just different.
But with Oliver, themorewas that it wasn’t only about one dance. It was about the years of longing ever since Chloe fell in love with him at age twelve. It was about the other boys she’d tried to date in school to distract her from the one she wanted, who didn’t see her in the same light. Last night was about that moment during sophomore year when, finally, Oliver had kissed her. And about the sixteen years that had passed since then.
It was possibly the beginning—or the end—of what they’d started way back when.
“That doesn’t make it okay that I was an asshole to Zac,” Chloe said to herself as she put on her robe and headed to the shower.
As she stepped into the bathroom, though, Becca popped her head out of her bedroom.
“Hey! It’s still my turn!” Becca pointed at the who-can-shower-when schedule pinned to the bathroom door. Sometimes it really did feel like they were bickering tween sisters rather than grown thirtysomethings.
Chloe sighed. Thereweretechnically still twenty minutes in Becca’s Sunday-morning time slot. “Can we make an exception?” Chloe asked. “I messed things up with Zac last night, and I need to go over there and fix it.”
“Oh.” Becca’s fighting stance melted away. “Yeah, okay. Do what you need to do. I know I didn’t start out being, like, the biggest fan of his, but recently… well, he’s been there for you, trying to help you with the origami thing. So I hope you two are okay.”
“Hey,” Chloe said quietly when Zac opened his apartment door.
“Hullo.” He stepped aside and let her in but wouldn’t meet her eyes. For once, he wasn’t spending a weekend morning working out or at the office. Instead, Zac had bedhead and was still in a T-shirt and plaid pajama pants.
“I brought you breakfast.” Chloe held up a cup with a double shot of espresso and a large bag from Giovanni’s Croissants & Baguettes. “It’s a loaf of pain aux céréales, the healthy bread you like.”
“Not hungry. But I’ll take the coffee. Thanks.”
She followed him into the living room and was quickly reminded by the décor that Zac liked the finer things in life, like handmade furniture, bespoke suits, and accounts at Bergdorf Goodman. That’s why Becca was wrong about the love-bombing; when Zac gifted things to Chloe, be it expensive sushi dinners or jewelry, it didn’t feel extravagant to him. He just had a lot more money and a higher standard of luxury than Chloe; those things were merely “normal” to him.
They settled on the couch, but with an entire sofa cushion empty between them. Zac held his espresso in his hands but didn’t drink. From the bags under his eyes, it looked like he hadn’t slept, either.
“I’m sorry,” Chloe said. “Really sorry about last night.”
Zac laughed humorlessly. “Sorry for what? Because it turns out, you never actually told me what happened. But obviously something did.”
Chloe’s chest tightened. She wanted to come clean, but she also didn’t want to lose Zac. Maybe it wasn’t fair trying to have both him and Oliver, but she wasn’t ready to choose. Zac had wined and dined Chloe for the past couple months, and he did seem to care. Oliver, on the other hand, may have been her first love, but Chloe was still barely getting to know him again. Whatever had happened in the intervening years he kept behind a heavily locked door, and it was too early to ascertain if he was still the same manherOliver had once been.
And then there was the reality that Zac and Oliver had to work together. Individually, they were good people, but they were both alphas, and Chloe didn’t need an MBA to see why the two didn’t get along at the office. Zac felt like he’d put in his years at Hawthorne Drake and Oliver, a newcomer, was swooping in to steal everything. Yet, to Oliver, he’d been hired to do a certain job but gotten ambushed on day one by a very territorial Zac.
If Chloe confessed that shehadwanted to kiss Oliver, full-out war would break out on the thirty-second floor of Hawthorne Drake, and that could be disastrous to both Zac’s and Oliver’s careers.
“Oliver and I grew up together,” she said carefully. “We were so close, we might as well have been physically attached. It was hard to find one of us without the other. We were just friends for nearly a decade… In tenth grade, though, we became something more.”
Zac set his espresso down on the coffee table a bit too hard, and some of it splashed up through the hole in the lid. He didn’t bother cleaning it up, just sat back on the sofa with his arms crossed tightly. “That was a long time ago. But go on.”
Chloe bit her lip. “Oliver was my first crush. I’d loved him already for several years when he finally seemed to realize it. But our ‘relationship’—if you can even call it that—was very short. His family left Kansas one day later, and then Oliver and I lost touch.”
“It didn’t look like you had lost touch on the rooftop.”
Chloe noticed she was twisting the fabric of her skirt with her hands, and she clasped them to try to still her nerves.
