Page 4 of The Whisper Place
“I missed you, too.”
It was hard to breathe. The quiet words coupled with a cocktail of emotion emanating from her—happiness, fatigue, and a hint of longing—didn’t leave room for oxygen. She slid her hand intomine and for an endless moment we just looked at each other. I feasted on the details, the sight, smell, and feel of her. I wanted to bring her hand to my mouth, to taste her skin and listen to what it did to her heart. Instead, I squeezed her palm and absorbed the flow of heat and energy.
“I was thinking while I was in Australia.”
“You’d be thinking if you were in a coma.”
I felt it coming. I heard it before she spoke it, and still it caught me like a punch in the gut.
“Would you like to have dinner with me? I want to go out. With you. Or stay in. I don’t know how you date, but I’m flexible. I want to be with you, Kendrick.” Her voice caught and went quiet. “I didn’t like not being with you.”
“Eve.” I pulled my hand away and tried looking anywhere else, as if that would help, as if I couldn’t feel the bright pulse of her intent shimmering behind my own ribcage. I wanted to say yes. My body was screaming at me to say yes. To ask her where and when and tell her how much I wanted it, too, that I’d been miserable while she was gone. That she was the best part of my day, the calm at the center of my entire stormy, complicated existence.
And I didn’t know how to do any of it.
“What?” I could feel the debate brewing, her list of counterpoints at the ready.
“I don’t date. It’s not really . . . possible.”
“We don’t have to go to a restaurant—”
“It’s not about being in public.” I turned back, drawn like a moth to the light of those blue, questioning eyes and choking on the truth I had to finally—after months of fantasizing and denial—admit out loud for both of us to hear. “It won’t work.”
“How do you know? We’ve already established you’re a pretty half-assed psychic.” Her mouth tipped up at one corner. “And you don’t have precognition. You can’t see the future.”
I didn’t have to see the future to know how this would play out. My haunted visions, dreams that woke me screaming in the middle of the night, a constantly medicated, barely-hanging-on existence at the fringes of every situation, wasn’t the kind of life I could invite someone into. Eve was brilliant, at the top of her field, rightfully in the center of every room, and beyond all that she was still recovering from her last relationship to an asshole who’d gotten himself—and her, almost—killed. It had been two years since her husband’s murder, but you don’t bounce back from a marriage like that and never with someone like me.
“I can’t be what you deserve.”
Her eyes narrowed as she processed that. The longing I’d sensed in her solidified into something more familiar, a silky and immutable determination. Holding my gaze, she leaned over the console until we were a foot apart and every fleck of her irises came into focus. Her heart thudded and mine picked up, matching her beat. Every good intention flew out of my head until all that was left was her—the smell of her, the pulse at her throat, the heat of her skin, and that shining whirr of her mind, ten paces ahead.
“Merit is an arbitrary, problematic concept. Completely untestable. I’m disregarding it because this isn’t a question of what I do or don’t deserve. It’s a question of what I want. And I want you, Kendrick.” She swallowed and her gaze dropped to my mouth. “Do you want me back?”
All the reasons we shouldn’t be together dissolved into white noise. I forgot everything. I forgot my own name. I leaned in, pulledtoward her like gravity, as voices murmured from outside the car. Then, out of nowhere, I felt a jolt of satisfied lust.
“What the—” I swung around to see my mark—our client’s cheating husband—locked in an aggressive kiss with his sidepiece directly in front of the car, two rows ahead.
I grabbed the camera and snapped a dozen shots as the guy tried to keep his fling from leaving. “Sorry. Max will lose his mind if I miss this.”
“It’s hard to miss.” Eve retreated to her side of the car and waited for me to complete the surveillance. The pictures were paid-on-delivery perfect. Clear shots of both faces, the whole scene in complete, prenup-negating detail before they both drove out of the parking lot.
I transferred the photos to my phone and backed them up on the company cloud, aware that I was stalling now. That Eve wasn’t going to forget the question hovering in the air between us.
Do you want me back?
It was inevitable, probably. It had been inevitable since the day we’d skated across a frozen, abandoned world and she told me she believed in me, since I’d held her hand in a dark bathroom while she sobbed, since we’d brought down a building and survived, together.Entanglement, she’d called it, and there was never any hope of untangling, not for me.
“I do. Yes.” Equal parts elation and terror ballooned in my chest.
Eve and I were officially dating.
Holy shit.
Darcy
The bakery stood in the shadow of downtown, across the street from a parking ramp and a steel and glass high-rise building that looked like condos or a bougie hotel. The old, converted house was tucked between two brick buildings and sat back from the street on a weedy path. I hadn’t even seen it at first. It was the smell that drew my attention, wheat and sugar and cinnamon floating in the air, making me pause on the sidewalk. A pink neon sign mounted to the siding readPastries & Dreamsin an oddly familiar font. A few bikes were padlocked to the railing and an open sign in the window turned my feet in the bakery’s direction, like my nose had hijacked my body.
I’d slept in my car in a Wal-Mart parking lot on the edge of town and used the bathroom inside the store this morning, changing underwear, brushing my teeth, and working a handful of dry shampoo through my hair before tying it back up in a knot—but I hadn’t bought anything to eat. I had snacks and water in the car and even though there was twelve thousand dollars taped under my seat, I wasn’t touching that until I reached my destination—wherever that might be.
