Page 20 of It's Always Been You
“Fucking shit,” Allie whispers. “That is really good gossip, Molly. What did he want?”
Jules cackles. “He wants her. You should have seen his face when he looked at her.” She waves a hand at Allie and Jordan. “You two are the only people I’ve seen look at each other the way he was looking at her. Even Asher doesn’t look at me like that.”
Jordan puts a hand on Allie’s cheek, tipping her face to his and kissing her like they are alone in the room.
“I’ll always look at you like that,” he whispers when they break apart, dropping a kiss on her forehead before sitting back in his chair.
“Jesus, you two,” Julie groans. “Can you not be sickening for, like, five minutes?”
“No can do, Jules. Gotta show my girl how much I love her whenever I can.”
Allie snickers but her face is flushed, and her eyes still look a little dazed from that kiss. None of that stops her from grilling me.
“Okay, so he was looking at you like you’re the only girl for him yesterday. What happened this morning?”
“It was nothing.” My reaction is knee-jerk, and no one is here for my shit.
“It wasn’t nothing,” Julie and Allie say together, looking at each other and laughing.
I laugh too, and it’s the tension relief I need. “Okay, fine. It wasn’t nothing. He acted like he was so damn happy to see me.”
“Why couldn’t he have actually been happy to see you?” Julie asks. “You said it yourself—you guys were the love of each other’s lives. He’s here in Pittsburgh, and he came to this office looking for you. It’s not a huge leap that he would be happy to see you.”
“Ugh, I know. It just threw me. Last time I saw him, he was grieving and broken. And last night I cried my eyes out in the shower after I saw him. It’s taking my head a second to reconcile that Gabe with the cheerful puppy dog wearing an Avengers T-shirt, buying me coffee and muffins, telling me he moved to my neighborhood, and asking me to be his lawyer. And to figure out why I didn’t hate seeing him.”
“Fuck, he moved here?” Allie asks. “You should have led with that.”
“To your neighborhood? That seems a little stalkerish for my taste,” Jordan says.
“I really don’t think he knew. He seemed genuinely surprised that I live there too.”
“So, you talked?” Julie is now basically sitting cross-legged on my desk with her elbows on her knees.
“Oh, we talked. About basically nothing. We bantered like it hadn’t been a decade since we last spoke. And I almost fucking kissed him.”
“What?” Jules and Allie both yelp.
“Oh, you bet. I was so surprised to see him I stumbled backward, and he caught me before I fell. It was like he captured me in his force field or something. I couldn’t move back, and we kept getting closer and closer to each other. I swear, if the cashier didn’t call us over, I would have kissed him right in The Coffee Tree.”
“Well,” Julie huffs out. “I don’t even quite know what to say about that.”
“I do,” Allie says. “That’s some heavy attraction to still be there after ten years. I’m sure the two of you have all kinds of shit to work out, and you should deal with all of it. But Jesus. Ten years is a long fucking time to still be drawn to someone like that. Plus, I’m sure he’s great in bed. From all the interviews I’ve seen, he’s got the hot nerd thing in spades, and that is just so fucking sexy. He looks like he’d know exactly what to do.”
“Yeah, no shit,” I mumble, as Jordan pokes Allie in the side and whispers something in her ear that has her grinning and flushing at the same time.
Julie checks the clock on my desk and stands. “When he called to schedule the appointment, he said he was looking for a lawyer and he wanted that lawyer to be you. He was all polite and everything and even apologized for crashing the party. It seemed like the beginning of a good grovel.”
I let out a deep sigh. “He always was good at that.”
“Listen, I have to go to this meeting, but I’m on your side. If you want to meet with him and be his lawyer or get back together with him and live happily ever after, or some combination of the two, I’m on your side. If you decide that you never want to see his face ever again, I’ll call him back and cancel for you. If youdecide at eleven twenty-five tomorrow that the meeting’s off, I’ll kick him out myself. I am solidly Team Molly.”
I tug on the bracelets around my wrist, thinking of Gabe’s crystal-clear blue eyes and the way they lit up when he looked at me. The way his ocean and pine scent wrapped itself around me made me feel more at home than I have in the ten years since I walked out of his house. The way my whole body buzzed with electricity when he touched me, and how easily he referenced the coffee dates we used to have in college, and the way he would always buy me three muffins because I was never good at making decisions and how much I liked it. I don’t know what he’s really doing here, but I am self-aware enough to know that if I don’t see this through—whateverthisis—it will haunt me forever.
I lean back in my chair, relieved, in some way, to have come to at least some sort of decision.
“It’s fine, Jules. Don’t cancel the appointment. Whatever he has to say, I think I need to hear it.”
She nods and heads towards the door, calling, “I’ll be back later for more details about this morning,” behind her.
