Lauren Blakely - After This Night

An envelope.

He took the envelope, fat and stuffed. His name was on the front, and his stomach dropped when he read the words: “This belongs to you. Thank you for the loan. I always pay back my debts.”

But there was no xoxo. No secret message to decode that would reassure him she’d be coming back. There was only money, all ten thousand dollars that she’d won, and he’d lost.

* * *

The next day he wasn’t any wiser as to whether she’d be returning. He hadn’t heard from her: no emails, no calls, only a text to say she’d landed safely. He took some small solace in the safety update, but it truly wasn’t enough for him. He wanted all of her. He needed all of her. And he had virtually none.

He’d zombied his way through the day, grateful that the Pinkertons had signed on the dotted line after the emergency soothe session the day before. Warding off that near-fiasco had given him the mental space to manage the bare minimum he needed to get through the contracts and phone calls on his agenda.

He emailed her the ticket back to New York. He’d booked it for two weeks from now, hoping that was fair—a week apart, a week to plan. She replied with a thank you.

He checked countless times for messages from her. Each time he’d come up empty.

He scrolled through his emails on the subway home just to make sure he hadn’t missed one from her.

After a workout at his boxing gym that left his shoulders sore and his body tired, he still was no closer to knowing whether she was going to need those fluffy towels or not.

The time without her was like a black hole, a vacuum that gnawed away at him. He’d subtract a few years from his life simply for a note that gave him some sense of which way she was leaning. Something, anything to hold onto, to give him purchase. How had it only been twenty-four hours when it felt like a fucking year?

But that was what love does. It changes your perception of everything, of your own capacity for pain, for hope, and most of all—your perception of time. Because now, time was measured by her, by her presence, by her absence, and his relentless desire for her yes.

He checked his phone once more on the way home from the gym, like an addict. He was going to wear a hole through the screen with his thumbprint from all the times he’d swiped it. He needed company; he needed someone. He showered and headed uptown, reasoning that if he wasn’t going to find an answer from her, he could at least ask questions of someone else.

When he arrived at the building off Park Avenue with the green awning, the doorman buzzed her apartment. “You have a visitor. Clay Nichols is here to see you,” the man said, then paused. “Very well.”

He hung up.

“She said to come on up,” the doorman said, gesturing to the elevator.

Clay hadn’t been here in a long time. He hadn’t needed to. Now, he did.

When Michele opened the door, she was wearing a tank top and slim jeans, her hair pulled into a high ponytail, showing off her neck.

A neck that he’d once kissed.

He didn’t mince words, or bother with preambles.

“Are you in love with me?” he asked as he walked inside.

“I have been for years,” she said, as the door closed behind them.

“I’ve been thinking of new names for cocktails. Well, Craig and I have,” Kim offered during a lull in the crowds on Monday night.

“Yeah? Do tell.”

“We came up with a whole list of great names while you were out of town.”

“Your hubs is usurping my spot as a partner-in-crime?” Julia asked, resting a hip along the bar as she wiped down glasses.

“Ha. Hardly. But he does like to name drinks. Here’s what we’ve got. A shot called the Long, Hard Night. A stiff drink called the One Night Stand. And a variation on the lemon drop martini that we called Lemon Drop Your Panties,” Kim said, and the edges of Julia’s lips lifted in a smile.

“Great names,” she said, then looked away from Kim because all of them—every single one—reminded her of Clay. He’d been her One Night Stand, her Long, Hard Night, and she’d dropped her panties countless times for him. Every time, he’d risen—no pun intended—to the challenge, stripping her down to the bare essentials of pleasure and desire, and somehow all that desire had morphed into so much more. Into a mad and passionate love. The kind of love that thundered down the road with wild hoofbeats after midnight. Desperate, reckless, and headfirst.

That was the problem. She needed to pull back and analyze. To think. To consider. “Hey, can I ask you a question?”

“Fire away.”

“Has Craig ever lied to you about something because he thought it was for the best?”

Kim shot her a quizzical look. “Well, how would I know?”

“I mean something he eventually ‘fessed up to,” she added.

“Ah, gotcha,” Kim said, scrunching up her forehead as she considered the question. Then she thrust her finger in the air. “Yes! He used to tell me he loved my pot roast when we were first dating, and it turned out he really thought it was dry and stringy.”

Julia laughed. “Tell the truth, Kim. Is your pot roast dry and stringy?”

Kim threw back her head and chuckled. “Evidently, I make the worst pot roast in the entire universe. It’s that bad. But you know what?”

“What?”

“Now if he ever bugs me by leaving his dirty socks on the floor, or failing to put the toilet seat down, I just threaten him with my pot roast. Keeps that man in line,” she said, straightening her spine like a drill sergeant issuing orders.

A pair of young men in suits sidled up to the bar and Kim turned her attention to them. Julia’s mind stayed put on Kim’s story and how it had a happy ending. Wasn’t that what everyone wanted? A happy ending? But was a pot-roast fib the same as an omission of the truth?

She didn’t know, and wasn’t sure how to arrive at an answer. Her brain had grown cloudier in the last twenty-four hours, fuzzier with the distance. Had she overreacted? Been too quick to anger? She was a hot-tempered woman. She knew that about herself. But she valued independence more than anything. Even more than love. If she were to give up her independence, her job, her bar, her home, her sister, even her hairdresser, she had to know with the same clarity she had about how to make a kick-ass cocktail that uprooting her whole damn life—like she were picking up a carpet and shaking everything off it, come what may—was as right as right could be.

Come what may.

That was the real risk, wasn’t it? Charging headfirst into the great unknown. Throwing away the self-protective armor she’d built since Dillon’s betrayal, and shedding all her fiery independence for a chance that could flame out and fade away. Living in close quarters could turn the two of them—two strong-willed, stubborn, controlling people—into a collision course for disaster.

Or they could become better together, come what may.

“Hey Kim,” Julia called out as her co-worker deposited the drinks to the customers. “I just thought of another name for a drink. Come What May.”

“What’s in it?”

“Something risky. Something that makes you want to take a chance. What do you think?”

“I think we need to break out our beakers and start mixing,” Kim said, bumping her hip against Julia’s.

“Ouch, I think you whacked me with your gigantic belly.”

“It’s a weapon of mass destruction. Beware,” Kim said, rubbing her hands over her beach ball-sized stomach as she reached for spirits to test. “Let’s start with— ”

But Kim’s suggestion was cut short by the clearing of a throat. Julia swiveled around to the bar and spotted a familiar face. She couldn’t connect a name to the man, or why she knew him, but the older, dapper gentleman was giving her a serious case of déjà vu, and she hoped he’d alleviate it soon.

“Good evening. I was hoping to find Julia Bell,” he said, and that didn’t help her one bit. In fact, all her instincts told her that he was working for Charlie, or looking for Dillon, or somehow that she was going to be in a heap of trouble again. A fleet of nerves launched inside her, and she could feel the inklings of flight or fight kick in.

“That’s me,” she answered, calling on her best tough-chick-behind-the-saloon-bar persona.

“We met briefly before,” he began, and something about his classy voice tickled her memory. He wasn’t one of Charlie’s men after all. Charlie’s men were rougher around the edges. This man was proper and finished, like a gentlemanly professor. “And you made me the most fantastic drink I’ve ever had.”

Her lips curved up, a smile threatening to break across her face. “Was it my Purple Snow Globe?”

“Indeed it was.” He extended a hand to shake. “I’m Glen Mills, and my magazine has been running a search for the best cocktail ever.”

Julia took his hand. “And I trust you found that cocktail here at Cubic Z?”

* * *

Clay sank down onto Michele’s couch. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

She flashed a small, sad smile. “Why didn’t you ever notice?”

He held out his hands, showing they were empty. “I don’t know.”

“Did you? Notice, finally?” she asked, and her voice rose, touching some kind of hopeful note as she sat down across from him in a dove gray chair in her apartment.

He shook his head. “No. But then, lately, I haven’t been so astute at connecting the dots, in the right time or the right fashion.”

“Then how did you figure it out?” she asked, cocking her head curiously.

“I didn’t. Julia did. She mentioned it when we went outside during the game.”

Michele winced, then dropped her head in her hands. “She must hate me,” she muttered.

“No,” he said quickly, needing to reassure her. “She doesn’t hate you at all. She’s not like that. She thinks you are lovely, and smart, and funny,” he said, repeating Julia’s words from Saturday. “And I happen to agree with her.”

Michele raised her face, and rolled her eyes in self-deprecation. “Some good that did.”

“Michele,” he said gently.

She shook her head several times. “I feel like an idiot.”

“Please don’t. You’re the farthest thing from that. If anyone’s the idiot, it’s me. I didn’t have a clue.”

She managed a small laugh. “I wish I could say that’s because I was so good at hiding how I felt, but seeing as Julia noticed it instantly and you didn’t have an inkling for ten years, I’m going to have to go with you being completely blind to what’s in front of you sometimes. I just have to wonder, though, Clay, how could you not tell?”

He raised both shoulders, shrugging. “I’ve been trying to figure out how I missed it and all I can conclude is this—I care about you so deeply as a friend, and you’re Davis’s sister, and I feel like the three of us are kind of in the trenches together. Like we’ve risen up together in our jobs, and we’re this great threesome of friends somehow. I guess I only ever saw you that way.”

“Let me ask you a question then,” she said, taking a deep breath, the look in her eyes one of fierce determination. “If you’d have known how I felt, would it have made a difference anyway?”

He locked eyes with the woman he’d been friends with for so long. With his best friend’s sister. With the gal he had drinks with every Thursday night. The person he’d turned to for advice on the woman who had confused him. She was his friend, always had been, and that’s how he wanted to keep her. He shook his head, and sighed. “No,” he admitted. “I’m sorry.”

She held up a hand. “Please,” she said firmly. “No pity for me.”

“It’s not pity.”

“I mean it, Clay,” she said. “I’m going to be fine. I’ve been in love with you for ten fucking years, and have managed it. Now it’s time I get out of love with you.”

He sank deeper into the couch, and breathed out hard. “Why didn’t you say something, if you felt that way?”

She closed her eyes briefly, then opened them. Her mouth was set in a firm line. Then she spoke. “I think, deep down, I knew it was unrequited. That even if I told you, I knew that it wouldn’t change a thing. That whatever that kiss was about in college was all it was ever going to be, but it did a number on me.”

He tilted his head, stared at her as if she were a science project he was in the middle of constructing. “Why? From one kiss?”

“It was the kiss, but most of all, it was you. I thought you were the most handsome man I’d ever met, and smart, and funny, and most of all, you had your act together. You have no idea what my days are like,” she said, with a light laugh. “I love my job. But I spend my days with a lot of messed-up people. And you’re the least fucked-up person I’ve ever known. You don’t have issues. You don’t have baggage. What you see is what you get. For someone who spends all day fixing people, I suppose I really have been longing for someone I didn’t have to fix.”