Page 101 of Mixed Signals
Don’t go,I try to tell her.Stay with me.
Trust me.
She tears her mouth from mine with a gasp and presses the back of her hand to her lips. She takes one step back and then two, stumbling over a tree root. I reach for her, but she shakes her head. She picks up the pile of containers at her feet.
“I’m—” She hitches her thumb over her shoulder. “I’m going to go to the bakehouse. There’s a—I should check on some things.”
I shove my hands deep in my pockets. “That’s alright.” I tip my chin up at the blanket and try not to rub my fingertips over my lips. I want to brand the feel of her into my bones. Ink it onto my skin. “I’ll clean everything up.”
She blinks quickly and her lower lip trembles. She feels so very far away when she says, “I really am sorry. I wish I didn’t feel like this.”
I shake my head. “You have nothing to apologize for.”
Not really. I’m the idiot that broke my own heart on this one. We entered this arrangement to help cure me of this problem and look. The same exact thing happened.
I look at my boots in the dirt. The edge of the blanket.
“Okay,” I hear her say. “I’ll see you tomorrow, right?”
She’ll see me tomorrow. She’ll keep seeing me. The last time I kiss Layla won’t be in the middle of a field with tears on her cheeks.
I nod and glance back up at her, my palm against the back of my neck. I squeeze so I don’t reach for her hand instead. She stares at me with her bottom lip caught between her teeth, like she’s got something else she wants to say.
But she doesn’t say it. She just gives me another small, sad smile and turns. She walks away from me, her pretty pink dress a deep red in the melting light.
I stand there and watch her go.
I watch her go until it’s just me and the trees.
TWENTY-FOUR
LAYLA
“I’d like a butter croissant.”
I don’t bother looking up from my notepad, listing out the ingredients I need to stock up on during my next trip to Annapolis. We’re going to need more sugar on this run. Probably the wholesale oranges, too.
A new soul, maybe, for the bakeshop owner who crushes the hearts of sweet, adoring men in her free time.
“We don’t have any butter croissants.”
Gus makes a grunting noise. He’s never been much of a morning person. “Then why am I looking at an entire case full of butter croissants?”
“Those aren’t for you.”
I came in earlier than usual and made three trays of butter croissants. I kept my hands busy to ignore the rolling in my chest, the tightening in my throat every time I thought of his face in the dwindling sunlight, hands reaching for me. The hurt in his eyes when I flinched away.
And it worked, for a little bit. The croissants. It was enough of a distraction to keep me from overanalyzing all the things I said last night—all the thingshesaid last night. I finished one batch and slid them in the oven. I watched them through the little window and immediately felt the press of the pre-dawn silence. Too damn quiet.
I stood there and felt all of my aches. My shoulder. My neck. My heart. Everything felt sore. I think the worst sort of thing you can do after making a questionably poor decision is to give yourself space to think.
So I started another batch.
And then another.
I tried to time the last one perfectly with his scheduled arrival so they might still be warm. A poor consolation, probably, for the way I handled things yesterday, but an apology all the same.
I got scared last night with Caleb. I know I did. When he sat down on the blanket and said he had something to tell me, I immediately thought the worst. He said he wanted to end the arrangement and it felt like every bad break-up I’ve ever had and then some. After a month. I didn’t realize how deep I had fallen into Caleb until exactly that moment. It wasn’t joy that accompanied that particular revelation, but bone-deep panic.
