Page 40 of Lucas & Melissa Falling in Love
“Will, I want to talk to him,” she says, her voice soft and gentle. I want to feel relief at her words, but I don’t. I need more from her.
Will stares at her. They stare at each other. I stand still at her side, watching. He waits for too many beats to count before speaking, then darts his eyes at me. I meet his stare, confident but not threatening, saying nothing. Then he talks in a quiet, almost pleading voice.
“If you were still seeing Lucas, why did you lead me to believe we had something going on?” He pauses to turn and look at me, distraught more than angry now. I keep my mouth shut. I want him to leave us alone, but I also want—noneed—to hear her answer.
“I wasn’t seeing him,” she says.
Will snorts again in derision, but the pain comes through. I keep silent, respecting his pain. Feeling some pain of my own, I should have expected her answer. It’s technically true that we weren’t seeing each other, but we’d never truly severed our connection. Or so I thought.
He continues, his voice breaking now. “Here I was thinking,planningour midnight kiss.” He lowers his voice and moves closer to her, away from me, and leans into her. I exert all my energy to keep from pushing him away. “We were going spend the night together tonight. We talked about it. You said nothing about him.” Will waves a hand in my direction.
It occurs now to my Melissa-muddled mind that Will wants to be alone to talk to her as much as I do. He feels the same urgency for privacy, for explanations, clearing the air. The same urgency for intimacy with her. But she’s buttoned up tight with both of us in the room.
She, for a flash, looks panicked and vulnerable and sorry, but then her toughness asserts itself and though I recognize the same kind of toughness in myself, it disconcerts me.
“I’m sorry, Will. I told you, I had no idea Lucas would be here tonight.” She waves a hand in my direction as if I were an interloper after all. But if the shoe fits, right? I was not invited. I came here tonight to a penthouse party thrown by two people I hardly know because I can’t stay away, because I need to convince her we have a chance.
The hairline crack of doubt about whether I’m right about us asserts itself. I feel it like a tense burn across my shoulders, but then I shut it out before it can pervade, before it can shake me.
I stand implacable. No matter how much I feel empathy for Will, I am not going to leave her alone with him. I’m waiting for Melissa to explain, to tell Will there’s nothing between them, to tell him she wants me, wants to spend the night with me tonight, share the midnight kiss with me.
The party gets louder outside the room. I think of pushing past Will and taking Melissa’s hand and pulling her through the door and out of this place with me, but I can’t force her, wouldn’t do it.
Persuasion is one thing, but I wouldn’t drag her off like some Neanderthal to take her away from my potential rival. So I stand there, tension coiling through my muscles. And I wait to see what she’ll say next, to see what Will is going to do next.
Holding at bay the seeping resentment that Will has a claim, that she is his f—ing date tonight, gets increasingly difficult. A sharp knife of tension slices through my shoulder blades again with my effort to stay still, to stay quiet. To let the scene play out until Will gives up. Until she sends him away.
The idea that she would be with someone else tonight had truly never occurred to me.
Clearly I was wrong about that.
What if I’m wrong about more? I feel the cracking of resolve and clear my mind, clenching my jaw and closing my eyes for a moment.
One, two, three beats of excruciating silence pass.
“Melissa,” Will says. Quiet. Too quiet. “This is me. Willie. You know me.” He pauses a beat and takes a breath and I know the next words will be a low blow, all the more effective for the hesitance Will has about saying them. And the truth in them.
“He’s a stranger. You don’t know him. You don’t know who he is or where he comes from or anything about him.”
I open my eyes to watch her. She’s not looking at me. She’s concentrating on Willie.
She says, “I know,” in a choked voice, and she licks her lips and darts her eyes at me. They’re pleading, but I don’t say anything. I need her to make up her own mind. I need her to decide I’m worth the risk, worth the chance, worth finding out about. Energy I can’t contain, the turmoil running through me, thickens the already tense air surrounding us.
