His eyes were twinkling; he couldn’t stop smiling. “You know I adore you, but there are times when I just like to torture you. It makes me happy.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I focused on the obnoxious part and ignored the part that made my stupid heart pound faster. “Well you don’t have to look so satisfied about it!”
There it was, that most Troublesome smile. “Oh, boo, you of all people should know that this isn’t how I look when I’m satisfied.”
I supposed I’d walked right into that one. Infuriatingly, I blushed. “Don’t you use that tone on me,” I warned, but it was so feeble that I knew it didn’t faze him.
We watched our show while the cake baked. He behaved himself, staying on his couch. I didn’t even have to insist. He just did it. I eyed him suspiciously all the while, not trusting it.
We were eating his chocolate cake when I caught him staring at me.
Not just staring. Eating me up. He was gazing at me with an unabashed longing in his eyes that I couldn’t let stand. I could only take so much.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I told him, setting down my fork, my voice turned as cold as I could manage.
He kept doing it, until his faced transformed into a too warm smile, a soft, affectionate stare.
“Like what?” he asked, and I knew that he was toying with me.
Torturing us both just to get a taste of the old feelings.
“You know. I will leave. I mean it.”
“I’m not doing anything. I’ve just…missed you. I’m glad to spend time with you again.”
I knew he was full of it. “We can’t go back, Tristan. We can’t take any of it back. We can’t pretend that you are just you, and I am just me. There is too much bad history between us to pretend.”
Something passed over his face. It was hard to name all of the things I saw there with just one brief glimpse. Pain, regret, hope?
I discounted it all, even while I felt it myself.
“This is nostalgia that you’re feeling. It is transient. It will go away.”
He swallowed hard, looking anguished for one brief moment before he washed his features back into that soft smile. “For you, maybe. But not for me. Want to know how I know?”
I started shaking my head, but the question had been rhetorical. He was going to tell me, regardless. “Because it never went away. Nostalgia suggests that the feelings are coming back, and they can’t do that, when they never went away.”
I couldn’t breathe.
I stood up, then started to look around, trying to remember where I’d left my bag, and what I needed, before I got out of there.
He stood, his hands going out in front of him, as though in appeal. “I’m sorry. That was out of line. I’ll behave myself, just don’t leave yet, not when you’re upset like this, okay?”
“We should make another don’t list, cause this is already getting out of hand.”
He laughed, long and hard.
I didn’t mean it to come out as a punch line, but hell, it was a punch line. I shook my head, and I couldn’t hold back a baffled smile. “I’m doing my level best here, but you need to promise me you’ll get a grip. No more of those impossible looks, okay?
He didn’t hesitate. “Yeah, yes, of course. I can do that. Just don’t shut me out again.”
We finished the cake, and he walked me out to my car. He behaved himself, mostly, not kissing me, instead folding me into his chest for a long hug. He inhaled deeply once, as though he were about to say something, but he held it back.
“I still taste cinnamon,” I said into his chest.
He laughed and I smiled.
I was curling up in my own bed when I realized that I’d still never gotten that tour of his house.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
He came by the gallery the next day, wanting to cook me dinner again.
I put him off. It wasn’t easy. Not to make myself do it or to get him to accept it.
I agreed to share a quick bite to eat with him after my shift and before his show, but not for three more days, and not at his house, but somewhere public.
It wasn’t what he wanted. He was used to bigger concessions from me, but he took it, believing I was resolute.
I was relieved when he did, because my resolution had been wearing more thinly than he’d realized.
I was a little shocked, and not altogether pleased, when I didn’t hear from him for those three days. That messed with my head, and I had to wonder if that had been his intent, because it had me obsessing about him more than ever.
It made me wish I hadn’t said three days. He didn’t have to do a thing but stay away, and I saw the error of my ways.
Why had I thought I didn’t want to see him for three days? That small amount of time with silence on his end had me realizing that I hadn’t expected not to see him for those three days, and that’s why it’d been so easy. He may have been playing some game by staying away, but I’d clearly been playing a game, when I’d told him to. The ‘Who wants it more?’ game is what I would have called it if I had to give it a name.
How quickly we fell back into the old, addictive patterns. The scary part of that? Even looking at it that way, I didn’t so much as consider not seeing him again.