Bitter Sweet Heart (Lies, Hearts & Truths #2)(35)

“He played for more than a decade. Professional hockey careers are short compared to the way most people will stick with the same thing for decades. Some players only get a season or two on the ice before their career is over.” I rest my elbows on the table. “How old were you when you finished your PhD?”

“Twenty-six.”

“That’s faster than most.” For reasons I’m unsure of, I want to know how she got where she is. “Why were you in such a rush to get through college? It’s kinda the last hurrah before you have to start taking life seriously.”

“Are you saying you don’t take life seriously?”

“It’s not that I don’t take it seriously. It’s that I know it’s full of slap shots and chippy plays, so you gotta enjoy the good stuff when it happens.”

“Is that why you half-ass your assignments in my class?” She arches a challenging brow.

“I half-ass a lot of things. I don’t think I realized how intense your class was going to be.”

“Did you think it would be an easy A?”

“More like a moderately effortless C. I probably should have paid closer attention to my advisor when I was signing up for classes. My first professor seemed to like me well enough, but that obviously changed. I tried to switch out after you took over, but I’d passed the deadline, so you were stuck with me.”

She laughs, and her smile does something to me, makes my chest all warm. It’s stupid. She’s a professor. Educated. Established. She’s done everything she can to put distance between us this semester, but for whatever reason, the universe seems pretty determined to keep pushing her back into my orbit.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” She said there’s no live-in boyfriend the other night, but that doesn’t mean there’s no boyfriend at all. Plus, there was a gift basket in her foyer when I checked in on her on Friday.

She focuses on her tea. “I thought we were going to talk about your creative writing assignment, not my personal life.”

“We are. I’m just curious. You’re beautiful. Smart. Funny. Kind. Strong. Independent. Someone has to have noticed that besides me.”

She leans back in her seat and crosses her arms. “You can’t flirt with me, Maverick.”

I bite my thumbnail and give her a half grin. “It’s a compulsion. I can’t help myself.”

“Does that mean you flirt with everyone?”

“Not everyone. Just women I find attractive, and I’m a single Pringle, in case you were wondering.”

“I wasn’t.” She shakes her head and picks up her mug. She’s still smiling, but it’s stiff now. “Keep it up and I’m leaving.”

“I’m sorry.” I hold up a hand. “I’m nervous and deflecting.”

“It’s fine.” She sips her tea and sets it down on the table. “And why are you deflecting?”

I focus on my mug for a moment. “For all these years, we’ve never really talked about what happened to my sister. A creative writing piece isn’t the same as a conversation, but putting it on paper . . . I don’t know. I didn’t expect it to sit with me the way it has.”

“We as in you and your sister?”

“We as in my family. We talk around it most of the time. I mean, it happened more than a decade ago—almost a decade and a half—so it makes sense that it’s not a huge topic of conversation. And Lavender doesn’t want to be defined by something that happened when she was too young to really remember.” I take a sip of my latte, wishing I’d gotten water, or that they served beer here instead.

“You were both quite young, weren’t you?”

I nod. Part of me wants to reject going back to that day, but the other part wonders whether purging this information will make things better.

“But old enough to remember,” she says softly.

I set my mug down. “I guess. Lavender says she remembers it mostly in smells and sensations, not what actually happened.”

Clover nods thoughtfully. “Do you think that’s because she was so young?”

“Maybe.” I pull a napkin from the dispenser. It’s thin and easy to tear, but it’ll keep my hands occupied. I start folding it into a square, following the pattern that’s engrained in my brain from doing it so often. “That’s the part I probably have the hardest time with—the never really knowing what happened. And it’s not like she hasn’t had loads of therapy. She’s gone not just because of what happened, but because she has pretty bad social anxiety. Even before the abduction, she was quiet whenever we were with people she didn’t know, or in large crowds. After, though, there were times we’d have to leave someplace because it was too much for her.”

“What would happen? What made it too much?”

“I don’t know really.” I run my tongue over my eye tooth for a few beats. “But she’d shut down. Like her body was there, but she was trapped in her head. It always freaked me out. I was scared she was going to stay like that. But she always came back. Eventually.”

“You said in the parking lot that you were supposed to wait. What did you mean by that?”

“We ran ahead of Lavender and River, and we shouldn’t have.”