Weather Girl(55)

An ordinary day, until it wasn’t. Until she ran out of excuses for him and it slowly dawned on me that he wasn’t coming back.

“I’m so sorry,” Russell says.

“Thanks. It’s okay,” I say, trying to brush it off, trying to force my usual smile. For some reason, my mouth doesn’t cooperate. “We don’t have to talk about it. I don’t want to bring down the mood.”

He has plenty to deal with. He doesn’t need my issues on top of that, though I don’t miss the furrow of his brow.

From the other side of the arcade, the kids let out a chorus of groans as one of them smacks the air hockey table. It brings me back to reality only slightly.

“I realize this is partially breaking our rule,” Russell says, “but part of me was worried we wouldn’t have anything to talk about if we weren’t talking about Torrance and Seth.”

“Ah, so you’re relieved that I’m a halfway decent conversationalist?”

“Yes. But I’m not surprised.” He offers me the last piece of pretzel. “I have to confess something. About Torrance and Seth. And then we won’t talk about them the rest of the day.”

“Okay . . .”

“It’s not bad. I promise.” He glances out at the arcade and the very contentious air hockey game going on before returning his gaze to me. “When we first started talking about doing this—”

“—which was your idea,” I remind him.

“Right. Right. So, of course, I wanted things at the station to get better. But I also saw the way the fighting was impacting you. And, well, you’ve noticed my beat has changed, and I don’t know if it’s a direct result of what we’ve been doing, or just that someone new was hired and someone else was going on leave. Part of the reason I was so on board with it . . . was that you were so earnest about wanting to get closer to Torrance. You grew up watching her, and the reality was so different from what you’d imagined. I didn’t want to see you so miserable. So I thought we could make work better for both of us, and you’d be able to get what you wanted, too.”

His admission steals the words from my throat. All that time I tried to hide how unhappy I was, turning it into a joke or waving it off. He saw through it.

“Russell . . .”

“Oh no. Are you completely furious at me?” He pretends to get up, but I place a hand on his arm.

“No! I just . . . don’t know what to say. I’m touched that you wanted to do this to help me.” It’s the truth. Russell Barringer is sweeter than I ever thought, and I could fill a month’s worth of forecasts with how much I’ve thought about him.

He lets out an exaggerated sigh of relief. “For a second there, I thought this was going to be our first and our last date.”

“Definitely not.” I turn his hand over, running my fingers along his palm. His hand twitches, as though he’s ticklish, but he doesn’t move away.

“Because I’m so out of practice, I’m curious: what would you usually talk about on a first date?”

“I’m no expert,” I say, since it’s technically been a couple years for me too. I follow the lines on his palm, charting a path from his wrist to his thumb. “Our jobs, our families, what we like to do for fun. Which we’ve already covered a lot of. There’d probably be something like, oh, you look so much better than your profile picture, even if that’s not actually true.”

“Of course.”

“Maybe one of us would ask why the other was still single, and it would really hit a nerve, but we’d try our hardest not to let that show. There’d be the arguing over who pays the bill.” I nod toward the pretzel wrapper. “I’m glad you didn’t chivalrously insist on paying the four dollars for this.”

“Only because I promise to get the pretzel the next time we come here.”

He fights a smile nestled in one corner of his mouth as I doodle a rain cloud on his skin, fingers shaking before he closes his hand around mine. In one swift motion, he flips it over so he can have his way with it. With his middle finger, he traces what I think is my heart line, back and forth and back and forth in these slow, searing arcs.

I bite down on the inside of my cheek, struggling to focus on the conversation as I imagine that finger sliding down my stomach. Parting my thighs. Making me gasp. “And then at the end of the night . . . I’d probably be stressing about whether we were going to kiss.”

“Who would be making the first move? You or me?”

“Depends,” I say, my voice strained. Now he’s etching circles into my palm, varying the pressure with each revolution. Fucking hell. “I don’t mind making the first move, but if the guy does it, he should be sure it’s what I want, too. And I don’t want it to feel like an obligation. I want him to kiss me because he’s been thinking all night about how much he wants to.”

“So . . . kind of like this?” He drops my hand, burning with the memory of his fingertips, and stretches forward. He skates his thumb along my jaw, draws my face closer so he can kiss me across the table.

Except—he doesn’t. Not right away. For a few seconds, he simply lingers there, lips a whisper from mine. Waiting. Finally, when I’m a moment away from leaping across the booth and crushing myself into his lap, he brushes his lips against mine so slowly. Sweetly, though he has to know how evil he is right now.