Love and Other Words(48)

“Yeah, but we’re talking about now,” he says. “You were always pretty insular, but do you have anyone? Other than Sabrina?”

“I have you.” After an awkward beat, I add, “I mean… now I do.” Another pause. “Again.”

His expression straightens and Elliot picks up a twig from the ground, resting his elbows on his knees and spinning the stick between his fingers and thumb. Fidgeting.

I know —

I know —

I know what’s coming.

“Macy?” He looks over his shoulder at me. “Do you love Sean?”

I knew it was coming, yeah, but the weight of his question still propels me up off the bench and two paces away.

“I’ve seen you in love,” he says gently, not standing. “It doesn’t look like you’re in love with him.”

I don’t answer, but he reads me anyway.

“I don’t get it,” he growls. “Why are you with him?”

I turn back around to catch his expression, brow furrowed, mouth tight with emotion. It takes a few breaths for me to put the words together in a way that doesn’t feel supremely melodramatic.

“Because,” I tell him, “we have the totally fucked-up agreement of emotionally messed-up people – that was unspoken, I guess, until recently – that we only give each other a fraction of ourselves. Losing him would never wreck me.” I shake my head and look down at my shoe, toeing the dirt. I feel my epiphany from earlier about a robust, shared life starting to fade as Elliot pokes at my self-preservation instincts. I hate that Sabrina was right. I hate that retreating to my cocoon is my first reflex. “I realize how cowardly that sounds, but I don’t think I could take losing someone I love again.”

“It hurt that much,” he says quietly, not really a question. “What I did. When are we going to talk?”

“I didn’t just lose you,” I remind him.

I stop, needing a second to breathe. The memories of the last time I saw Elliot used to make me physically sick. Now they just send a wavy lurch through my body.

I can see he’s processing this. He studies my face, turning the words around in his mind and looking at them from different angles, like he knows he’s missing something.

Or maybe I’m just being paranoid.

“What’s his story?” he asks.

“You mean Sean’s?”

Elliot nods, picking up another twig. “He was married?”

“Yeah. She was in finance, and got addicted to cocaine on a work trip.”

His head shoots up, eyes shocked. “Seriously?”

“Yeah. Terrible, right?” I look past him, out into the parking lot. “So, I think part of it for him is that he has his daughter, and he never really got to get over Ashley. It’s been… really easy for both of us to just fall into something permanent without really needing each other.”

Elliot leans forward. “Macy.”

“Elliot.”

“Are you staying because of Phoebe?”

I stare at him, genuinely confused. “What?”

“Phoebe.”

“No, I heard the name. I just don’t understand how – Oh.” I get what he’s saying. “No.”

“I mean, she’s this sweet little girl without a mom…” He says it like it’s obvious why I’d stick around, and okay, from the outside I can see why he’d think that. But he doesn’t know them.

“She doesn’t need me,” I reassure him. “She’s got an awesome, involved dad. I’m this…” I wave my hand around, unsure. “This accessory. I mean, let’s be real: I don’t really know how to… ‘mom’ anyway, so she doesn’t seem to need anything from me.”

He grunts a little, looking down at the twig he’s slowly and methodically shredding. “Okay.”

I glare. “What does ‘okay’ mean?”

“It means okay.”

“You can’t think that long before giving me an ‘okay.’ That’s a condescending ‘okay.’”

He laughs, and tosses the stick to the ground before looking up at me. “Okay.”

A challenge. He wants to engage me, I can tell.

“Goddammit.” I turn and stare up at the education center and the gray clouds rolling in behind it.

“She might need a mom when she gets her period,” he says quietly. “Or when her friends are jerks.”

“Maybe she’ll have a friend in a closet who listens to her instead,” I counter, and then turn to look up at him, suspicious. “Why does it feel like you’re trying to talk me into staying with Sean? Are you reverse-psychologizing me?”

Grinning, he relents. “Come on, let’s talk about something else. Favorite word?”

Heat ripples across my skin. I’m so unprepared for this that my mind stalls and suddenly, there are no words, anywhere. “I’d need to think… What about you?”

His laugh comes as a low rumble. “Mellifluous.”

I scrunch my nose. “That’s a mouthful.”

“It most certainly is, ma’am,” he growls, with a meaningful lean to his words.

He gets a pebble tossed at him for that.