Picking Up the Pieces (Pieces, #2)(26)

But Eva had left the car five minutes ago and I was still at the end of the driveway leading up to Swift Middle School. I had scanned the teacher parking lot and didn’t see Lily’s car. She’s probably running late, as usual. Why I was still sitting there though, I didn’t know. I just couldn’t bring myself to pull away. So, instead, I sat there like a third-rate stalker hoping to catch a glimpse of a woman I wasn’t even sure I liked.

Then I saw her. I had somehow missed her pull in, but I hadn't missed her walking toward the school. And as soon as I caught sight of her soft, brown hair blowing gently in the wind, the confidence of her gait, and the cool collectedness on her face, I knew why I was still sitting there. I damn well did like her. Maybe even loved her. And I had about fifteen seconds to determine what to do about it before she stepped into the building and I lost my chance to do anything.

“Fuck it,” I muttered as I threw my car in gear and drove toward the school entrance. She was approaching the front doors, and I felt my opportunity slipping away. I racked my brain for something to say, but nothing came. Finally, I just said anything. “Thanks!” I yelled as I leapt from my car, not even bothering to close my door. I watched her jerk to a stop, but she didn’t turn around. Does she not recognize my voice? I immediately realized what a stupid question that was. It was because she knew it was me that her body was so tense. Maybe this had been a mistake.

“Uh . . . Lily, I just wanted to say thanks for the coffee.” I stood there, waiting for her to turn around and acknowledge me in any way. Christ, this had definitely been a mistake.

Finally, after what felt like hours, she turned around to face me. I watched as her eyes looked me over, and I prayed that she liked what she saw. “Hi,” she ground out, clearly at a loss for anything else to say.

I felt my eyes widen, waiting for her to continue. This shouldn’t feel so awkward. At least not for me. She was the one who had cheated. She was the one who had betrayed me. Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that both of us owed something to the other. Though I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out what I could possibly owe her.

When she didn’t speak, I felt the urge to clarify, if for no other reason than to end this debacle as soon as possible. “The coffee the other day . . . I just wanted to say thank you.” I was clearly on the verge of setting some sort of record for repeating myself. Come on, Carter; get your head out of your ass.

I noticed her lips lift slightly before spreading into a small laugh. “Yeah, you said that already. And you’re welcome, by the way.”

I thought that her silence had been weird, but hearing her speak to me was even more disconcerting. Not to mention that she had just called me out on my redundancy, thereby highlighting my awkwardness. “It surprised me, that’s all.” At some point today, my brain would catch up to my mouth and prevent this stupid shit from leaving it. But evidently my mind had not yet reached that point.

Confusion lit up her face. “That I’d buy you a cup of coffee?”

“No . . . well, yes, that too. But I was more surprised that you knew how I took my coffee.” I felt like a teenage girl who harped on the fact that a boy knew her favorite color. But I couldn’t help it. The fact that she knew this small detail meant that she had wanted to know it. That she cared enough to pay attention to the subtle idiosyncrasies that only someone who loved you would think to notice.

“Black. Two sugars,” she said simply, as though it were information that were obvious to everyone who knew me. It wasn’t. “I’ve always known that, Adam.”

It shook me a little to realize how much I loved hearing her say my name—how much I wanted to hear her say it again, preferably in a more intimate setting. She licked her lips and my need to hear her say my name again morphed into a need to hear her scream it as I slid inside her, as I branded her so everyone knew that she was mine.

“Well, I should probably get going. I don’t want to be late.”

I was tempted to point out that she probably already was, but thankfully my brain caught that comment before my mouth spewed it. So this was it? This was how things ended? Did I want that? Did she? “Right, sorry,” I quickly grumbled, sounding much harsher than I had intended. I softened my voice before I spoke again. “I don’t want you to be late either. I guess I’ll talk to ya later.”

The last part slipped out. It was a standard farewell. An easy substitute for goodbye. But with Lily, it held countless possibilities. I could talk to her later. If I wanted to. And as I watched her walk toward the school, my heart ached with how badly I wanted to.

***

Two days. Two torturous days of thinking about her and how f*cked up our entire conversation had been. Couldn’t I have played it cool? Just one time? I glanced over at the clock next to my bed. 2:15 AM. I had barely slept the previous night and was having a repeat performance this evening as well.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if I could just figure out what the hell I wanted. I shouldn’t want Lily. She had destroyed me. The entire time she was dating me, she was also seeing that cocksucker Max. How could she do that and have genuine feelings for me? It wasn’t like we had been dating for years and the relationship had gone stale. Not that that would have provided a valid excuse for her behavior, but at least then I could’ve understood on some level. But we had only been together a short time. We were still in the honeymoon stage of our relationship, and she had f*cked around on me. I couldn’t reconcile that Lily with the one I thought I knew. The one I had loved.