by Elise Faber
He gripped the back of her chair, spun it to face him. “What’s going on, sweetheart?”
Silence, those russet and amber eyes on his then away then on his again. “I’m not going to date you.”
Well, fuck, there went milkshake night.
He crouched down, hesitated for a second, then placed his hands on her jean-covered knees. “I’m going to ask one more time. What happened?”
The barest hint of ice retreated.
“Nothing’s happened,” she said. “The cost-benefit ratio of having a relationship with someone I work with is too great. I’m not doing it.”
The cost-benefit ratio?
Seriously?
His fingers tightened. “Dani.”
She stood, and he rocked back to his heels for a brief moment before he regained his balance and found his feet. “Look, you’re fun to talk to. You even make me laugh every once in a while. But I’m not the person for you, and I never will be.” She opened the door. “Now, go.”
That was utter horseshit. She was herself, and that was enough for him. He opened his mouth to tell her just that.
“Th—”
Fanny walked up. “Dani, you ready to go—” She stopped, realizing several moments too late that the office wasn’t empty. Her gaze moved from him to Dani. “Or I could just come back . . . later?”
“No,” Dani said sharply. “Ethan was just leaving.”
He met her eyes for a heartbeat, but it was long enough for him to recognize that he needed to regroup. In that moment, he wasn’t going to be able to convince her of anything, least of all to tell him what was really going on. Fucking hell, what had happened?
Fanny’s brows were lifted, but she slid back a pace, as though she were going to be the one leaving.
He glanced at Dani. “We’ll talk later.”
“No,” she said, with a streak of fierce determination. “We won’t.”
His temper spiked, something that Ethan usually controlled, and for an instant, he considered hauling Dani against his chest and giving her the kiss he should have laid on her earlier. It would be good, he knew that.
He’d actually taken a step toward her before he realized what he was doing and stopped, clenching his hands into fists and shoving them down to his sides. He could kiss her, could make her like it.
But . . . fucking hell, he also knew that she deserved their first kiss to be something of passion and need rather than anger.
Fanny’s voice intruded on that haze of fury. “I’ll just—”
“No,” he snapped then forced himself to soften his tone. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m gone. Enjoy your . . .” His eyes drifted to Dani, to the muscle clenching in her jaw, her knuckles pressed in sharp relief against her skin. For as much as she wasn’t talking, he knew this was about something deep, deeper than he could get out of her in just a few moments. He needed to regroup. “. . . evening.”
And then with one more look at the woman who’d shyly woven her way into his heart, he turned and walked away.
Chapter Thirteen
Dani
“Want to tell me what that was about?” Fanny asked.
Hell fucking no.
She wasn’t going to tell anyone about what had happened in the Family Suite. Not because she felt ashamed of the way she’d reacted—which, okay, yes, she did feel ashamed because she hated that she was still a person who didn’t value herself. She should be like the other women of the Gold—strong and confident and woke and . . . lots of other things. Equality for all, including the shy, dorky girls. Confidence for days.
She should have just told Sara that she wasn’t going to set Roxanne up with Ethan.
Because he was hers.
Except . . . he wasn’t hers.
And why would he want to be with someone like her?
“Ugh,” she groaned, plunking her head onto her desk and then thunking it several times for good measure. “I.” Thump. “Don’t.” Thump. “Know.” Thump. “What.” Thump. “I’m.” Thump. “Doing.” Thump—
Or it would have been another thump, if Fanny hadn’t caught her shoulder and tugged her up.
“The team needs that brain,” she said.
Misery coursed through Dani. “I—um—I—”
“Easy on the wheels zipping around in there”—a tap to Dani’s temple—“I swear, smoke’s gonna start pouring out of your ears pretty soon.”
She shut her eyes. “I’m a mess, Fanny. I can’t even agree to go on one date without freaking out.”
Her friend squeezed her shoulder. “Let’s go get a drink.”
Dani’s lids peeled back. “You’re not going to pump me for information?”
Fanny straightened, leaned a hip against her desk. “Honestly?” A pause, gaze on her until she nodded. “You don’t look like you can handle an inquisition, bub. Let’s just get ourselves good and drunk, eat too many carbs, and then you can figure it out tomorrow, okay?”
Surprise and relief warred with that ever-present anxiety and self-doubt. “You’d do that?”
People weren’t nice to her—
Except, she couldn’t use that excuse anymore, could she?
Because without thinking hard, she could come up with a list that was plenty long of people who were nice to her, people who cared—and they weren’t just her family, not any longer.
She had Fanny and Jess. Sara and Brit and both Rebeccas and—
The point was that she was living her life like it was the past, instead of realizing she was a thirty-year-old woman who wasn’t on the receiving end of a bunch of mean-ass kids.
And it was high time she stopped giving that past power.
“Dani?” A shake of her shoulder. “Booze. Carbs. Sleep. Okay?”
Since that was better than living in her own head, letting it twist around her like barbed wire, hurting whether she moved or not, but doubly so when she moved, Dani pushed up from her seat and nodded. “That sounds good.”
Fanny smiled, laced her arm with Dani’s. “Great. I’ll drive.”
“But—”
“We’ll have a slumber party at my place, but we’ll stop by yours first, get your stuff packed for the road trip. That way in the morning, we can grab brekkie at Molly’s and come straight here to hop on the bus.”
Dani’s brows drew together because there was a lot to process in that. Starting with, “But you don’t travel with the team.”
“I’m hitching a ride,” she said. “My family is coming to the game in Chicago, and then we’re road-tripping it for a week.”
“That sounds fun.”
“You haven’t driven with my mother.” A grin. “I’ll be lucky to come back in one piece.”
Dani found herself laughing.
Somehow, after she’d spent the last hours in a perpetual cycle of self-flagellation, she was laughing and walking arm-in-arm with her friend, and the bottom wasn’t falling out of the world, and . . . she was beginning to wonder if she hadn’t been the least bit hasty with Ethan.
Cue more internal whipping.
“Dani? Is there a reason you look like you’ve swallowed a lemon?”
“I’m . . .” She sighed. “My head is a mess.”
“And here I’ve promised to not give you an inquisition.”
Dani snorted. “You’d take advantage of a woman on the edge?”
“Hell yes, I would.” A beat, a squeeze of her arm. “But I won’t because I promised.”
“A woman who sticks by her word.”
“Yeah.” Fanny nudged Dani with her elbow. “Kind of like my friend.”
“I haven’t had that many friends,” she whispered, the words slipping off her tongue uninvited.
Fanny tugged her to a stop. “And why’s that, do you think?”
“Because I’m . . .”
A nerd, shy, self-conscious . . . not worthy.
The last crept through her mind like insidious ivy crawling up the trunk of a tree. She waited, expecting the pang that usually accompani
ed the thought, the cold frost that followed, creeping in through the fronts of her sneakers, soaking into her socks, chilling her toes.
But the pang, the iciness didn’t come.
Instead, something red-hot flared in its place, and suddenly, her brain went clear. She wasn’t what they had said.
And why, why had it taken her so long to see?
“I was . . . well, for a long time I’ve made myself small.”
Fanny’s expression gentled. “Why, babe? When you’re so fucking big and bright?”
“Because I’m an idiot?”
A shake of her head, brown locks flailing behind her. “Nope. That’s one thing you’re not.”
A sigh. “Because I’m scared?”
Fanny tapped her nose. “Ding. Ding. Give the girl a prize.”
Laughter floated up, like a balloon drifting toward the sky, escaping her lips in a quiet puff of sound. “I thought you said no inquisitions?”
“Well, you gave me a freebie, what’s a girl supposed to do?”
“I—”
The question was what was she supposed to do? Because seriously, what the fuck was she doing? She needed to find Ethan and explain, to tell him . . . something that would come to her, knowing coming to fruition as she went after him.
It was bad. She needed to—
“Hang on.” She tugged her arm free, started down the hall. “I need to—”
“Hey!”
She stopped, turned around.
Fanny’s mouth was tipped up at the corners. “Should I wait?”
Nerves bubbled into the space laughter had just occupied. But . . . fuck . . . hadn’t she been scared long enough?
Yes. Yes.
“No,” she told Fanny. “Don’t wait.”
“Carbs and booze another night!”
She nodded in agreement . . . and then she ran in a very undignified manner toward the parking lot.
When she burst out through the door, the air was cold, spreading across her face, tightening her skin, drying out her lips—or maybe that was nerves. Because the urge to spin back around and run inside to find Fanny for the booze with a side of carbs was intense.
Grew even more intense when she found Ethan standing there, his gaze on the ground, his hands fisted at his sides.
Turn tail.
Run.
Hide.
Her spine prickled, her foot slid back.
And then his stare drifted up, collided with hers.
She couldn’t miss the hurt in his eyes, the misery, the despair. The trifecta of emotions was a literal gut punch, and her foot stopped its motion. Then moved forward to join the other.
Her throat seized.
Words exploded.
“Sara brought a beautiful woman named Roxanne to set you up with, and I freaked out. I thought that I couldn’t possibly measure up and shouldn’t get in the way of someone who clearly fit you better than me.”
His face turned . . . scary. That was the only way she could think to describe it, but instead of stoppering the words up, it only made them come faster.
“And I’ve always been quiet. My family is great, but they’re all big personalities, and it was just easier to blend into the background, to sit back and enjoy the show. I wasn’t ever the type of girl who’d battle to be in the front. I was just happy with what I had.”
A fierce expression.
Gentle fingers lifting to grasp hers, his thumb brushing the inside of her wrist, tracing light circles on her skin.
And she found that the rest of it wasn’t so hard.
“Then I reached for more,” she whispered. “Then I dared to want something big and beautiful, and . . . the universe slapped me back.” Her eyes closed, and those fingers gripped tighter, tugging her away from the door, slipping an arm around her waist and bringing her body flush against the side of his.
Warm and strong, one hand wiping away the tears she hadn’t even known escaped, then drawing her even closer as voices came close.
“You coming, Eth?” Brit called from somewhere nearby.
Ethan shifted her, shielding her body with his, and she felt a piece of her heart chip away, slip right through the holes in her safety net and drift over to him, to his palm, to those gentle circles on her skin. “Another time,” he called.
“Okay. But just so you know,” she called back, “I’m pretending I don’t see Dani with you.”
“Stay in your lane, Brit.”
“That’s for race car drivers.”
A sigh. “Then between the pipes.”
“That I can do,” she hollered. “See ya.”
Then she was gone, and Dani was alone with Ethan again, only this time they weren’t standing in the shadows next to the arena, they were moving.
Or maybe they’d been moving the whole time.
Because by the time she processed they were walking, Ethan was beeping the locks on his car, opening the door. “Sit,” he murmured, plunking her into the passenger’s seat and reaching over her to buckle her belt.
Then he crossed around the front of the car, got in, and drove out of the parking lot.
He didn’t speak as he drove, navigating the bright lights of the waterfront, the semi-quiet streets. There were always a few people out in a city like San Francisco, but this late, it was a muted hum of activities, the traffic gone, most people tucked safely into their beds. She turned to look out at the water, wanting to explain more, wanting to apologize, to find something to make him understand.
Ethan reached out and squeezed her knee. “It’s okay.”
“That I freaked out or I can’t find the words to explain?”
Another squeeze. “Both. You don’t owe me anything, sweetheart. Explanation or words or otherwise.”
“But . . .”
When she trailed off, words lost again, he didn’t get impatient, just waited.
“I want to give it to you.”
His fingers convulsed.
She sucked in a breath.
He turned into a parking lot, the lights twinkling at regular intervals, the water of the Bay in the distance. It was a clear night, the moon shining down on the waves and their crests, turning them shades of black and gray and silver. But the beauty of that undulating mix of salt and water couldn’t hold her attention.
Not when every cell in her body was focused on the man next to her.
Not when he said, “I only want what you’re willing to give.”
And that unlocked the rest of it.
“I fell for the popular boy in high school.” The memories threatened to swell up, to overwhelm her, but she shoved them down. “The long and short is that I was the baby in my family, the quiet one, the protected one, and I fell for a boy who didn’t believe in protecting me in any sense. I was too weak or infatuated or stupid to recognize what was happening, and by the time I did, I was pregnant.”
Ethan sucked in a breath.
“It’s stupid, really,” she said, hating the sharp slice of pain, the way this truth made her want to curl up and go quiet, to lock the hurt down. “I figured we’d get married, and everything would be perfect. I’d somehow have the fairy tale ending.”
Her heart thudded.
Her palms were sweaty.
Her throat was tight.
But Ethan didn’t rush her.
And she found that her heart slowed, her throat loosened, and the moisture on her palms dried.
“He just . . . pretended I didn’t exist.” A breath. “I told him I was pregnant, and he just dropped me off at my house, and then at school the next day, he ignored me completely. It wasn’t even hours before he was with the most popular girl in school.” A tall, slender blond, much like Roxanne. Except, she’d been snake-mean where Roxanne seemed nice.
“I was a teenager. I was emotional and heartbroken and hurt and—” A shake of her head. “And I tried to talk to him, but he was . . . well, cruel. So, then I knew I couldn’t rely on him, couldn’t expect a happy ending from him, so I thought t
he baby and I would make our own.” Her eyes burned at the memory. “But I lost the baby, and I got really sick.”
His fingers were like a vise on her leg, but instead of hurting, they grounded her, helped her finish the story.
“My parents hadn’t known until I started bleeding, until it was bad, and they needed to call an ambulance.” She shook her head, a thousand little slices of agony crisscrossing through her insides. “I was in the hospital for a while, and after I recovered, my family . . . they gave me a pass. I homeschooled for the rest of the school year, and we moved the next. New school. Fresh start for my senior year,” she said with a sigh. “But I was different, smaller. Quieter. No happy ending. No fairy tale. No prince. No boyfriend.”
Dani shuddered out a breath.
There it was. Her whole sad sob story.
One no one knew except her family.
But . . . shouldn’t this feel better? To get everything off her chest? Cutting the bindings, releasing their hold on her?
Instead, the past was like a mace inside her, spikes jabbing at her from all sides, her spine as rigid and stiff as a piece of wood. God this hurt, and she wanted to crawl back into herself, to cover the pain, the spikes, wrap up and bury the splinters from that wood.
She wanted to be small again.
She wanted to not feel again.
No sooner had that thought crossed her mind before Ethan moved.
The car jerked as he shoved his seat back and then in the next instant, her seat belt was unlatched and she was hauled over the console, plunked into his lap with his warm, strong arms wrapped tight around her.
“I’m sorry.”
Just two words but filled with empathy instead of pity for the first time. Her family had been sympathetic, sure, but they’d largely been pitying. Poor Dani. Poor, naïve, unworldly Dani.
It was different with Ethan, however.
No pity.
No pat on the head.
Just warm arms and a steady heartbeat against her ear when he brought her even closer.
“I should be over this by now.” She found the words she’d thought to herself a million times before allowing them to slip out, and his arms grew tighter. “I was a teenager, and it was puppy love, and—”
“You were hurt and lost a dream. That doesn’t just go away.” A soft hand on her back, rubbing lightly. “That changes a person. Irrevocably.”
