Her heart felt like an egg—cracked, everything inside spilling out. She watched him walk away, taking the stairs for expedience, not quite running. She wanted to scream.
The scene blurred and slipped away.
* * *
The few weeks that followed were torture, and she was exhausted. Elise vacillated in the tiny breath between feeling stupid for putting her heart in peril again and being stupid by throwing away what could be the love of a lifetime.
“Tough one,” Superman said, though there didn’t seem to be any pity in his voice.
“No kidding. And I still don’t know what to do. I . . . I think I love him. I’m ninety-nine percent sure he’d never deliberately hurt me, but that one percent, I can’t get around it. People fall down all the time, you know? But after the first time they’re more careful and take extra precautions because they know how bad it’s going to hurt if it happens again.”
“But don’t you think that standing in one place and going nowhere is extreme?”
“I’m not standing in one place,” she said, miffed. “I just think I’ll have better balance if I walk alone.”
“I might have to agree.” He had her attention now. He was tall enough to bend an arm across the top of the framed divider and lean on it. “Maybe Max is deluded. Maybe you don’t love him at all.”
“Why? I do. Of course I do. Who wouldn’t? He’s . . . We fit, you know?” Every inch of her ached for him. She missed him. “He’s wonderful. And smart and funny. And real. Kind.” She let out a deep, wistful breath. “He’s the calm to my crazy. He listens to me—even when I’m not saying much of anything. And hot! He’s hot, don’t you think?” He raised his superbrows. “He is, trust me. I think he’s amazing. I just don’t know—”
“And that’s why I’m wondering: Do you really love him?”
“What?”
“In this conversation alone there have been twice as many Is and mes than hes and hims. It’s all about you. It’s always all about you. What you want, how you feel. What about him?”
He motioned with his head toward the Medieval tunics, hippie dashiki shirts and polka-dot poodle skirts as another episode commenced . . .
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Relax. She’s sweating. She’ll fold. Just a matter of time.” Her brother, Roger, looked as unconcerned as Max looked gloomy and miserable. “She’s scared, not stupid.” He hesitated. “She can be stupid . . . I just don’t think this is one of those times.”
Slouching in a booth at some bar she didn’t recognize, Max’s sigh was deep and loud. “It’s been two weeks. And six days. That’s almost three weeks. I should at least call her; send a text . . . just hi. I need to do something. What if she’s forgotten about me?”
The wrist under the fist supporting Roger’s cheek went limp in disbelief. “Do you need a slap or something? I’m telling you, she’s in bad shape.” His pause was dramatic. “Not as bad as you, clearly, but I have it from a reliable source that she’s been calling in sick to work and then spending the whole day in bed. My source caught her a couple of times with puffy red eyes and a stuffed-up nose, which—and you should take my word on this, too—once seen can never be unseen or mistaken for anything but crying.”
“No. I don’t ever want to see her cry.” Max took a swig of his beer. “Happy crying would be okay. I could handle that. But I don’t ever want to see her as unhappy as she was the last time I saw her. I swear to God, it was all I could do to walk away from her. She looked so hurt and confused.”
“I still say stubborn.” Roger finished off his beer and motioned to someone for two more. “I know how my wife and my sister work, but I have no idea what drives them to do what they do. If I say no to Molly all she hears is Oh sure, sweetie pie, do whatever you want. Elise is really good at overanalyzing everything. Her mantra is Yes, but. It can drive you completely insane, but eventually she gets to the point where everything yes is bigger or better than whatever comes after the but.” He took two beers off a waitress’s tray and handed one to his companion. “It just takes time. What?”
Max caught himself staring, gape-mouthed. “I can’t believe I understood that.”
“Well, that’s because you’ve spent more than ten minutes with her. In thirty years you’ll have an owner’s manual full of female gibberish. The thing you have to remember is that nothing you do is going to change anything. See, with Elise, you can give her all the answers, write them down for her and show her scientific evidence, and she still has to stubbornly go through her whole weird process until she comes to the conclusion you gave her in the first place.” He tipped his head and squinted at Max. “Come to think of it, you should probably run away while you still can.”
Max chuckled. “Too late. I am hopelessly in love with your sister.”
Roger shook his head in commiseration. “Why do we do this to ourselves?”
“I don’t know. One minute I’m standing behind her at the grocery store. She’s reading the Cook’s Illustrated magazine while she waits for the people ahead of her to finish. Her feet hurt, I guess, because she steps out of one shoe and then the other and stands there in her bare feet, reading, waiting, curling her toes. I was mesmerized. And the minute there was movement in the line she was back in her shoes and returning the magazine . . . then she changed her mind and put it in her cart.” He sighed again and met Roger’s sympathetic gaze. “I wanted to follow her home like a puppy.”
“Molly backed into my practically new, parked Cherokee Trailhawk with her Mazda piece-of-crap car and the whole time she was standing there trying to be apologetic and responsible she had tears in her eyes. She never cried and her voice never cracked. We did the insurance thing and the cops came; the tears stayed and they never spilled, not one. I thought she was trying to kill me. I did follow her home, but only because I didn’t know if she could see well enough not to hit someone else.” He grimaced. “We’re pathetic.”
Max smiled. “Maybe. Probably. But I don’t feel that way when I’m with her. She does things that—”
“Is this going to get weird? This is my sister we’re talking about. I don’t want to have to knock you out.”
Max chuckled. “Pathetic, not insane.” Roger played relief. “I was going to say that she makes me feel like I belong. And awake. I feel so awake around her . . . and I didn’t feel asleep before.” Another forlorn sigh. “We fit, you know? Why can’t she feel it, too?”
“She does.”
“Really? She has an odd way of showing it.”
“I told you. It’s a process. She’s yes, but–ing.” He bobbed his head. “It doesn’t usually take this long, I’ll admit that, but she’s not exactly buying a new car. The good news is that once she makes up her mind about something it becomes a forever thing . . . like a Twinkie.”
Max laughed again—Roger had a way about him.
“I hope so. It’s been six months and I can’t imagine my life without her anymore.” He pushed both hands through his thick black hair, front to back, then looked up suddenly with an epiphany. “Love sucks, man.”
The both laughed then—agreeing, bonding, deciding to order burgers.