“Is that clear enough for you?” he snapped softly. “Or do I need to spell it out further?”
I shook my head, suddenly desperate for him to stop talking. It was too much to process all at once. My eyes began to sting with tears. I blinked rapidly to fight them back, appalled to be reduced to such an emotional state in front of him. Try as I might to hide it, he plainly saw that I was balanced on the razor’s edge of a breakdown. His angry expression slipped. Softened into something far, far more treacherous.
“Gwendolyn—”
“Please,” I choked out, my voice thick with impending tears. “Please, can you just go?”
“I don’t want to leave you like this.”
“I’m only like this because of you,” I retorted, incapable of being reasonable in such a moment of weakness. He physically flinched, as though the words had dealt a direct blow to his heart. I wanted to snatch back my cruel words, to hit the rewind button back five minutes to before this conversation. But I couldn’t.
“Please,” I repeated.
He stared at me for another long moment. “You need space. I can see that. And I’m happy to give it to you — for now. But not forever, Gwen. Not even for long. I have no intentions of giving you enough time to twist this around in your head, change us into something we’re not.” He turned for the door, but paused before stepping out into the hallway. “I’m a patient man. I’ve been patient for years, waiting for you to drop your guard. I’ll keep being patient as long as it takes you to feel safe enough to do that. But so help me God, if you don’t stop trying to actively push me away just because you’re scared… then I guess I wasted my energy, because you aren’t the girl I’ve been waiting for all this time.”
When he was gone, I collapsed onto my bed in a heap, curled into a protective ball, and did something I hadn’t done since the day after Aunt Colette’s funeral. I wept like a heartsick child, salt streaming out of my eyes in a great flood, ragged sobs racking my whole body. I wept until there were no more tears left inside me, until I was a dried out, emotionless husk. All the while, Graham’s words haunted me, echoing over and over inside my skull.
You aren’t the girl I’ve been waiting for all this time.
With swollen eyes and a hollow heart, I drifted off into a fitful sleep.
Chapter Eighteen
Sure, I have a magic wand. It’s in my nightstand.
- Gwen Goode, enjoying six unique vibration patterns
My sneakers pounded the pavement, matching the tempo of the music blasting into my ears as I neared the final mile of my favored running route.The song choice — ‘Monsters’ by All Time Low — matched my mood as well as the atmosphere. While October usually gifted Massachusetts with glorious autumn weather, that morning was overcast and gray, the air thick with mist that rolled off the Atlantic.
Each breath I hauled in felt damp inside my lungs, like swallowing a gulp of dry ice. My ponytail swung behind me in a thick rope as I increased my pace, the weight of it tugging at my temples with each stride. My throat was burning. So were my thighs. I’d pushed myself far faster than normal. Maybe I thought if I ran fast enough, I might somehow outrun my problems — and by problems, I meant Graham.
It had been six days since his unexpected appearance in my bedroom. Six days of silent reflection on a kiss that made me simultaneously the most turned on I’d ever been and the most furious I’d ever been. Six days of riding an emotional roller coaster, second guessing everything I thought and felt, playing it back over and over until it was burned in my brain, every second of it, from the rasp of his voice to the brush of his lips to the heat of his body pressing into mine.
I hadn’t called him. He hadn’t called me, either. Our paths never crossed, not even once — not on the street or at the shop or at The Witches Brew, when I met Florence and Desmond for a midweek drink. As the days passed without any contact whatsoever, I found myself bracing for him to pop back into my life as he always did — appearing out of nowhere to stick his perfect nose into my affairs. Yet, after a week of seeing neither hide nor hair of him, I was left to assume he was avoiding me.
Which was fine.
Totally fine.
I didn’t care at all, not in the slightest. What that man did in his spare time was not my business. The fact that I’d grown so accustomed to his constant presence in my life was alarming in and of itself.
You know you can’t afford to depend on anyone like that, I scolded myself, pacing the length of my bedroom in the wee hours of the night when sleep refused to come.Especially not Graham Graves.
It was not lost on me, however, that my dark mood did miraculously improve midweek when Desmond let it slip over our second round of drinks that Graham was out of town, consulting on a case for the Feds up in New Hampshire. I’m not sure what my expression looked like in that moment but, evidently, it had been enough to alarm my best friends, seeing as Flo slid her stool closer to mine and Des reached out to grab my hand across the table, squeezing as he assured me his best friend never took jobs that lasted more than a few weeks.
So… maybe he wasn’t avoiding me. Maybe he was just out of town. Not that I cared.
At all.
The only thing that kept me from going completely off the rails was the fact that I quite simply did not have the time. Halloween season was in full swing and things at The Gallows were busier than ever, a nonstop parade of sales that kept me occupied from the second I stepped through the front doors at the start of each day to the instant I bolted it behind me each night. I went in early and stayed late nearly every day, the overtime necessary to restock our rapidly-emptying display cases and set the book tables to rights after tourists ripped them apart.
Setting up the new window display turned out to be a monumental endeavor, one that took two full nights to finish even with Flo’s assistance. She, as ever, could be bribed into servitude with wine and copious amounts of gossip — about Madame Zelda’s potential whereabouts, about whether things with the dastardly O’Banion clan had cooled down at all, about Hetti’s new hair color, which was a vibrant violet shade… about everything except the one thing I probably need to gossip about the most.
Graham.
I didn’t tell her about what had happened between us, mostly because I wasn’t sure how to put it into words without spontaneously combusting. I did experience a good degree of guilt over this omission, especially since she sacrificed two nights in a row to help me make my window display absolutely perfect. In the end, our long hours of toil paid off. It looked fabulous — and I wasn’t just saying that because I’d spent so damn long getting the nooses to hang right, or positioning the hidden floor fan to waft the witches’ dresses in a seriously spooky-cool way.
There’d never been so many tourists stopping to take pictures of the storefront before. Half of them ended up wandering in, buying coffee or a book or a bauble before they went on their way. (Okay, so, most of them only bought coffee.) Hetti, to her credit, was never daunted by the constant influx of patrons, even when we had a line out the door and every seat in the cafe section was occupied. She wassogetting an early Christmas bonus once Halloween was behind us.