The thought popped into her head: how Annelise would love the wordphalanx.
Because all thoughts led to Annelise. She was her very heart; the world was like the circulatory system.
And yet Jasper was part of Annelise, too. And Annelise was part of him.
The push-pull of that thought was a sort of sweet anguish.
“By the way, that was right about the time you fought with the supermodel and went into rehab and then after that dated another supermodel.”
“Which one was that? Annika or Marie Hele—”
“Are you kidding me right now?”
“Right. Right. Sorry. Just thinking out loud. Kind of... kind of thrown.”
“Okay. Well, that makes both of us. Maybe you can get a song out of it.”
He remained quiet.
Perversely she liked him for not blathering something insincere, or defensive, or self-righteous.
Something terrified and tense in her was easing: she’d liked him back then for a reason, not just because, well, he was sexy and a musician. Apparently he wasn’t a bullshitter. He was, in fact, an actual person. Her judgment wasn’t entirely awful.
The news of children pretty much sobered everyone in a damn hurry. Shock was great for burning off the mists of bullshit.
“Iwouldhave gotten in touch,” he said quietly, finally.
She wasn’t positive she believed that.
His tone suggested he wasn’t even certain he believed it.
The guy he was back then might not have.
The guy he was today apparently believed he would have. He was here, anyway. And that took some nerve.
She let it lie.
They stared at each other in the hush of her little store. So precious to her, like Annelise, like her mostly predictable life in Hellcat Canyon.
“You never got married, huh?” he said next.
She sighed. “C’mon, Jasper. I’m barely thirty, and you’re not much older than me. And I’ve been kind of busy raising a child and running a business.”
“Sorry. I meant... It’s just that... so it’s not like you were... um, waiting for...”
When his meaning dawned on her, she coughed a laugh so incredulous it fluttered the leaves on her floral arrangement. “Foryou?”
She said it with such genuine, scorching amazement color actually rose in his cheeks.
She was also amazed anything could still make him blush.
“I’m sorry, I’m a little thrown, too, and I default to snarky when I’m thrown. I don’t mean to be unkind, Jasper, but, uh, no. I had no interest in a relationship with you. Now, or then. I wanted what you wanted that night, and that’s all.” She tried to say this a little more gently. “It was fun, though. It was memorable. And I guess I don’t regret it.”
That was hardly flattering.
He accepted this with a wry twist of his mouth.
He looked so stunned and so oddly stranded in her store, like a creature abandoned by his mothership. He had always had that quality of otherness about him, that charisma that rock stars exuded, that drew the world in and kept it at a remove.