Four tables remained between Jasper and Gabe’s table.
Suspense slowed and stretched time as she watched him walk up the aisle.
Even as her heart sped.
Because now some deeper truth was asserting itself.
Something she’d overlooked in all the hazy sex and rushed, intense intimacy was the possibility that Gabe might not know himself as well as he thought he did. That maybe some corners of his heart remained raw and wounded, that maybe he’d only put up hazard tape around his losses and heartbreaks. That the two of them together hadn’t been tested. That his pride might do him in. That his tendency to see things as black and white or right or wrong would tempt him to shut her out forever. What would be would be.
And yet none of that mattered right now. Because every snarky word out of Jasper’s mouth had scored her own heart with little paper-fine cuts.
And this was the other reason she’d sent him to apologize. She would be damned if anyone spoke to Gabe Caldera with anything other than utter respect. She couldn’t bear to see him hurt.
Two tables left...
Eden applied such force to the napkin in her fist that it was nearly spitball size.
One table...
She curled her nails into her palm.
And then he stopped next to Gabe.
Eden released a breath that nearly deflated her two sizes.
And then she breathed in a shuddery draft of pizza-flavored air to compensate for the fact that she’d stopped breathing.
Because she also knew then, definitively, that she didn’t want Annelise to have a wuss for a biological father. She wanted her to have a father who knew when to make a sacrifice, even if it was only of his own ego. Who maybe wouldn’t even see it as a sacrifice, because it was forAnnelise.
And when she looked at Gabe, she realized it might mean losing everything else she wanted.
John Mayer crooned for the second time from the jukebox when Jasper Townes arrived at Gabe’s table.
Gabe had been aware of his approach in his peripheral vision, and he was prepared to handle it in any necessary way.
He looked up.
The skin of Jasper’s face looked stretched rather tight. As if he was struggling to hold at bay a thousand emotions eager to reveal themselves via his mouth and eyes and cheeks.
He looked, in fact, a bit like someone being forced at knifepoint to rob his own ATM.
Gabe’s own face felt like it had petrified over a series of a thousand years. Stone hard and implacable. As though he couldn’t move it if he tried. Like the hardness was starting at the surface of his skin and working its way down through all the layers, would eventually reach his heart, turn it into a stone, and he’d finally have a little respite from this torment that was, admittedly, only about ten minutes in duration.
His friends, who by rights ought to be exclaiming over Townes’s appearance, had clammed up tight.
“Hey, um, Gabe, right?” Townes said.
“Right. Jasper Townes, right?”
A muscle in Jasper’s cheek twitched.
And then Townes drew in a long, long breath. Almost as if he was going to release one of his famous high notes. Maybe he wanted to shatter the glass on the jukebox to shut John Mayer up.
“I wanted to apologize if I came off a little... flippant... a minute ago. Sometimes my sense of humor doesn’t translate the way I want it to.”
Huh.
Gabe’s friends’ heads whipped toward him with such speed the paper napkins took flight. The sympathetic doe eyes were now blazing headlights of curiosity.