Nothing More (14 page)

Dakota lets go and stumbles to the front entrance. I pull it open for her and she sighs in relief when we step into the warm hallway. My apartment doesn't have a doorman or any fancy security, but it's always clean and the hallways usually smell like chemicals. I'm not sure if it's a good thing, but it's better than some of the alternatives.

As we walk in silence down the hall, I realize that she's never been here before. When I first moved to Brooklyn, we were supposed to get together for dinner at my house, just to catch up, but she canceled an hour before our meeting. I had made a full meal, four courses—with Tessa's help, of course. It felt like I had searched nearly every corner store in Brooklyn for Dakota's favorite drink, blue cream soda in a glass bottle, finally finding it after an hour. I even stopped myself from drinking any of the six-pack before she arrived. Well, I had two, but I left four for her.

Dakota's flat shoes squeak against the floor, and I can't remember it ever taking so long to walk to my apartment. The elevator seems to be taking forever.

When we finally reach my door and I unlock it, Dakota pushes past me and enters. I lay her purse on the table and kick off my shoes. She takes a few more steps until she's in the center of the room.

The living room feels much smaller with her in it. She's a beautiful storm, all waves and anger as her lungs fill with air. Her chest rises up, then down, in a ragged pattern.

I step toward her, right into the eye of it all. I shouldn't know how to approach her. I shouldn't remember the exact way to talk to her, to cool her temper.

But I do.

I remember how to slowly step to her and wrap my arms around her waist. When I do, they fall into their protective place, trying to shield her from anything and everything. In this case, from myself.

My fingers should have forgotten how to gently raise her stubborn chin and let me look into her eyes. But they haven't, they couldn't.

“We have to talk about this,” I whisper through the heavy air between us.

Dakota takes a breath and tries to look away from me. I bend at the knees, leaning down to her height. She looks away again and I refuse to give in before she listens to me.

“I met Nora a while ago, back in Washington,” I begin to explain.

“In
Washington
? You've been seeing her that long?” She hiccups at the end of her question and pulls away from my embrace.

I wonder if I should offer her something to drink. I don't think this is the best time, but when an inebriated person hiccups, it sometimes means they're going to get sick, doesn't it?

Where did I even hear that?

This is one of those times when I wish I knew more about drinking and the effects it has on your body. Dakota's toe catches on a pile of textbooks on the floor and she stumbles, taking a few unsteady steps toward the couch. Better safe than sorry, I'll get her that water after all.

I shake my head. “No, no, no. She came over a few times because her parents live close to my mom and Ken.”

I know it sounds like a lie, but it's not.

“I barely know her. She helped my mom with baking and now she's Tessa's friend—”

“Your mom? She met
your mom
?” Dakota shrieks.

Everything I say seems to add another shovelful of dirt to the hole I'm digging myself in.

“No . . . well, yes.” I sigh. “Like I said, her parents live near mine. I didn't have her over for family dinner or anything like that.”

I hope something clicks within her and she sees that this isn't what she thinks it is.

Dakota turns away and her eyes scan the living room. I watch her as she walks over to the couch and sits down on the side closer to the door. I pull my jacket off and drape it over the chair. I hold a hand out for Dakota's jacket, but she isn't wearing one. How did I not notice? I remember looking at the line of her tights, the outline of her bra through the thin cotton of her dress. I'm not used to seeing her dressed like this, in such tight clothing.

That's my excuse for being a pervert who didn't even notice that she wasn't wearing a jacket? It didn't even cross my mind to offer her mine—what's happening to me?

While I wait for her response, I walk over to the thermostat and turn up the heat. If we're lucky, it'll make her drowsy. I pop into the kitchen and pour each of us a glass of water.

When I return, she shakes her head and looks past me; I can see that she's struggling within herself. “For some reason, I believe you, but should I? I mean, this fast? Just like that?”

She rests her chin on her elbow and stares across the room. “I didn't think I would care this much if you dated someone,” she admits.

Her words take me by surprise, and as I mull them over, something shifts in my reasoning. I guess I saw that from the beginning of the small almost-catfight that she was annoyed I was with Nora, but for some reason I thought she was more upset because I'd lied to her about what I was doing tonight. That she would feel weird at seeing me with someone—even though I'm really not
with
anyone—wasn't the first thing on my mind, given everything.
She
broke up with
me
over six months ago and has barely given me the time of day since.

Part of me wants to shout at her,
Where's the logic in that!?
but another part reminds me that she must feel that she's justified in some way. I do my best to try to see it from her side before I say anything or react because I know that if I do speak right now, my words will do more damage than good. Especially if I'm only thinking of my point of view. Of myself. Still, I'm mad, too. She thinks after six months that she can yell at me for dating someone who I'm not even dating? I want to tell her that, tell her that she's wrong—and I'm right—and I'm pissed, too! But that's the problem with this type of quick anger: discharging it would make me feel better for a few moments, but then I'll feel like crap after. Anger doesn't often offer a solution, it only creates more problems.

Still, part of me wants to say something. I take a big drink of water instead.

I know anger.

The type of anger that I know isn't some small thing that pops up when you see your ex of six months hanging out with someone else. My experience with anger isn't getting pissed off because your neighbor drove his car into yours. The anger that I know cuts at you when you're watching your best friend get his eye split open because his dad heard someone down at the bar whispering about him looking at another boy just a beat too long.

The anger that I know seeps inside of you and turns you into lava, burning slowly as it rolls down the hills and covers the town. It's when your friend's bruises are in the shape of knuckles and you can't do shit about it without causing more destruction.

When you've been host to that type of anger, it's very, very hard to fly off the handle over small things. I've never been one to add fuel to a fire. I've been the water, extinguishing the flames, the salve to heal the burns.

Little problems come and go, and I have always avoided confrontation at all costs, but sometimes things become too much to bear or too big to ignore. I'm terrible at fighting, I can't keep an argument going to save my life. My mom always said I was born with a gift: an enormous amount of empathy. And that it could quickly become a fault instead of a virtue.

I can't help it . . . I can't stand to see other people suffer, even if holding back causes suffering to
me
.

I'm struggling to understand Dakota's anger when she finally breaks the silence.

“I'm not saying you can't date,” she says.

I sit down on the arm of the couch farther away from her.

“Just not so soon. I'm not ready for you to date,” she adds, and takes a long drink of water.

Soon?
It's been six months.

I can tell by her expression that Dakota's completely serious, and I don't know if I should call her out on it, or just let it blow over. She's pretty drunk, and I know how stressed she's been lately with her academy and all. I'm smart enough to pick and choose my battles, and I don't feel strongly enough about this one to let it snowball into a full-fledged war.

What she's asking of me isn't remotely fair, and I'm frustrated by how easily I've let myself slide into this passive role again. I'm enabling her . . . but is it really that bad? We are communicating. No one is yelling. No one is losing their cool. I want to keep this going. If she's handing out secrets, I'll take a few.

“And when will you be ready for me to date?” I ask softly.

She sits up straight, immediately defensive. I knew she would be. I stare at her, my eyes telling her that there's nothing to be upset about, we're only talking. No judging here.

Her shoulders relax.

“I don't know. I haven't really thought about it.” She shrugs. “I assumed it would take you longer to get over me.”

“Get over you?” I ask, worried for this woman's sanity. What would have given her the assumption that I
could
get over her? My kiss with Nora? It's not like this girl before me even gave me a choice about getting over her.

But, man, do I wish she didn't know about that kiss. Not because I want to hide it, but because some things really are better left unknown. I keep my distance still, leaving two cushions of space between us.

“I'm not over you,” I calmly say, “but you didn't give me much of a choice here, Dakota. You've barely spoken to me since you moved. You broke up with me, remember?”

I look at her. She's staring at the floor.

“You wanted to focus on yourself when you moved, and I got that. I let you have your space and you didn't do anything to stop me. You didn't reach out to me at all. Not once did you call me first, not once did you answer the first time I called. Now here we are and you're acting like I'm a villain because I went out on a casual date with someone.”

So much for biting my tongue and letting it blow over.

I truly don't want to fight with her. I just want to communicate openly and honestly.

She looks at me with a pointed glare. “So you
did
go out with her.”

It's frustrating as hell that after everything I said, that's all she picked up on.

I'm trying to find some logic behind her accusations, but I'm coming up short without knowing what Nora has been telling her. All night I've repeated over and over that Nora and I aren't dating, but she's not listening. And then she's holding me up to this no-dating standard she'd never voiced before.

If the roles were reversed, I would believe her. I know her well enough to know that she wouldn't lie to me. She's complicating things. Why is she complicating things?

“Stop lying to me.” She waves her hands through the air and the metal bracelets on her wrists clang against each other. “I get it, Landon, she's beautiful and older, and aggressive, and men like that kind of shit. You like that, and I've been replaced again.”

I can either sit here and get mad that she's cooking up her own explanations for everything, or I can bite my tongue and remember that she's drunk, upset, and has been under a lot of pressure lately.

With a sigh, I move from the arm of the couch and kneel on the rug in front of where she's sitting. I look up at her stoic expression. “I would never lie to you about something like this. I'm telling the truth.”

My hands grab at hers in her lap. Her skin feels cold and the chill forces a memory into my mind. I'm thrown back into a backyard make-out session that happened when we were fifteen. Her hands were so cold and she put them up my shirt to rest on my warm stomach. We kissed and kissed and couldn't stop. We were frozen by the time we went inside, but we didn't care. Not one bit.

“Can I ask you something?” Her voice is soft and melts something inside of me.

I'm a sucker for her.

A goner.

I always have been.

“Always.”

Dakota draws a long breath and pulls one of her hands away from mine to tuck her hair behind her ear. I turn her other hand over and trace the lines in her skin, the scar there. She flinches out of instinct and I feel the throbbing ache of the memory behind her reaction.

“Do you miss me, Landon?”

Her hands are soft and light in mine.

This moment feels familiar, yet foreign. How is that?

Do I miss her?

Of course I miss her.

I've missed her since I moved to Washington. I've told her how much I've missed her. I've expressed how much I miss her more times than I've heard anything remotely close to that come from her.

I lean into her farther and squeeze her hands between mine while repeating her question back to her. “Do you miss
me
?”

Without giving her time to answer, I continue: “I need to know this, Dakota. I think it's more than obvious that I miss you, that I've missed you since I left Michigan. I missed you before and after you visited me in Washington. I would say that me moving across the country to be with you shows that I missed you.”

She seems to think on my words for a beat. She looks at me for a second and then stares past me. The clock on the wall is ticking, humming in the silence.

Finally, she opens her mouth to speak. “But did you miss
me
? Or was it just the idea of me, the familiarity of me? Because there were times when I literally felt like I couldn't do anything without you, and I hated it. I wanted to prove to myself that I could take care of myself. After Carter died, I clung to you, and so when you left me, I had nothing. You were my safe place, and when you moved away, you took that safety with you. But then, when you said you would move to New York with me, I felt like I was going to be stuck in that safe place with you. That I would be a child forever. There would be no chance for adventure, nothing unexpected could possibly happen with you around to save me.”