The Space Between (24 page)

A few margaritas
and a thorough leg massage were my new Thursday night requirements. Wonderfully absent of bros in tight t-shirts, shots, and electronica, this was exactly how I wanted to spend my time. I adjusted the pressure on the chair’s massage settings and swallowed a groan.

“I know, right?” Lauren sighed, clinking her glass to mine.

“Yeah. This is going in the rotation.”

“So worth it,” Lauren said. “Especially when you don’t have time for anything and you’re running around with your hair on fire.”

“Speaking of hair on fire, how’s the wedding planning coming?”

Last we spoke, Lauren was the picture of chill but altogether too many of my college and grad school friends went from completely calm to completely batshit crazy while planning their weddings. I continued wondering when Lauren would drink the bridezilla Kool-Aid.

“Good. Really, it’s all good, and the biggest variable is whether my brothers will be able to make it.” She signaled to the young man pouring refills, pointing to our glasses before flicking her gaze over her phone. “They’re deployed, and it’s up in the air whether they’ll be back. Sometimes their missions are…unpredictable. But I’m sure it will be fine.”

I studied her, watching her teeth sink into her bottom lip and her head bob as if convincing herself.

“So anyway,” she continued. “What’s new with you?”

Hm. There was a lot of new in my life. I nodded to myself, and drank my margarita, thinking about all this newness. Amazing apprenticeship where I was learning more than I thought possible. Great colleagues who were smart, funny, and swore like sailors. A new city to explore, and more good eats than I could consume in a lifetime. A few more pairs of tall boots added to the collection—as if I didn’t have enough Wellies or riding boots to wear a unique set each day.

And one incredibly hot architect with the most expressive hazel eyes I ever encountered and entirely too much talent in and out of the bedroom.

“Mmhmm. Yep, about that dreamy look you have right now. So how is Patrick?”

Holding my breath, I slowly swiveled my head to face Lauren, and found her smiling at me with her chin propped on her fist. There was no way she knew. Not possible.

“What?” I asked, struggling to keep my voice steady.

“I knew it! I knew it that night we all met up at Twenty-First.”

She knew and the tequila started rebelling against my stomach. Despite the alcohol warming my blood, a cold sweat broke out across my skin. If Lauren knew, Matt and Shannon knew, and that meant everyone knew. Everyone knew and they were going along with this little act to pretend they didn’t and I was the apprentice who slept with the managing partner. Where was the cheesy soundtrack for that cliché?

“What?” I repeated.

My stomach roiled. I tried to calculate an appropriate tip for vomiting in the footbath.

Lauren smiled and nodded patiently. “There’s something going on between you two.”

This wasn’t happening. This was a hallucination bred of tequila and sugar scrubs, and it wasn’t happening. I leaned forward and focused on my breathing to keep my stomach contents in place. “Who—I mean, where did you hear that?”

“I didn’t hear it anywhere, I just noticed things. Though you confirmed it all with that deer-in-the-headlights look, my friend.”

“No one said anything to you?”

“No,” Lauren replied. “Sweetie, we’re friends, right? This is between us.”

A breath I didn’t know I was holding whooshed out, and I slumped back. “What do you mean, you ‘noticed things?’”

Lauren frowned, gesturing toward me with her margarita glass. “The way you were sitting tonight. You were leaning toward each other. And you kept looking at each other, and having little talks with your eyes. I’ve never seen Patrick do that. And he kept trying to be all smooth and touch you when he thought no one was looking.”

Mr. Smooth’s ears must have been burning, because he decided to text me at that exact moment.

19:51 Patrick:
still want to take you to bed. im back at my place. come over whenever

19:52 Patrick:
or ill go to you

19:54 Patrick:
do I know where you live?

I pocketed my phone, electing to concentrate on the issues at hand instead of the issues in Patrick’s bed—as if they were different. “Did anyone else notice?”

“No. And no one noticed the sneaky looks you were giving each other at Twenty-First.” Lauren sipped her drink and placed a soothing hand on my arm. “It’s obvious you’re a little frazzled, and I’m sorry for doing that to you. But it sounds like you need to let it out, so let it out on me. Just between friends.”

The story tumbled out in a tangled, frantic mess, and I told her everything—the flirty texts, the lunches, the fangirling, the bathrooms, the dirty fantasies, the anxiety I felt over the future of my career, and the secrecy—and she listened as if I was reciting some Emily Dickinson rather than describing the most wild experiences of my life.

None of it surprised her, and that surprised
me
.

Lauren was right: I felt better getting it out, and I felt substantially better when she swore up and down she wasn’t peeping a word to anyone. Not even Matt.

“I gotta say,” Lauren laughed. “I love that you have this perfect storm. You’re so in sync at the office and it sounds like that carries over in bed. Too perfect. And the fact you held him off for so long blows my mind. I did
not
have the same success.”

“Success with what now?”

Lauren licked her lips while a broad smile spread across her face. “So…I met Matthew on a Thursday, and went home with him on a Friday. Of the same week.” She lifted her hands. “And somehow managed to spend the next four days attached to his side, even though I was full-tilt obsessed with my work and not letting a guy get me off-track. I might have been a little crazy back then. And by ‘back then,’ I do mean a couple of months ago.”

That was the last thing I expected to hear from Lauren. I spent very little time piecing together her relationship with Matt, but I didn’t expect it to start with a glorified hook-up. She seemed altogether too innocent, too by-the-book.

“So, Andy, let’s get down to it. What do you want out of all of this?”

I watched the technician as she applied warm oil to my foot before digging her fingers into my tendons. She was getting an earful—I bet she could eat out for weeks on the stories she heard from her vantage point. My phone buzzed again, and I studied the screen.

20:28 Patrick:
yeah I don’t know where you live. You don’t make a habit of telling me things like that.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just trying to enjoy Patrick, and not kill my career in the process.”

I typed a quick response while Lauren chuckled at a message streaming across her phone.

20:31 Andy:
patience is one of the strongest warriors. the other is time.

“Yeah. I tried that too,” Lauren muttered. “Turns out you can do both. Who knew?” She shifted her attention from the sunny yellow color on her toenails, and gave me a serious look. “It’s been a rough couple of months for them, and they’ve been through a lot. I think…I think Patrick needs a soft place to land. They all do, but Patrick needs someone who will ride out the storm with him. He rides them all alone, and he can’t do that to himself anymore. Not now.”

I couldn’t tell whether she was warning me off or giving her blessing, and I decided not to ask, as I didn’t know what to think about either. “Rough couple of months?”

“Honestly, it’s been a rough twenty years for them.” My eyebrows arched and Lauren held up a finger to shut me down. “Do not misinterpret the Ivy League educations or
Boston Magazine
covers or the fact they’re generally put-together, functional adults. They’re little orphans in nice clothes who know how to use big words.”

Lauren skimmed through the Walsh family highlights, and I started to see my colleagues in a new light. My eyes fixed on the first coat of polish as it went down, studying the brushstrokes instead of Lauren’s soulful expressions. The Patrick I knew was funny, and generous, and a great mentor—he wasn’t an abandoned child who rebuilt a family business from rubble and kept it going despite his father’s destructive ploys.

While two more coats of black cherry paint covered my toenails and our glasses were refilled with another round, Lauren recapped their history. Angus Walsh’s hate-filled blowout with his sons, and his subsequent stroke and death. The grenade attack will. The blame Angus levied on his children for their mother’s death. Their collective dedication to the business that left them without an ounce of free time. Their loyalty to each other. Their refusal to quit when all of the odds lined up against them. Their warm acceptance of her in their circle.

We eventually parted—after Lauren insisted that we meet for lunch and shopping over the weekend—and I hiked through the snowy streets of Beacon Hill toward my apartment. It was a lot to digest, and I knew a little something about growing up with an adequate degree of dysfunction to know that Patrick
was
riding out a storm. It was a lot to process, and if I knew what was good for me, I’d back away.

Without thinking, I tossed a few items in my bag and headed straight for the North End. Icy slush and snow crunched beneath my boots, but I didn’t hear it while I reorganized everything I knew about Patrick, his siblings, and the firm.

I couldn’t explain why I was going to him. I only knew I needed to be with him, put my arms around him, and hold him tight.

I wasn’t the girl who paid attention to sad stories. I had my own, and I wasn’t waiting for anyone to pat my head and make it all better—no, I found my big girl panties a long time ago, and I expected everyone else to do the same. In fact, I steered clear of all sad stories unless we were talking solutions. The last thing I was qualified for was comforting friends in their times of need. I never knew what to do and empathy wasn’t my strength.

It’s not that I was a coldhearted bitch—I wasn’t. I knew sitting around and being depressed wouldn’t make a damn thing better, and if I wanted to stop feeling broken, picking up the pieces and gluing myself back together was the only way to do it.

Patrick glued himself back together, too. All the signs were there, waiting for me to add them up. He was a survivor, and he saw to it that his siblings made it through, even if it crushed him a little more along the way. He avoided asking personal questions because reciprocating led down a path few cared to explore. He kept a small, tight group of friends who knew enough to keep history in the past. Though he never brought it up, it was obvious serious girlfriends were few and far between. But when he let himself connect with someone, he gave
everything
.

I memorized Patrick’s building code the night he gave it to me, and barely noticed my gloved fingers moving over the keypad when I reached the door, or the climb up three flights of stairs. He answered within seconds.

“Was that a Tolstoy quote?”

“Yes, now come here.” My bag and coat dropped to the floor, and I sighed when my arms wrapped around him. My palms pressed against the corded muscles of his shoulders, absorbing his warmth. There was something charming about Patrick’s low-slung fleece pants and thermal shirt. It was a younger, less intimidating look than the dress trousers, Oxford shirt, and tie combo that he frequently paired with v-neck sweaters or half-zip pullovers, or suits. God help me, those suits were devastating.

Patrick’s fingers tangled in my hair—they were always in my hair—and his lips swept along my neck. “Texting with you gets really complicated. You make Google work for it.”

“Let’s not talk,” I murmured, pulling him toward the bedroom. “Not right now.”

Patrick’s bedroom was fast becoming my favorite hideout, and even I could admit the old exposed brick and beams balanced nicely with the contemporary closets and bathroom. The high ceilings and angled windows at the roofline avoided the harshest morning sunlight while always providing the perfect amount of darkness and moonlight at night.

Getting Patrick naked and then feeling his skin were the only priorities, and I threw his shirt over his head and pushed his pants and boxers down without ceremony. His hands were busy unfastening my pants when I backed him to the edge of the bed. Patrick sat, observing while my clothes and boots landed in a heap, and I stripped to bra, panties, and socks. He summoned me closer with a hand on my hip.

“I don’t know why these are so fucking sexy,” Patrick said, his fingertips grazing my knees and circling the blue and white striped socks embroidered with tiny Eiffel towers. His fingers stroked higher, over my thighs and along my torso. One quick flick released my bra, and my panties soon hit the ground. “Can they come off?”

“As soon as I warm up.” I stalked him back against the pillows, and pulled the blankets around us. His clean scent was at once sedative and stimulant.

“For a Mainer, your blood’s thin,” he laughed, his hands coasting along my back to diffuse my body heat.

My teeth nipped at the thin layer of skin stretched over Patrick’s collarbone, my tongue soothing the miniscule bites. “Don’t call me that.”

His hands clutched my backside, scooting me closer to his erection. “Fine, but you spent five and half years in Ithaca with seventeen feet of snow. It’s not like you’ve been in Miami.”

Against Patrick’s growling protests, I levered up and glared at him. Every time we were naked—without fail—he launched into a game of twenty questions. “Would it be possible to reserve this topic for another time?”

“Of course,” he retorted, gripping my forearms and pulling me closer. “But you’re more forthcoming like this. I take the opportunities I get.”

‘You don’t give me much’ and ‘you don’t make a habit of telling me things’ echoed in my thoughts, and I shuffled away from Patrick long enough to peel my socks down, cast them to the ground with a harried look, and tangle my arms around his neck. I wanted to give him more—even if his methods were maddening.