Two Degrees Off Base Who: Helene and Neil When: late evening, just before nine Where: Torte di Angeli What: Old flame's back in town
It had been a relatively uneventful day for Helene. After the other night at the bar, she felt more like her old self, even back to the way she was in college. There was a subtle bounce to her step and she was happy. After closing, they had to do inventory, make sure they had enough of everything. She bribed them with the fourth off and the day after a late open. It took a couple of hours, but they had pizza and it was fun. She really was genuinely happy. Once everything was tidied, most everyone went home. She stayed behind with her aunt, doing some paperwork, the important kind of thing one had to do when they owned a business. It wasn't her favorite thing, but they sat in the front of the store, the back feeling just a little creepy in the dark.
Once everything was done, Helene walked her aunt to the front door to let her out. It was more lit and she felt more comfortable that way. As she kissed the woman on the cheek, she thought she saw the flash of someone familiar but brushed it off. "Good night, Aunt," she said in perfect Italian, the aunt replying in kind and telling her to go home soon. Nodding, she turned and closed the door, locking it. There were papers to put back and then she could go home and get some much deserved sleep. And perhaps a bubble bath.
Meanwhile on the street outside, Neil was still getting ash out of his clothes when he came around on the corner of East Main and Johnston. (Bren had a lot of kinks to work out of her technique.) The streets were still bustling with the Friday night life, a surprisingly vibrant coming and going of startling good-looking people. More than he’d been willing to expect from a little backwater town of Middle America.
Neil eyed a couple baby blood dolls, dressed in fetish leathers that bared skin from jugular to femoral and left nothing to the imagination, which was a shame because Neil had a good one and he liked putting it to use. He watched them go with an arch of the brow and whistled in a not complimentary fashion after they’d gone. He imagined they were on their way to Heme and that thought only bothered him because he tried to imagine Seer in a setting with that lot and kept coming up with her glaring and telling them to go get a driver’s license and put some clothes on.
Amusing himself, Neil hopped up on a stone bench beneath one of the street lamps, lifted his face into the light and took a deep satisfying breath because this place, this town, this was the brand new land. No looking back. He was done with everything that ever took him out of Michigan because this familiar ground and this unfamiliar city was good enough now. Seer was alive, he was quitting the game while he was ahead, he was leaving all this nemeses behind to scowl and hate his memory over seas, and Neil felt confident for once he had his head on straight.
Then he happened to glanced right... and ex-thief froze dead stop.
His mind locked, jammed on some impossible kink in the wire of his thoughts. Through the display window of a quaint little bake shop – sorting absently through papers in a drawer, like she wasn’t rearranging his world view – was Helene Laitos and goddammit if she didn’t make the planet grind to a halt on its fucking axis. Suddenly Neil remembered why this town felt familiar: it was the hometown of his old college ex. (Fuck you serendipity. Fuck you.)
Not realizing who exactly was outside, she went about her business and closed up the shop, tucking her hair behind her ear as she locked up for the night. It wasn't a terrible night and she was really looking forward to a bubble bath. Adjusting her back, Helene turned and took two steps away from her store front and saw someone near by. Someone who was looking at her. Like he'd just seen a ghost. Someone who was too familiar. And that was the moment the world crashed into her.
Neil. Neil MacKenna. The one man, save Edward Reese, who would stop her in her tracks. Actually more than Edward really, as Neil was the one who had left her in New York with some lame ass excuse and a million questions. And there he was. All Helene wanted to do was run to his arms and kiss him stupid. Then slap him. And kiss him stupid again.
Oh fuck! Fuckity! Fucking flying fuckery! (Neil felt himself have a very small anxiety attack) She’d just spotted him.
To say that he and Helene had parted on good terms would have been pushing it. No, actually, it would have been shoving it down a flight of stairs and rolling a piano down after it. At the same time he and Helene had been involved back in university, Neil had been moonlighting as an art forger and picking up absorbent extra cash flow painting virtually undetectable fakes for the use of bad men and women. During this turbulent period of his life – slipping fast and gleefully into a world without rules or limits – Neil had also been… well he’d been with Helene.
He was trying very hard not to think about what ‘being with Helene’ had entailed because it was a hell of a lot more than he really wanted to admit. Enough that he’d left her behind rather than lie to her, poorly, for years to come. He’d only known her for a little over a year. (He told himself that over and over and over and didn’t hate his own guts.) She’d been wonderful but it would have been disastrous. (Told himself over and over again.) He was a criminal. (Not anymore!) He lit things on fire. (Only some things.) He thought – framed by the shop window, hair undone, caught at that angle, dark eyes wide on him – she looked better than Rembrandt.(Well fuck.)
Neil stepped off the bench toward the window and, for a lack of anything else he could do, just shrugged at her through the window and smiled crookedly. First smile in over half a decade and hoped it held at least a fraction of how he much he’d missed her.
It seemed impossible that he was there. And yet, she found herself unlocking the door and just staring at him. She could still remember the day he left her. He'd spouted some nonsense about it being good for her, better this way and she was angry, tears shinning in her eyes at the fact that he was leaving her. But now, all those years later, he was standing her home town and giving her a mild heart attack. Neil was there. And damn it if he didn't look just as sexy as he had in college.
Helene stepped just outside the bakery, as if trying to figure out if he was a trick of the light. He wasn't. Of course he wouldn't be. Standing there for a moment, completely dumb struck, she stared. And then her lips moved, in a reflex as natural as breathing.
"Mio fuoco," she breathed.
God, she was still calling him that. It seemed like eons back (or yesterday) since he was a level four fire-starter, picking fights in New York pubs he hadn’t a chance in hell of winning. (But sometimes did anyway.) She named him for his temper, but pegged a very real aspect of what he really was back before he was allowed to talk about it. He remembered meeting her at the busstop every morning, 7:14AM because that was the only route that took them both downtown and sitting together watching the city go by side by side.The weight of her head on his shoulder.
Neil exhaled slowly and said very quietly, “Mia greca.”
He couldn’t read through the shock on her face; if that was the deserved rage or the beginnings of a rant, or just surprise to see him, or any other million nuances of reaction. The anger was what he expected, the resentment, or dismissal. He looked down suddenly and laughed, the sound a little dry, rueful. When he looked up he slipped into Italian because, well, that was always how he imagined talking to Helene.
“I, ah, I nearly forgot Scarlet Oak. You told me once the family business but…” He trailed off. He had no idea where to go from there. He hadn't come here with intention to see her he'd stumbled here by accident. He had no words ready for her, no apologies or explanations, nothing. So he looked up at her and said haplessly, with a sort of tired honesty, ”I would miss you at 7:14.”
Her heart melted a little. As angry as she might still be at him, he was there, he missed her. And every once in a while, she would look at the clock and see those numbers flash at her and for a minute, she would remember his warmth, his firm body against hers, his breath against her ear. She would remember his smile, the way he held her. For a moment, she lived a dream and then returned to the reality that haunted her. The one without him in her life.
Helene wanted to scream. She really wanted to slap him. But her body moved to his and she slipped her arms around him, sighing at the feel of him, that familiarity. To think, it had been all those years. She thought of the men in between, though they were few. She thought of the fact that she nearly married. And then there was this moment, him in her town at her store.
"Come in," she murmured, pulling away almost as quickly as she'd hugged him. It was still so strange, so surreal. Still a dream. "What the hell are you doing here?"
He'd frozen when she came down of the stoop of her family store, bracing for impact but the contact she initiated was of a more gentle variety than he’d been prepared to expect. She crossed the pavement between them in three steps and slipped her arms around him, pulling herself against his chest and in exactly three steps, three seconds, made dropping everything and everyone from Neil's old life and his old world completely viable as acceptable losses. Because when he pit his arms around the familiar, slender shape of her he remembered everything that was good about New York and everything that he’d never wanted to leave behind (but did anyway, pulled by reasons he could not ever fully explain.)
She still smelled vaguely of whatever soaps she was using these days, She still had that goofy rose tattoo on her right bicep, etched with her gone mother’s initials. She still brought her arms up to the middle of your back between the shoulder blades to pull you into a hug, placed pressure just below the base of your neck. (He’d taken that for granted. No one did that.) Neil followed her inside the bakery which smelled terribly familiar for whatever reason, as though Helene had always carried a bit of this place with her, and here he just recognized it wholly.
“I came back to Michigan to find a friend,” he said plainly, moving to the middle of the store, quickly casing it and admiring the classic style: old red brick, heavy wooden furniture, warm atmosphere. (Bad security. He could have broken in here drunk with a toothpick.) He turned to look at Helene, hand in his pockets and shrugged. “I found them in Scarlet Oak and I thought… here was as good a place as any to restart. Stop for a while maybe. It’s been a long time since I did.”
As soon as her arms were no longer around him, she wrapped them around herself. It felt like a dream, to see him standing there. For a moment, in his arms, everything felt right. But that was impossible. He was the one who had made everything wrong. He was the one who had broken it off, left her alone in New York. And Helene had hated him, or so she told herself. Mostly, it was just anger. She had told herself that she would slap him or walk away if she ever saw him again. And she hugged him.
"Is your friend okay?" It was her way of processing what he said. He was staying. In Scarlet Oaks. Well, that just screwed everything up, didn't it? She didn't know what to think. Did she want him here? On a more permanent basis? Could she handle having him in her life again? Did he even want to be? All he had done was raise questions that were long since buried. And now she had to face them and find answers.
Neil ran a hand across the counter, eyes wandering the store rather than looking at Helene. “Yeah, she’s….” (Not dead? Alive? Or undead at the very least. Back from the dead? Not murdered but alive and he could hold her?) “…she’s fine. She’s good. Really good, well... better than I could have…ever hoped anyway.”
The counter was clean but somehow it felt like flour rubbing across his palm. The grainy organic feeling was distracting him from the conversation by thoughts: She owned this bakery, had been living here with her family’s shop and her mornings were filled with dough and ovens and coffee… and standing on the very far side of that gulf Neil had to confront the fact that his mornings had been filled with casing, lying, laundering, conning and smiling sideways as people. What's more he'd left her on a false premise. So on these grounds, she owed him nothing, not even this conversation.
He swept his hand off the counter, stared at his palm, finally looked up. He felt terribly out of place. Like the world around him was two degrees left and he was two degrees right. "I don't want anything, you know that right?" His perspective was just off here. "I didn't come here expecting something." (He didn't have the heart to say he hadn't come to Scarlet Oak for her at all.)
Watching him, she sat down, as if his movements could give her some sort of insight on him. It almost looked like he was a little lost, but then again, this was her bakery and she felt terribly out of place. Her hands went to her lap, trying to hold off on life stories and the fact that she wasn't married until later. She wondered if he was being critical of her business, of her life and that really shouldn't have bothered her as much as it did. He had left her, after all.
She did know that and she was acknowledging the part of her that was disappointed. Helene knew him, heard his words. He had come for a friend. A female friend. It shouldn't have surprised her. It wasn't like she was celibate after he ended things. She wasn't blind, either; she'd seen just how surprised he was to see her. In her mind, she was sort of regretting the hug now. It let him know that she had missed him, even if it hadn't told him how much. Stupid bastard.
Part of her wanted to hate him for leaving and another part, hate him for coming back into her life. Then, there was that annoying part of her that wanted to kiss him still. More than that, she wanted to scream, to cry, to throw things, but none of that seemed appropriate. So she said nothing, her heart in her throat and suddenly in dire need of a drink.
She'd assumed a quiet and huddled position in a nearby chair that was making Neil uncomfortable. The longer he stood here the more pronounced his sensation of disorientation became, as though he were suffering a sudden bout of vertigo and everything else was moving around him while he stood perfectly still in the middle of the bakery, looking at Helene. She had her hands pressed between her knees, an unconscious position his eyes read as repressive, as trying to hold something in that needed and wanted to be said and he realized very suddenly that he was in Soairse's position now. He was the one to leave on a false premise, lied and vanished without a trace and now there was an unsaid hurt hanging between them: the elephant in the room that would start gnawing on their shoes if one or both of them didn't just address it.
Now.
Neil sighed and slipped his hands into his back pockets, leaning back a little to look at the ceiling. (Jesus, why could he not make basic eye contact anymore?) "Okay. I guess what I'm... what I'm trying to tell you is that I didn't really come here to say... with anything in mind to say to you." His stomach was occupying some negative space somewhere. His face burned. This was all wrong. "Look, I left and I'm sorry I did it. That doesn't mean I would have done it differently... well, I would have done some things differently... but I had to leave. That didn't make it alright but if I'm going to be in this town and you're still upset with me you can..." He pursed his lips briefly. "You can say it."
For a moment, she took it all in. Every word he said. Every little movement he made. And Helene let herself feel things she hadn't felt in years. She waited a moment, trying to figure if he really did want her to say something, if he really did want to hear what was on her mind.
"I hated you. You left with barely any notice and ripped my heart out when you did. I cried for days, felt so damn lost and all because you needed to leave. And for the longest time I was bitter about it. Jaded even. And things have happened in my life since then that should have made me more jaded and had for a while. But now, it just hurts too much to hold all that in. It really does." Helene stood and moved over to the window, unconsciously unable to look at him. There were tears that stung her eyes and she really did want to scream at him. But it was late and she was exhausted.
There was silence for a long moment on her part and then she took a deep breath. "It took me years to forgive you, just so you know. Years. Doesn't mean I forgot any of it." And she didn't just mean his leaving.
Even braced for it, it was hard to hear and Neil resolved his face into an expression of perfect calm, the face one dragged up and put on while staring down something too difficult. This was difficult. This wasn’t like lying to a mark or posturing for a fence or conning someone into doing and giving you what you want, this was hard. Far too personal. He felt all together in a million pieces, like he was coming apart and scattering in all directions by this: part of him angry, part of him hurt, part of him watching the terrible shine of water rising in Helene’s dark eyes and laying open her gaze to him and showing him everything. Yet another part of him was aware that his stomach had reappeared in his midriff and now occupied the space with something having the weight and consistency of lead. (Another part said, “But she forgave you.”) More important parts said he should move forward.
But didn’t think he knew how to approach her.
Neil stood by the counter, having backed himself against it while she spoke, turned his eyes into the corner of the room while she said her piece. He didn’t look up while she filled every blank he’d hypothesized over the years, imagining how this reunion might go. The silence after she spoke felt like it was full. It pressed in on him like water and he felt a rising sensation of… something that was panic but it wasn’t… it was too mild and too intimate to be panic. In the end he couldn’t get his voice above a low murmur.
“Do you want me to go?”
She turned to him, just looking at him over her shoulder. "No," she said softly. If she had wanted him to leave, she wouldn't have allowed him in. Helene would have given him a piece of her mind on the street and gone away, not looking back. But, since she was being honest with herself, she had missed him. The time she had him in her life had been an amazing time.
Her fingers played with her dress as she turned fully. She had been through so much. So much she would have liked him there for. So much that wouldn't have happened had he been there for her. "I want you to stay." And she meant for more than just this conversation. Or, at least, some part of her did. All in all, Helene was incredibly confused.
But he still smelt the same. He still looked as he had all those years ago. Maybe a little more tired, but there was her Neil, even if he hadn't been her Neil for a while. "I just don't understand why you left. Was it me? Were we too intense? Because I spent a while trying to figure it out. And I would really like to know." She knew it couldn't have been the same things that drove Edward away because Neil never knew her secret. He was part of the reason she'd told Edward.
He blinked. "It wasn't you," Neil said, as though the concept startled him.
Then he felt thick for having said it because that was the first half of a break up line. ("It's not you. It's me.") But in this case it really had been him; him and his restless inability to hold still long enough to treat her like he should have, but looking back all he could see was the same line to the same conclusion: Him leaving. In the time he'd been with Helene he'd been getting in too deeply and he was not professional enough to maintain the double life. He couldn't forge art and love Helene. These were mutually exclusive things. To be a criminal and be with her wasn't loving her it was setting her up to be an accessory to high profile larceny.
"It wasn't you, Helene. It was what I was doing back then and who I was. I had too many things going and I knew everything I wanted to do to just so... it would have made things too difficult. I couldn't ask you to come with me. It would be asking you to give up everything but I couldn't stay. It was my one shot and if I'd stayed with you any longer I might have changed my mind and..." (And done all the same things except later, with Helene in the crossfire.) "...I didn't want to make things and harder."
And as he said these things, even as he was 'coming clean' and telling her what she asked to hear, he was lying by omission. It had been a accident coming here and now it was a mistake.
She looked at him. "Harder? You ripped my heart out because you had one shot? You had one shot to do what ever it was that you can't even tell me about and it was worth losing what we had?" That was even harder to hear. To know that something had been more important than her. Helene refused to cry. As much as it hurt her, she wouldn't show him that part. She had missed him; after all this time, she had missed him, wished that he would show up, that she could understand why he left. Now that she did, she was really sorry she did know.
Her hands fell away from her clothes and she was focused on how his words made her feel. To her, it seemed like she wasn't good enough. And to hear that he felt something was more important than her made her feel stupid for still thinking about him. It hadn't been a constant thing, but he was always there.
Part of Neil was a little surprised to hear her say anything along those lines because it had always been his impression that Helen was a force of nature which surrendered unto nothing. He was, actually, a bit annoyed with her for not raging across the bakery and laying him the haymaker he’d been anticipating for all these years. That she was about to cry – or was trying not to cry – was ununacceptable to him as part of reality because the woman he knew was a spoiled rotten hurricane with a streak of kindness like gold through her. He should not be able to stand here and reduce that iconic memory to… a hurt girlfriend.
Chrissake, she sounded like a cheap soap opera.
Helene Laitos been so much bigger, so much fiercer than some ex, some transitory relationship into which he had passed in and out of. This wasn’t right. She was this huge and integral piece of his past that was fucking unstoppable and unforgettable in the backdrop of his memories. She was made out of independence and ‘fuck you kindly’s. She was sideways smirks and sweet kisses. She was kicking taxi tires and talking back to meter maids. Who was this shadow woman who smelled like rose and lily body wash, felt like the same body, and spoke with the same voice? He could feel himself, irrationally, becoming angry with her for not being angry.
“Is that the cliché we’re going with? I ‘ripped your heart out’?” the words are out before he can stop them… then doesn’t care to stop them. When he’d asked her to vent he’d expected more heat. Heat he could handle. This… wishy-washy resentment he really couldn’t. “I’m sorry, Helene but I told you. I chose because the alternative was pain and I mean for both of us. If I’d stayed I would have hurt you. If I left I would have hurt you. The devil was in the details. I love you, but Chrissake I knew you well enough to know it wasn't the right time."
He really didn't know her. Not the woman she was now. Yes, she had been stronger than. But things had broken her down. Seeing him again, it reminded her, not just over everything they been, but everything she was trying to get back for herself. Helene hated the fact that he saw right through her, just like he had when they were together. Neil always knew her so well, probably better than anyone. And he saw her as a woman who dissolved all those years into a cliché.
Between him snapping at her and her finally hearing the words she hadn't heard from him for years, Helene crossed the bakery in three strides and slapped him across the face. "Fuck you and your excuses, Neil. You know nothing of what I've been through since you left. Nothing." She spat the words at him. She tried to ignore the fact that he'd said 'love' instead of 'loved'.
“Okay then,” snapped Neil, the pain of the blow like a catalyst, triggering a reaction. “Impress me baker girl. What the hell have you been through? What pain did my walking off and leading my own life cause you, exactly? Draw me a picture. I left. Are you saying it would have been better for me to put my life on hold and just stay in New York? And for a relationship that was so fluid in definition that I couldn’t even say whether or not we were together half the time. You always kept me on the back foot so what was I supposed to do? Mess up ,my life without any really commitment from you? Bull shit!”
He pushed away from the counter. “You were busy. You were talented. You had guys lining up out the door. You had the world at your feet,” he said furiously, heat rising in him sure as Fire but deeper than that because it was such an old rage, coming up from an old deep well inside. An outburst years in the making. “You had your family. You had your goals. You had your friends and I had what to offer you? I had your busfare in the morning? I had your favorite Chinese place on speed dial? I had your class schedule memorized? Does that do jackshit to make the world stop turning or the fact I had no job, no prospects, and nothing stable to give you?”
(Except a rap sheet four miles long, $80,000 in stolen money, a disposition for theft, and an inability to stop casing every building I saw.)
He was standing just three paces off from her now, too angry too see straight. Why couldn’t she see straight? Why did she act like it was something she’d done to make him leave. It wasn’t’ her. Fucksake if he’d thought he could have done it – stayed with her and been himself – he would have, but he couldn’t and that was the point. He couldn’t stand her self recriminations. He’d left. Him. He was his fault. Why was it taking her so damn long to get off her self-pity trip and tell him to fuck off? Tell him where to shove it? Say everything hanging unsaid?
“Where in your world did I fit in, exactly, Helene? God, tell me. Please. I need to hear this.”
"You're such an ass. Put your life on hold. Bull shit. What was so damn important? And it didn't seem so fluid to me. Wasn't like I was seeing anyone else when we were together. I would have gone with you, I would have done almost anything for you. I fucking loved you then! More than I'd loved anyone outside my family." Her hand stung a little from where she'd hit him and she was tempted to do it again. He'd been the one who changed the way she saw things. He was important to her and she didn't know what to do when he'd left.
"I didn't want any of those guys. I wanted you." Helene looked down and shook her head. "Everyone leaves. You started it all. After you, no one was the same. Until Edward. I thought he was the one and that was the one point in the years we were apart that I didn't think of you as much. But he found out who I was, the real me, and he fucking abandoned me too. Couldn't have run out fast enough. Even my own father left, moved to Greece. I may have family, be surrounded by them, but I'm still alone and it fucking sucks."
She moved to stand in front of him, forcing him to look at her, and she was closer to him than she's been all night. "You fit in because I loved you, because after all these fucking years, I still love you. Why the hell wasn't that enough?" She was in his face. "Or was I just naive enough to think you cared as much as I did?"
It wasn’t important it was unavoidable. A wire of compulsive fire hardwired into the programming of your brain wasn’t a reason for leaving. It wasn’t pinnable. You couldn’t articulate it. Couldn’t put it into words and weight it against New York winters, cheap movie tickets, and Chinese food. Hell, even if you could, all it led to was the inevitable indictment of grand theft. However much she said she loved him he doubted that love would extend to sharing his jail time if got caught. (He wouldn’t get caught though. He was just that damn good.) But that was then, not now and he was on the straight and narrow wasn’t he?
He was only thinking of this based on the fact that Helene was no longer simpering, but smoldering. No longer whining, but full of wrath and for a split second he was early twenties, New York crass, broke, a petty thief, and they were not in Scarlet Oak. Her eyes held the rage of the girl he knew from before he was what he is and they were not in this unfamiliar bakery but caught in a moment from back then. And back then, this was how he made her shut the fuck up.
“Goddammit,” he breathed, looped his hands up around the nape of her neck and pulled her mouth his.
That wasn't what she was expecting and just as it always took her off guard then, this kiss left her speechless. For a moment, she struggled and then she wrapped her arms around the familiarity of him, of that moment. It brought her back to a time when she believed in so much more than she did now, when she wasn't quite so jaded about the world. It brought her back to when they were together, when their hotheadedness got to the best of them and this was the only way to end the cycle of an argument.
She finally broke the kiss but didn't pull away from him. "You're still an ass," she murmured, looking up at him. It was only a couple of inches, but it made all the difference, especially if she was in his arms. 'Ah, fuck it,' she thought, pulling his mouth back to hers. They could get back to arguing later. She missed this too, needed to be reminded of how his lips fit against hers.
Kissing Helene felt like coming home. Neil looped his fingers up into the unstyled mess of her hair, sliding his hands through the warm silk and cradling her skull delicately, firmly so he could breathe her in. The wire of resistance she offered melted – like metal against a secret flame five thousand degrees and climbing – and for what seemed like the first time in a long time Neil wanted someone. Helene’s lips opened on his, all warm breath and heat, and suddenly he found himself pulling her closer to him, bumping into a counter behind her in his urgency to make sure her mouth was precisely the shape he remembered. He kissed her.
He felt fire running through his veins, flame racing under his skin and breathed between hungry kisses, “I missed you.” Drank her in again, could feel that gloriously near flame of her life force like a furnace in her bones. He broke away again, but only far enough to rasp against her mouth, “I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.” Neil MacKenna kissed Helene with her back to the bakery counter in the air that smelled of bread. She was softly burning in his hands. How had he forgotten this? “I never stopped.” Missing you. Loving you. Wanting you. Wishing the world would stand still so I could hang in the inertia with you forever.
She purred against him, so pleased to be kissed like this, to be kissed by him again. For a moment, she was young again, in New York, standing in the rain after having missed the bus, on a day when they both decided to tell the world to fuck off. That morning had been bliss that seeped into the afternoon. This tasted like that, of a good time. And yet, she was in the present, pressed up against the counter, being kissed the way every woman should be kissed. It was only right.
Helene groaned softly when he pulled back to speak. She pressed her hands to his chest, giving herself a moment for the world to catch up. "We have to much to talk about, Neil. We can't just pick up like this again." Damn logic. There was so much that had changed and yet, he kissed her like there was nothing different. She pressed her forehead to his. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "I'm sorry I slapped you and I'm sorry I was talking like I stepped out of some trashy romance novel." Like the ones he knew she hid under her bed. "But you can't just walk back in here, accident or not. We will have to talk." But she looked into those eyes and she saw the fire that she loved about him and pulled his lips to hers once more, unable to resist him.
Her touch was comfort even when talking from a stand point of frigid logic, a cool mist of reason on the intense urgency that rushed him. He held the last kiss for as long as she let him, willing every second to be etched in his mind and be unforgotten. Like he could will remembrance. When he leaned back, breath slightly quickened still, he leaned against her forehead, hands still cupped at the slender nape of her neck, and nodded silently his agreement. As good as this felt, as much as every thread of intent in him wanted to just curl around her again and stay here, he knew she was right because he was the one who couldn’t resist an impulse. (He’d been unable to resist them in college and it had cost him this.)
“Okay.” His voice was startlingly low, almost unrecognizable to his own ears. He opened his eyes, looked into Helene’s dark gaze, just inches from his, close enough to see the imperfect ridges in her irises and the shadows cast by her lashes. “I have… I have to go then. It’s late and I… I have someone waiting for me. Tomorrow?” He moves away from her, hand lingering on her shoulder as he turned to the door. “I’ll come back tomorrow before closing. Then we can talk.” He didn’t know how to convey that ‘tomorrow before closing’ just became the focal point and focus for the next of his 24 hours so he just smiled. “Promise not to run out on you.”
The door jangled as it closes behind him and the summer air was impossibly warm and sweet as he blindly maked his way down the lane.