My hands shake, my phone trembling in my grip, while I wait for Weston’s response.

The closer we got to my building, the more I regretted telling him that I wanted to go home. I didn’t want to go home. All I wanted to do was to keep things in perspective, keep things in my grasp, for another few minutes.

But things seem to have slipped away from me anyway, because my heart is beating so hard in my chest that no amount of deep breathing will steady it. The moment I shut the door behind me, all of the emotions I’ve been struggling to tame all evening burst out in a tingling wave of excitement and dread and disappointment, and an odd happiness. 

Most of all, a piercing need to be back by Weston’s side.

There’s no way I can reconcile it with the thing I believe in the most solidly. There’s no way I can shove the two things together, make them sensible. I need to keep my chin up and get through it—whatever it is—but at the same time, my body aches to be next to Weston.

I only met him in person five days ago.

It doesn’t make any sense.

I gave in on one thing and one thing only before I climbed out of the town car. I gave him my phone number. I took his and programmed it into his phone.

He’d looked at me steadily, his green eyes guarded. He’s probably struggling to figure out why I keep swinging between extremes—kissing him one moment, then insisting on being taken home the next. 

The urge to explain myself is overpowering. 

I wait as long as I can, and then I pick up my phone.

Now that I know he has my number, the silence is so loud that it drowns out the thud of my heartbeat. Why the hell am I so concerned that now is when he might have had enough? And if that’s the case, should it even matter?

All of me is on fire for him. That’s why it matters right now. That’s why it matters tonight.

That’s why I send the two messages, typing the words as quickly as I can and stabbing my thumb down on the “send” button before I lose my nerve.

Weston Grant, I think I made a mistake.

Can we talk?

I get up from the loveseat I crammed into this studio apartment just to give myself somewhere to sit other than my bed, and put the phone gently down on the end table. I pace to one end of the apartment—six steps, if I make them relatively small ones—and then pace back. I undo the halter closure of my dress and take it off, sliding it over my hips. I hang it up in the tiny closet, smoothing it in between the other clothes. 

All of this takes fifteen seconds.

My phone makes no sound.

I move into the kitchen and take a mug from the sink, wash it, and put it on the drying rack. It’s the one dirty dish in the entire place. 

No new messages.

I undo my hair from its clip, brushing it out with my fingers, and put the clip back into its place in the bathroom.

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

I don’t know how Weston Grant has crowded out all the other things that normally consume me—plans for paying off my father’s bills at Overbrook, the law school classes I need to study for with tomorrow coming up fast, loan applications, rent, my next shift at the Rose, strategies for making more tips so I can squirrel away every single dime—but he has. Everything seems to revolve around my phone, and whether or not he’ll message me back.

Or if I’ll never hear from him again.

That’s another possibility.

Then a worse possibility dawns on me, as I sit down on the bed and stand back up just as quickly. He could withdraw his payment, and then I’d be back where I started with Darla.

A place like Overbrook isn’t going to provide my father with extras like a private aide if they’re not even getting paid for his basic care. They’re just not. I fought to get him a bed there because they’re truly excellent with cases like his, but there’s nothing they can do about being short-staffed. If I want him to be close to me—at least as close as Forest Hills—then it’s simply going to cost more than a facility upstate. And I have to have him close to me.

My throat goes tight at the thought of moving him again. On top of all this, it was the only place he agreed to live. I’ll keep my chin up, Julie Girl, but I’m not going to that decrepit place upstate. Terror had filled his eyes, and I saw there the memory of his own father, fighting every day to get out of the place where my parents had admitted him near Lansing. They couldn’t afford anything else and save for a retirement that turned out to be short-lived.

I can’t do that to him.

I’m so lost in that thought that I don’t hear the first alert from my phone, a gentle beep. 

It’s only when it comes a second time that it registers in my mind, and I leap up from the edge of the bed and lunge for the phone.

I’ll be there in ten minutes.

It’s the longest ten minutes of my entire life.

I run to the closet, yanking out a tank top and a pair of shorts, and then skid into the bathroom so quickly that I stub my toe on the doorframe, spending a minute clutching it and muttering shit, shit, shit, under my breath. I wash my face, then decide I can’t do this without at least a little makeup on, and reapply some. I stop at the lipstick. We’re not going back out tonight. 

I thought it might come in the form of a phone call, or a text conversation, but my heart is all the way out to my fingertips, my pulse beating its way through my veins. Weston Grant is coming here.

My studio is spotless, as usual—in an apartment this small, it makes me crazy to have shit lying around—so I have practically nothing to occupy my mind.

Several eternities later, the intercom buzzes.

I miss the button the first time, but on the second try, static crackles over the line. “Hello?”

“It’s me.” His voice turns me on even through the intercom.

“Come up.” I press the door button.

And then I wait.

It’s a third floor walk-up, but now time hurtles forward. It only seems like a few seconds before there’s a gentle knock at the door. My hand is already on the knob when it comes, but I wait a few heartbeats before I open it. I’m totally cool. Totally calm.

Weston stands in the hallway, feet firmly planted on the industrial carpet, no jacket, arms crossed over his chest. The grin he gives me is half caution, half amusement. 

“So,” he says, like it’s the most natural thing in the world for a man like him to be standing in a place like this. “You wanted to talk to me?”