I’ve always been a bowtie kinda guy. Sophisticated, spiffy, jaunty. I straightened the edge of my pink and navy polka dotted neckwear in the bathroom mirror before running my hands down my gray lapels. Snazzy. Felix may have won the Sexiest Man Alive title, and he may have also been the reason we were all at this fancy schmancy charity gala, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t planning on taking full advantage of it. I wasn’t entirely sure, but I’d have bet money I’d spotted Cara Delevingne across the room.
Okay, maybe only a five spot, but still.
As the bathroom door swung shut behind me, I stepped back into crushing pandemonium. People were jam packed from wall to wall, de la Rentas brushing up against McQueens. Cater waiters zigzagged through the crowd, trays of champagne and hors d’oeuvres impossibly balanced on small circular trays. I snagged a flute of bubbly on the way back to the table, taking a swig as I hooked my chair with my foot and pulled it out.
My hand went immediately for the bread basket. “Find Jules yet?”
Felix shook his head, the expression on his face competing with Ben’s for grumpiest of the evening. “What’s his problem?” I hooked my thumb in Ben’s direction, tossing the question to Ian.
Ian bumped his adorably intertwined fingers with Bianca against the table. The two of them were so cute together it was sickening. “He’s just pissy that he decided to go stag tonight.”
I stuffed a chunk of bread in my mouth, talking around it. “Are you kidding? This place is the ideal place to fly solo. Have you even looked around? The only thing I’m missing at the moment is a drink—” I flicked a glance at my champagne, “—a real one, and maybe some pie, but I’ll settle for the drink right now.”
Felix leaned back in his chair, waving his hand in a come-hither motion. The crowd parted like a multicolored curtain, making way for a pint-size server to sneak through. It was her bangs I noticed first—long and fringed—the sheen of her red hair making every muscle in my body automatically tense. It wasn’t even a conscious response anymore but a conditioned one. An internal flinch that even this many years later I couldn’t convince my body to give up.
Her head cleared Felix’s shoulder and the flinch transformed into a full-on frozen panic. My expression stuck to my face as that customary cocktail of emotions intensified into a maelstrom that pummeled me from the inside—my mouth caught somewhere between my usual smile and spitting out my drink order, eyes wide and unblinking, fingers crushing the other half of my roll. I could actually feel the blood drain from my face like a vampire was suctioned to my neck and sucking me dry. A Nina-Dobrev-style vampire, not the Robert Pattinson variety.
The only thing she was willing to give up was a brief flare of her nostrils as she sucked in a breath and a miniscule tightening of her eyes around the corners. If I didn’t know her face almost as well as I knew my own I would have missed it entirely.
My mind catapulted me into the past, to me staring into those cornflower blue eyes, her red hair, shades lighter, fanned out across my pillow as she laughed. A laugh that was too big for her body, too loud to be ignored. The memory was replaced with another starker one, that same pillow colored with shadows, empty and cold except for the Chinese food menu lying diagonally across it. The bottom corner was bent back, a grease stain splattering the right quarter, and the words I’m sorry hastily scrawled across the middle.
By definition, a second is supposed to be a short thing—a blink, an inhale, a pinprick of time. But this particular second defied all expectations of what it was supposed to be. It lasted an entire lifetime. Maybe two. Letting me travel through time only to arrive back right back in my seat, my chest hollowed out on the inside and aching like I’d lifted my ban on all cardio-related activities and insanely decided to try my hand at a marathon.
I forced myself to sit straighter, to breathe deeper.
Felix prodded my arm, his voice rushing toward me in a wall of sound. “You want a beer or are you going straight for the hard stuff?”
I glanced at my champagne flute then back over his shoulder at the ghost that came back to haunt me. At Dani. Just her name sent me into another tailspin, my brain too muddled and spinning to form words.
Fingers snapped in front of my face. “Earth to Gavin. Are you gonna tell us what you want to drink, or are we just supposed to guess?”
I tried to focus on Felix, his confused and mildly concerned stare as I continued to sit there without uttering a word. Understandably, the fact that I was speechless was equivalent to the shock value of waking up in the middle of the night to actually find the tooth fairy stealing your tooth. Directly from your mouth with a pair of rusted plyers. Except also that the tooth fairy was a middle-aged, balding man in a pink tutu with glittering wings.
My attention slipped back over his shoulder, and for the briefest instant she met my gaze, all the churning emotions I was feeling reflected back at me. But between one blink and the next she was gone, red hair disappearing behind a long swath of emerald silk, before I could even utter a word. If I could’ve even found one to utter.
Felix’s chair creaked as he frowned back in the other direction and I took the distraction for what it really was—a chance to escape. I nearly tipped my chair over in my haste to get the hell out of there, my heart racing as it finally decided to get working again. My feet were moving faster than I was prepared for them to, nearly tripping me in the process and propelling me straight into CaraDelevingne. A tiny voice inside my head was cheering, shouting that I’d won my own shitty bet with myself, but the louder voice, the one that was broadcasting over the speakers said confidently, At least you were the one to leave this time. Payback’s a bitch, huh?