Chapter 7: The Walk Home
The diner on Henry Street was exactly as advertised. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, bleaching the color from everything. The vinyl of their booth was cracked, and the coffee arrived in thick ceramic mugs, steaming and acrid. Matt stirred two sugars into his, the spoon clinking in the quiet lull between songs on the old jukebox in the corner.
“So,” Dee said, not meeting his eyes. She cradled her mug for warmth. “Present your evidence.”
He set the spoon down carefully. “Okay. Exhibit A. The Berlin Christmas market.”
She blinked. That was two years ago, one of her visits during her year abroad. “What about it?”
“You were trying that spicy glühwein. It was too hot, and you burned your tongue. You did that little panting thing, waving your hand in front of your face.” He mimicked it, a quick, gentle motion. “And I laughed. And you got mock-offended and said it wasn’t funny. And I said it was adorable.” He paused, his gaze fixed on the swirling black surface of his coffee. “I said it, and I meant it, and then I immediately felt… weird about it. So I made a joke about you being a baby bird who couldn’t handle hot liquids. I deflected. I do that. I deflect things that feel too true.”
Dee remembered. The sting of the wine, the warmth of the fairy lights strung above them, the way his laugh had clouded in the cold air. The punch-in-the-gut feeling when he’d called her adorable, followed by the familiar, safe slide into teasing. She’d gone back to her rented flat and stared at the ceiling for an hour.
“You remember that?” she asked quietly.
“I remember everything about that trip,” he said, his voice low. “The way you explained the difference between a bratwurst and a currywurst with the seriousness of a UN diplomat. The absurd woolen hat with the pom-pom you bought. How you looked walking ahead of me through the snow, your breath making little clouds. I filed it under ‘Great Trip.’ But I was annotating the file in my head without realizing it. Notes like: ‘Her nose gets red in the cold.’ ‘She hums when she’s thinking.’ ‘I want to tell her things I’ve never told anyone.’ Those aren’t friend notes.”
A truck rumbled past outside, shaking the window beside them.
“Exhibit B,” he continued, not waiting for a response. He seemed powered by a need to empty himself. “Your last day in LA before you left for Germany. We had dinner at that terrible Italian place you loved.”
“It’s not terrible,” she murmured automatically, the old habit of their debate kicking in.
“It serves canned mushrooms, Dee. It’s a crime scene.” The ghost of his smile appeared, then faded. “You were talking about being nervous. Starting over. And you got quiet. And I remember thinking, ‘Just hug her. Pull her across this table and don’t let go.’ But I didn’t. I patted your hand. I said you’d be amazing. I gave you a peer review. Because crossing that line felt like it would break the whole table, and I needed the table to stay right where it was. I was a coward.”
The word hung there, heavy and final. Coward.
She took a sip of the bitter coffee. It was awful. It grounded her. “Why are you telling me this now? What’s the point of annotating the past? It doesn’t change it.”
“Because the past is the crime scene,” he said, leaning forward, his elbows on the Formica. “And I’m trying to show you I can finally see the blood spatter. I’m not asking you to clean it up with me. I’m just… acknowledging it’s there. That I made the mess. For years.”
They talked for another forty-seven minutes. The coffee grew cold. The night waitress refilled their mugs without asking. The conversation splintered into fragments—painful, honest, occasionally slipping into the old, comfortable rhythm of their friendship before hitting a new raw nerve and careening off again. He told her about the crushing silence of his house after she’d left for Germany. She told him, her voice detached, about the dating app she’d used in Berlin, how she’d compare every man’s profile to an invisible standard she couldn’t name.
“That’s cruel,” he said, wincing.
“To them or to me?” she asked.
“Both.”
When they stepped outside, the world had changed. The bruised purple sky had split open. Rain fell not in a drizzle but in a sudden, dense sheet, hammering the slick cobblestones with a sound like static. It drenched them both in seconds.
“Shit!” Dee gasped, her sweater instantly leaden.
Matt grabbed her hand—a swift, practical move—and pulled her sideways under the narrow green awning of a closed bookstore. The space was shallow, barely enough for both of them to stand without being pelted. They were pressed together from shoulder to hip, the heat of their bodies a stark contrast to the chill damp soaking through their clothes. Water dripped from his hair, tracing paths down his temple.
Her back was against the cold glass of the bookstore window. His front was a wall of wet wool and warmth, inches from hers. The rain roared around them, a liquid curtain sealing them off from the neon-washed street.
“Well,” he said, breathing heavily. “That escalated.”
She laughed, a short, surprised puff of air. It melted into silence. The space between their faces was a geography of seven years. She could see every droplet clinging to his eyelashes, the stark blue of his eyes in the gloom, the rapid pulse at the base of his throat.
All the words were gone. The careful analysis, the evidence, the annotated files—they dissolved in the drumming rain. There was only this: the press of him, the smell of wet cotton and his skin, the sheer, terrifying want.
His gaze dropped to her mouth. He didn’t move.
She saw the war in his face—the want, the fear of misreading, the absolute determination not to assume. To not be the guy who just took.
It was the hesitation that undid her. That proof he was trying.
Dee lifted a hand. It trembled. She cupped the side of his face, her thumb brushing over the rough stubble on his jaw, mirroring the gesture she’d only imagined for so long. He leaned into her touch, his eyes falling shut for a second, a sigh escaping him that was pure surrender.
When his eyes opened again, the question in them was clear, raw.
She answered by closing the final distance herself.
The kiss wasn’t gentle. It was a collision. A release. His mouth was warm and insistent, and hers met it with seven years of pent-up, furious longing. He tasted like bad coffee and rain and something intrinsically him. One of his hands came up to cradle the back of her head, fingers tangling in her wet hair, the other splayed against the small of her back, pulling her fully against him. There was nothing brotherly about it. It was desperate, consuming, a direct circuit completed.
A sound escaped her, a muffled gasp against his lips, and he swallowed it, angling his head to deepen the kiss. The world narrowed to the points of contact: his lips, his hands, the solid weight of his body, the cold glass at her back. The city faded into a blur of light and noise behind the waterfall.
She forgot the rain. Forgot the cold. Forgot every reason this was a catastrophic idea. There was only the shocking, visceral rightness of it, the feeling of a door she’d been leaning against for years finally swinging open.
He broke the kiss first, pulling back just enough to rest his forehead against hers, his breath coming in ragged gusts that mingled with her own. His eyes were wide, dazed.
“Okay,” he breathed, the word shaky, carved out of the static. “That… that wasn’t in my notes.”
Or in mine, she whispered, not quite sure if she just dreamed his tongue mingling with hers and everything Natalie wrote her about him kissing like god was true. That was the best kiss of her entire existence. The words left her in a breath, unvarnished and shocking in their honesty.
He went perfectly still. The only movement was the rain tracking down the window beside them. His hand, still tangled in her hair, trembled slightly.
“What did you just say?” His voice was rough, scraped raw.
She hadn’t meant to say it aloud. It was a thought, a seismic realization that vibrated through every cell. But the dam was cracked. “Natalie. She emailed me after the Vanity Fair shoot. A play-by-play. She said you kissed like…” Dee couldn’t finish. She shook her head, water flying from her dark strands. “I hated her for writing it. I hated myself for memorizing it.”
Matt’s expression fractured. Not with pride, but with a kind of horrified understanding. “And?”
“And she was wrong.” Dee looked straight into his drowning blue eyes, the streetlight catching the gold in her own. “It’s not like that. It’s not some… performed skill. It’s just you. It’s just the place your hands go. It’s the way you hesitate right before, so I know I can still run.” She let out a shaky breath, fogging the air between them. “It’s worse than a god, Matt. It’s real.”
A low groan escaped him. He dropped his forehead back to hers, his eyes squeezing shut. “Don’t. Don’t give me that. Not after what I did.”
“I’m not giving you anything. I’m stating a fact.” She was trembling now, the cold and the adrenaline crashing together. “My fact. It doesn’t change yours.”
“It changes everything.” He opened his eyes, his gaze burning. “Do you have any idea what I just realized? In that diner, talking about Berlin? I wasn’t just a coward. I was a thief. I stole seven years from you. I took your friendship and I wore it like a costume while you were standing there, real and alive and wanting me, and I was too obsessed with keeping the costume neat to see the person underneath it.” His thumb stroked her cheekbone, a devastating contrast to the anger in his words. “I don’t deserve your facts.”
The rain began to slacken, shifting to a steady, soaking patter. The immediacy of the downpour’s veil was lifting, exposing them slowly to the world again.
“Maybe you don’t,” Dee said. Her mind was clear, strangely calm in the eye of this hurricane. “But I’m not a charity. I don’t hand out undeserved facts. This is mine to say. So hear it.”
She pushed off from the glass, creating a sliver of space between their soaked bodies. The loss of his warmth was immediate and brutal. “You kissed Natalie to see if the world still made sense. What did just now feel like?”
He stared at her, his chest rising and falling. “Like the only thing that ever has.”
A taxi splashed through the intersection, its yellow light smearing across the wet street.
“Okay,” she said. She wrapped her arms around herself. “Then we have a new problem.”
“What’s that?”
“We’re freezing, we’re soaked, and my sister is probably having a panic attack looking out the window for me.” Dee nodded down the block. “Your driver’s been circling for twenty minutes. I saw him.”
Matt glanced, noticing the black town car idling discreetly under a elm tree. He looked back at her, a question forming.
“You can come up,” she said, the offer hanging in the damp air. “To dry off. To talk where it’s warm. But it’s not a promise. It’s just… a change of venue.”
He searched her face, looking for the trap, the hidden catch. She kept her expression open, weary, resolved. This was her choice now. Her navigation.
“Just to dry off,” he repeated, as if convincing himself.
“And to talk.”
He nodded slowly, then gestured toward the car with a tilt of his head. “You want to ride? It’s five blocks.”
“No,” Dee said, already stepping out from under the awning into the gentle rain. She needed the walk. She needed the cold air on her face. “I’ll meet you there. Give me two minutes with Claire before you ring the bell.”
She started walking, her sneakers making soft, sucking sounds on the pavement. She didn’t look back. She listened. She heard the soft thud of a car door closing, the purr of an engine catching, and the slow roll of tires keeping pace far behind her, a shadow following her home through the gleaming, emptied streets.