I growled under my breath. “Liss. You know why.”
Visibly frustrated, Lissa grabbed my arm and pulled me into the small entryway to the kitchen. “You can’t use circular reasoning, G. You keep people away because of your mom, and you don’t tell people about her because no one is close. Then, this amazingly nice and clean-cut guy comes in here, is clearly interested in you, and you still insist on pushing him away.”
“Who? Regan? You saw how he nearly drank his face off over his dead girlfriend the other night. I’d hardly call that a place of moving on.” Crossing my arms, I leaned back against the greasy wall.
“Whatever. I haven’t heard him mention her once. If he’s opening up to you, he trusts you. And that look he gets around you? The one where his pupils double in size?”
“How the hell can you tell what his pupils do in this light?” I challenged.
“Because,” she smirked, “I can’t stop looking at them.”
I rolled mine. “Lissa, I don’t even know what the point of this conversation is anymore.”
“Georgia,” her voice lowered to a purr, “the first night he was in here with the band, I saw the looks you two were giving each other. I chalked it up to fresh meat, something new.”
“Romantic,” I murmured.
“Shut up. But, that night he played with just CJ on stage, when Willow Shaw came in after? You should have seen yourself. You let go, G. All the way.”
“It was music. What’s your point?” I looked up at her as my cheeks heated.
She took two fingers and ran them across the apple of my cheek. “It was his music. And, for Christ’s sake, you told me he tried to kiss you.”
I thought back to the night that he and CJ dominated E’s for an hour. And I forgot about my life for fifty-eight minutes of that time.
“It was a fluke. And he didn’t really try. It was just that tense, vibrating sort of pre-kiss moment.” I cleared my throat, ignoring my lips’ desperation to have his on them.
“A pre-kiss moment you bailed on.”
My shoulders sank as I pressed my head back into the wall. “I’ll just hurt him. It’s inevitable.”
Lissa grabbed my shoulders. “No, Georgia, it’s not.”
“Genetics are pretty cut and dry, Liss.”
She sighed, keeping her eyes closed as she swallowed hard. “You know that’s not one hundred percent.”
“Whatever. I’m not going to pursue something with someone who isn’t even sure how long he’s going to be here, who has a dead girlfriend that’s sending him mail, only to inform him he’ll lose me when the white rabbit drops his pocket watch down the hole in my brain and I go in after it.”
“You and that goddamn fairytale...” she trailed off in a whisper.
“It’s no fucking fairytale, Lissa. It’s just the sordid story of a lonely girl. And there’s no prince.”
Lissa dropped her arms from my body and stood back, knowing this was where the conversation ended. It’s where it always ended. She had nothing to say. No charts to disprove the course I was on. No scissors to cut the strings that were tied around my wrists generations ago.
Just a lonely girl.
And no prince.
I remained quiet for the rest of my shift. Head down when behind the bar, smile up when dealing with customers. Lissa didn’t try to smooth over our earlier conversation. Not that she had any apologizing to do, but she knew well enough to leave me alone for the rest of the evening.
When I got into my car, and onto the highway, I had about fifteen minutes to make a decision on which exit to take. Home, to my quiet and comfortable bed, or another twenty minutes north to anywhere but comfort. After a few minutes of indecision, I realized I couldn’t bail on her for the third night.
The staff at Breezy Pointe was beyond accommodating to our situation, and I felt bad when I didn’t use it as set up. Visiting hours were pretty strict and did not encompass three in the morning. But, given I’d be an orphan when she decided she couldn’t take it anymore, they’d always let me work on a schedule with them. Okay, maybe I wasn’t a minor anymore, as I was when I first came out here and started my twilight visits a few times a year, so orphan wasn’t a technical term.
Especially since half of the time I already felt like one.
There was a woman at the front desk I’d only seen a few times before, so it took me a few extra minutes to get back to my mother’s unit. As usual, Daniel was waiting to check me in and put my belongings behind the nurses’ station.
“She’s gonna be pissed,” he mumbled with a slight snicker.
“Did you just curse?” I gasped and dramatically put my hand to my chest.
He shook his head as we approached her door. “You just can’t take no for an answer, can you?”