After another half hour, Bo and Ember said their goodbyes to Regan and me. Bo made sure that I was serious about sending baked goods to the studio tomorrow. I assured him I was and laughed as Ember poked at Bo’s rock-hard stomach and begged him not to get soft. I’d soften him up just to spite the skinny bitch. I said I no longer wanted to claw her face, not that I was going to sympathize with her ever running into the issue of bringing something into a dressing room, only to find out it’s too big.
Regan locked the door behind them, without me asking him to, and came back into the kitchen, leaning against the counter with his hands in his pockets and smiling like I was holding a camera. “Thank you for letting me just bring them down here like that. I wasn’t really thinking...”
I was about to make a snarky comment about his supposed thoughtlessness, but when I looked up, he was looking away. Not down, not off into the distance, but to somewhere no one else around him would ever be able to see.
“It’s okay. I was afraid they’d be upset about you being in my apartment, or something.” I realized how stupid it sounded as soon as I said it. We were two adults and we weren’t found in bed, so to speak. And, really, even if we had been, what would anyone say?
I was too unsure of the ghost of Rae to know exactly what anyone would have really said.
Regan shrugged, allowing his vision to come back to the present. He opened his mouth to speak, but closed it once before opening it again. Then, he took my hand. “Come in here and sit for a minute.”
I followed without argument, because you follow someone who looks that sad when they ask you to. As a matter of practice, someone should really always just follow someone around who looks that sad. He brought me over to the booth he’d been sitting in with his friends. A few cupcake wrappers and errant crumbs were young fossils of the happiness that briefly inhabited this space.
In the looming greyness that tomorrow would bring, those crumbs gave me hope.
“So,” Regan started, “I’m sorry if it was weird for you up there in your place ... all that crying and stuff. I didn’t know if I was going to show Bo the card, and I certainly didn’t plan on doing it in your apartment.”
“It’s okay.” I shrugged. “It was a little jarring, obviously, since I haven’t had that many people in my place, like, ever, and certainly not for anything so emotional.”
“Do you always keep to yourself because of your mom?” His question was as direct as his eyes were. Unflinching. Bold.
“It’s not really like that.” I shifted in my seat, picking up the crumbs one by one and placing them on an empty cupcake wrapper.
“What’s it like then?”
My eyes shot up. “What’s with the inquisition, Regan?” I stood, but he lurched across the table, capturing my hand.
“Sorry. Please sit?”
I sat, but only because I swear I could hear a flicker of Irish accent in his voice, and I wanted to hear it again.
“Let me try this again.” He cleared his throat. “What I meant to say was thank you for being so cool. Upstairs with Bo and Ember, and earlier today with me.”
A few seconds ago I was uncomfortable with what seemed to be an interrogation, but that swiftly morphed into me viewing his own uneasiness. Then I felt like a giant ass for assuming it was about me at all. Regan picked at something invisible on the table, looking down, and lost again.
I put my hand on his to stop the maddening noise. “Hey, it’s okay. She was clearly really special. Rae, I mean.”
He released half his mouth into a smile. I needed to give him more.
“Tell me about her.”
He looked up, seemingly startled. “Really?”
I nodded. “Really.”
For the next several minutes, Regan told me the story of his star-crossed romance with Rae Cavanaugh. He had a dumbstruck grin on his face, but the wear around his eyes highlighted the unhappy ending that awaited me. I always read the last page of books first, anyway; it gives more guts to the story. It was no different here. Knowing the ending made Regan’s smiles brighter. Tragedy has a way of amplifying the good and smudging the bad. When he finished the story of his spunky, tough as nails girlfriend, he sat back and took a weary breath.
“I like her,” I whispered.
“I loved her. And,” he cleared his throat but that did nothing to stop the tremble in his voice, “I never told her.”
Regret is ugly. A pus-filled boil ready to break open on the face of your soul. As soon as I saw it forming, I stood. “Come to the kitchen with me. I need your help for the stuff I’m sending with you to the studio tomorrow.”
“Really?” His eyes lit up and the boil faded into hiding.
“Really.” I chuckled, mocking our identical conversation from minutes before.
Tomorrow I would tell Regan anything he wanted to know, because I knew he wouldn’t forget to ask. For tonight, though, I’d let us get lost in the sweet escape of this confectioner’s wonderland. A place where nothing was sour.