Excerpt:
I watched as Grace bit into a slice of rare steak with ravenous abandon, strands of filthy brown hair falling into her diamond-shaped face. She rolled her shoulders back as she chewed, her eyes flickering shut. Sweat shone on the exposed plane of her chest, the thin gray hoodie she wore doing little to hide the fact that she was naked beneath it. Leaning against the back of the vinyl booth, knife and fork gripped tight in her hands, she breathed deep through her nose, face held up to the sky as she swallowed.
Thirty years, and she was still the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. As I slid into the booth across the table from her, it took everything I had to keep a tremor out of my voice as I queried, “Rough night?”
Grace’s hands seized around her utensils. Her eyes shot open, but she didn’t look over at me right away. Her surprise surprised me—she should have smelled me from a mile away. She was slipping, getting sloppy.
Smacking her lips, she answered, “I suppose you could say that.”
When I didn’t respond, she tipped her head back down to look at me at last. Her gaze was cold, revealing nothing of what she might have felt. “Been a long time, Marcus. What are you doing here?”
I smiled at her, my left hand fiddling with the thin gold chain wrapped around my right wrist. “Looking for you, of course.”
Grace slid farther down in her seat, baggy sweatpants slipping up her hips. Her gaze roamed over me unchecked, every place it passed breaking out in goosebumps. “You found me.”
I clasped my hands together on top of the table, examining her in kind. I swallowed hard, trying and failing to muster up a smile. “You look good.”
Grace blinked. She took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. Shaking her head, she pulled her gaze away from me and focused on her plate, cutting off another hunk of steak. “You look exactly the same.”
I was silent as she lifted the bite to her mouth. The sounds of the five a.m. weekday Waffle House washed over us…the scratching of cheap silverware against cheaper ceramic and the clatter of cup against counter, the old trucker at the bar, red cap perched back on his forehead, slurping his fifth cup of coffee as he worked through his third plate of pancakes, the muted murmuring of a pregnant woman and her partner, seated in a faraway corner, splitting an order of chili fries, the shuffling of two waitstaff workers and the short order cook, bored out of their minds, but too tired to gossip.
“How’s the job?” I asked at last, desperate to try to carry on a normal conversation, as if nothing had happened, as if the intervening thirty years were so much smoke between us.
Grace glared at me as she chewed. “The job is fine,” she said around her mouthful of meat. She took a large gulp of milk, tangled hair falling away from her face. “Did you really come all this way to chit-chat with me, Marcus?”
The blood drained from my face. My smile faded. “You can’t fathom for a moment that maybe I missed you?”
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