Her eyes go wide and vulnerable, but she recovers fast. “Look who’s back to being dramatic.” She waves her hand at the staircase. “Finish the tour.”
My chest tightens with satisfaction. Sort of. Just like last night, I’m still unsettled and it’s more than what happened between Addison and me. There’s something out of reach and it’s driving me crazy. With a tight nod, I head upstairs and turn right down the south hallway. “Guest rooms, mostly, down this way. Although that door at the end…”
“What?”
“I think she…”
“You can say her name to me,” Addison says, her voice bright as she glides past. “This was going to be her house.”
“Right.” I follow Addison, wondering why my ex-fiancée’s name sounds so foreign on my tongue. “I think it was going to be a meditation room.”
“Oh.”
A crack of laughter leaves me. “How do you pack so much judgment into a single word?”
“Practice.” She seems to brace her shoulders before walking into the small room that overlooks the bay. “I can’t get over the view. I spent most of the night sitting on the third-floor balcony watching the boats.”
Don’t sing to them or they’ll crash on the rocks. The thought catches me off guard, but it sticks. I can picture her up there, dark hair flying around in the wind, beckoning to passing sailors. Will I ever get to see her up there? “You like the house?” I rasp.
She shrugs one shoulder. And coming from Addison, that’s a resounding yes. “It reminds me of you.”
Why am I holding my breath? “Does it?”
“Mmmhmm. Old-fashioned and charming…” She squints at my backside. “With a big old kitchen.”
The heat that weaves up my neck is humiliating, but I cough my way through it. I’m not sure if my usual embarrassment is at play, or if I’m remembering for the thousandth time how hard I came when she used that damn finger on me. Was it supposed to make me shake like a damn teenager? “It’s not polite to make ass jokes about your tour guide.”
“Oh come on. You know I love that thing.”
When she crosses to the window and looks down, I ask, “What are you looking at?”
“Just checking to see if your milkshake brought all the boys to the yard.”
I sigh.
She rolls her lips together to flatten a smile.
“Since meditation isn’t your thing, what would you use this room for?”
The smile drops completely. “That hardly matters.”
“I want to know.”
Her hands slide into her pockets as she turns in a slow circle. “Probably…an ornament assembly room. I don’t know.” I barely have time to picture her materials and ribbons strewn all over the floor before she shoots out of the room. “Okay, Captain. I got up early and swung by my place to pack some clothes and get my car, because I have plans. Let’s wrap this hospitality mission up.”
Plans. I want to know them. Badly. But her tone tells me it’ll be a cold day in hell before she tells me a single one.
“Hospitality doesn’t have a time limit,” I say, following her while trying to ignore the tight side-to-side sway of her backside. Not so easy, now that my hands are acquainted with its shape and texture. “You should know, you’ve been generous with yours for months.”
She slows to a stop and pivots to face me, a line between her brows.
I’ve gone from wanting to tickle her, to getting her under me…and now I just want to shake her. “Why do you look surprised?” I step closer, pressing a finger to my chest. “I’m grateful, Addison. For all the times you stayed up and kept me company, made me dinner, let me be in a bad mood. Let me have the remote.” We both laugh quietly. “Now it’s my turn.”
“I liked having you there,” she whispers, turning her face away. “It was okay.”
A thud starts in my chest. “I was an asshole last night. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have disappeared into my own head like that. We should have gone home together and talked once we’d gotten some sleep.” She says nothing. “We were good, just as we were. We can go back to that right now.”
She opens her mouth to respond, but the movers choose that moment to breach the top step with a headboard. It takes me a second to place it—hell, I barely had a hand in picking any of the furniture—but the rich wood finally rings a bell. The master bed. Addison and I stand there and watch as one of the movers nudges open a door with his foot, guiding his partners back through the entrance. It’s obvious she didn’t include the master bedroom as part of her nighttime tour, because she gasps at the size of it, the domed ceiling, the view of Charleston’s wealthiest neighborhood beyond.
“We can’t go back, Elijah,” she murmurs. “We should never have been living together to begin with. It put all this on hold.”