I knot my hands into fists to keep them from shaking and watch the elevator screen’s meticulous count of all the floors we barrel past. Twelve. Fifteen. Eighteen. Twenty. The Amena building is one of the tallest in Seattle. In a different world, I’d make a joke to Cole about it. You couldn’t settle for just a mid-rise, could you? Maybe I’d quip that he was compensating for something, and he’d make a crude joke back.
Tonight is not that night.
The elevator bell dings as it slides to a smooth stop at the top floor, opening straight into Cole’s home, if you could call his modernist fortress that.
I walk down the hallway without stopping to take off my jacket. My mind feels blank and foggy—too much has hit me in too short a time. The bookstore is closing. Cole’s tearing it down. Karli and I failed.
“Skye? Thank God you’re here.” Cole emerges out of his home office, shrugging out of his suit jacket. “I can’t wait to bury myself in you.”
My handbag slides off my shoulder and lands with the sound of metal on hardwood.
His eyes find mine. “Skye? Are you all right?”
“We met with our accountant today. We’re not profitable.”
For a moment he’s completely still, eyes locked on mine. And then he’s crossing the space to me in quick strides. He opens his arms but I can’t. Not right now, and not with him.
I take a step back and he stops. “We failed,” I repeat.
“Fuck.” He slides a hand through his hair. “I’m so sorry, Skye. Truly.”
“We turned things around. There were more customers there. You saw it too, didn’t you?”
He gives a faint nod. “I did.”
“And we followed your advice. Practically everything is on sale, Cole. We’re flying through the inventory, and our Instagram page is growing, we engaged the entire neighborhood, and we got a new accountant and…and… I can’t think of anything else we could have done. It’s heading in the right direction. We could still become profitable, it just needs more time.”
“You’ve worked so hard,” he says, and the expression on his face kills any last shred of hope I’d harbored. “I don’t know what to tell you. I’m sorry. More sorry than I can tell you.”
I swallow hard. He’s sorry, because he’s going to tear it down anyway. He’s sorry.
“I know how much this meant to you, to prove yourself.”
He says it like he expects me to walk into his arms—to have him console me—before he tears it down in two weeks’ time.
Karli and I failed.
Correction: I failed. I was the one who made the crazy bet with him, who pushed through the late nights and the doubts and the flu and created a whole new business plan. I’d forced everyone to believe the same thing I did, just because I wanted it so much. Because I was too stupid to see the writing on the wall.
The bookstore is gone. It has an expiration date, and always had, from the very beginning. Eleanor’s face swims in front of me, her kind eyes, her sharp voice. So what? she’d said once, when I’d come to her upset about being called a bookish nerd in school. Popularity fades. Smarts don’t. I’m betting on you. Turns out she lost that bet.
Cole takes another step toward me, but I back away again. There’s too much emotion running through me at the moment, more than I can handle. It burns.
“Skye…”
“You’re going to tear it down,” I murmur. “It’ll be gone.”
All of the late nights, his help, his encouragement, and in the end, it doesn’t matter.
“What do you want me to say, Skye? We had an agreement.”
“You helped me,” I say, the blood beginning to pound in my temples. “You helped me with this.”
He nods, but it’s sad, and that’s when it hits me so clearly that he did it to spend time with me, to sleep with me, and not for the business. Of course not. I already knew that, didn’t I? So why does it hurt to have it confirmed? To have the illusion shatter?
I put a hand to my chest, to where my heart feels like it’s breaking. “You’re going to tear it down.”
“Skye, I don’t know what to do.” He takes yet another step toward me, but I hold up a hand this time. I can see that it hurts him—me not letting him near. “Are you asking me to stop the demolition? That wouldn’t be a sound business decision. But… just tell me what you want.”
Judging from the pained look on his face, he means it, too. I could ask him not to do it. I could stand here and beg him to reconsider. He wouldn’t do it for the bookstore’s own sake. But he might do it for me.
What are we, exactly? Enemies, but not just that. Friends, but not just that, either. Lovers… I can’t begin to think that way. And if I spent whatever capital I had with him begging… I’d never be able to show up to Between the Pages without remembering what I’d had to do to get it.
Smarts trumps being popular, Eleanor had said. I couldn’t be someone who called in favors to save a business, not like this. Not the way I’d earned them with him.
“I can’t,” I say, backing toward the hallway. Humiliation and failure makes my cheeks burn. “You’re right. I can’t ask you that. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t. Skye—wait.”
I shake my head, feeling myself unraveling and unable to stop. “I can’t, not with any of it. This… it’s too much.”
Cole puts a hand next to me in the hallway, caging me in, his jaw clenched tight. “Wait. Skye, please… let me help you somehow. Let me be with you tonight.”
“Why? What are we?” I fumble with the clasp of my purse. “Nothing. We’re casual.”
He frowns. “I know what we agreed to. I’m still not sure if I can offer you more, but—”
“But what?” A laugh escapes me, though the only funny thing here is my own poor decisions. “I went into this against my better judgement. Even knowing you’d tear down the business, I did it anyway. I thought it would be an adventure. God, I can’t believe I’ve been so stupid!”
He stiffens as if I’ve struck him, his hand sliding off the wall. “There is no getting around this, then?”
“That you’re tearing down my bookstore?”
He gives a harsh nod, lips a flat line.
“No.” I press the button for the elevator, the doors gayly chiming as they slide open. “No, there isn’t. I can’t… Cole, I can’t.”
“So we’re over.”
I don’t trust my voice to speak, the taste of tears on my tongue. He’s said the words, and once they’re out, I can’t see a way around them. We were never really anything, really.
I nod.
Cole’s eyes shutter, and he crosses his arms over his chest, strong and sure and distant. “Well then,” he says. “Thanks for a few enjoyable weeks.”
I mash my fingers against the button and the elevator doors close in the nick of time as my tears break free, running hotly down my cheeks.
Sadness is a funny thing. It comes in bursts, all at once, and then disappears again, lying in wait for the perfect opportunity. Pushed away by good times or ignored when inconvenient. I’d known that Between the Pages might close for months. I had grieved Eleanor when she passed three years ago. And I’d never really expected the game with Cole to last.
And still.
All three things hit me at once, so hard that I have to reach out a hand to steady myself against the elevator wall. This morning had started with a purpose, a job, a potential future. A man who made me feel like life itself pounded in my veins, free and strong and alive.
It ended with all of those things gone. And worst of all was the feeling that all of it was somehow, someway, my fault. If I’d worked harder. If I’d known the right things to say. If I’d made different decisions.
We’d been so close, and instead, Between the Pages is to become dust and rubble, an impersonal glass structure rising from its wake. Maybe it’ll have a hotel bar on the top floor for billionaire owners and unsuspecting young women to meet, I think bitterly, but the thought just brings on a fresh round of tears.
