Songs for this chapter are:
Rock Bottom- Hailee Seinfeld
Never Forget You- Zara Larson & MNEK
No One's Here To Sleep- Bastille & Naughty Boy
..
Without giving Dakota time to answer, I continue.
"I need to know this, Dakota. I think it's more than obvious that I miss you, that I've missed you since I left Michigan. I missed you before and after you visited me. I would say that me moving across the country to be with you shows that I missed you."
She thinks on my words for a beat. She looks at me for a second and then stares past me. The clock on the wall is ticking, humming in the silence.
Finally, she opens her mouth to speak. "But did you miss me? Or was it just the idea of me, the familiarity? Because there were times when I literally felt like I couldn't do anything without you and I hated it. I wanted to prove to myself that I could take care of myself. After Carter died, I clung to you and so when you left me, I had nothing. You were my safe place and you took it with you but then when you said you would move to New York with me, I felt like I was going to be stuck in that safe place with you. There was no chance for adventure, nothing unexpected could possibly happen with you around to save me."
Her words burn as I digest them. They pull at the most insecure part of me, the little voice in my head that's worried about what people think of me. I don't want to be the boring guy. I've been the nice guy for twenty years now and I still can't grasp why women want drama over normalcy.
Just because a man doesn't bash the face in of someone for hitting on you, doesn't mean he doesn't care about you. It only means that he has his temper under control and he's respectful and trained to be a functioning member of society. I will never understand why the nice guys have it so damn bad.
However, if you think about it, the nice guys usually end up being the husbands. The women go through trial and error with the hot bad boys for a while, but eventually most of them want to trade in the motorcycle for a Prius. That's me.
The human version of a Prius.
Dakota would be a Range Rover, sturdy and luxurious, yet still beautiful. Nora would be a Tesla, sleek and new and fast.
"Until I broke up with you, then there was adventure. I was alone to navigate this big city and all the trouble that comes along with it," Dakota continues her warped version of what went wrong with us, and I stop comparing Nora's curves to that of the body of a Tesla.
What is wrong with me?
I'm here, inches away from Dakota, her hands in mine, Nora shouldn't be on my mind.
This is the worst possible time to think about Nora and the way her eyes are impossible not to get lost in, the way her bottom lip pouts out further than the top.
Thinking about Nora is much less complicated than trying to understand Dakota's logic. I don't have a clue what to say to her right now. She's telling me that I did too much for her, that she was in someway prohibited by me to do things for herself, and I'm too afraid of pissing her off to come up with anything decent to say.
She shifts on the couch and tucks her feet under her body, still holding my hands, waiting for my response.
Finally, I begin to speak.
"You can't expect me to apologize for being good to you," I tell her.
Her hands are still in mine. She pulls one away and tucks her hair behind her ear before she looks at me.
"I don't," she sighs and licks her lips with her tongue, wetting them. "I'm just saying, I needed a break from you, from us," she moves her hand and mine between us.
She's speaking in past tense like our break up is something that we are moving by, forgetting about. I lean down to catch her eyes.
"What are you trying to say? That you don't need a break anymore?"
She tucks her bottom teeth between her lip as she takes my question in. The weirdest part of this is that I don't know how I feel about it. One week ago, if this conversation played out the exact same way, I would have felt differently. I wouldn't have been so reluctant. I would have been excited, grateful, happy. Now it feels weird, it doesn't quite settle the way that it should. She hasn't answered me yet, and her response already feels forced because of the way her eyes scan the room and the way her shoulders fill with a breath too deep to hold good news.
"Can I have some water?" Dakota asks, keeping her response to herself.
I nod, meeting her eyes one more time in hopes for an answer. Half of my brain tells me that I should ask again, that I should make sure she doesn't want to change the status of our relationship. Would we fall back into place easily? How many days would it take until she's effortlessly falling back into my arms, forgetting about her need for adventure.
I stand up from my knees and walk into the kitchen. First, I open the small drawer next to the fridge and grab the Tylenol. If her hiccups and fumbled steps were any indication of how much she drank, she will be feeling this in the morning. I open the bottle and dump three into my hand. I grab an empty glass from the cabinet and fill it with water.
On the counter is a cake pan, the purple and white flowered cake. Nora has left traces of herself all over my apartment. I debate whether it would be worth it to cut a piece off and eat it before I go back into the living room with Dakota. Or I could cut one for each of us, I doubt she would eat it though. With her strict diet and all. I lift up the corner of the plastic wrap and dip my finger into the icing.
Dakota walks into the kitchen just as I shove my finger between my lips.
Shit.
"Really Landon?" Her lips lift into a smile and I lean against the counter and face her. She looks at the cake, then back at me. I could have done a better job wrapping the corners of the glass pan, that's for sure.
I grab the glass of water and hold it out to her. She inspects it for a moment, thinking of something to say, I'm sure. Dakota's lips press to the side of the glass and I move back toward the delicious cake.
"You always had a sweet tooth you couldn't resist," her voice is warm and sweet like the icing on my tongue.
"There are a lot of things I never could resist," I look at Dakota and she looks down at her bare feet.
I use my fingers to tear off a small corner of the cake. Little pieces of cake break off and a chunk of icing drops onto the countertop. I look at Dakota and lighten up the conversation. "At least now I work out too," I joke.
I was a pudgy kid, always a little more round than most growing up. I blame my mom's baking and my own lack of wanting to go outside and play. I remember wanting to stay home, like actually wanting to be inside my house on the weekends with my mom. I ate a lot of sweets and I wasn't as active as I should have been for my age, and when my doctor talked to my mom about my weight I was so embarrassed, that I knew I never wanted to overhear a conversation like that again.
I still ate what I wanted to, I just became more active than before. I was a little embarrassed to ask my Aunt Reese for help, but the next day she came over with an exercise bike in her trunk and little weights in her hands. I remember laughing at her eighties style pink and yellow workout outfit. She even had matching arm warmers.
Together, her and I got healthy. My mom joined too, just for the fun of it, but she had always been in good shape. Reese was always more plump than my mom, but she became a machine. Reese and I both lost the weight together. She was happy that she could finally fit into some dress that she had been eyeing for a year at some expensive store in the mall, and I was just happy not to have the extra weight on my body, wearing me down.
I felt great for a while and Dakota began to notice that the chubby boy next door wasn't so chubby anymore. The problem was that my weight loss wasn't good enough for my peers. I lost too much weight and didn't put on any muscle, so that's when the Lardy Landon name calling became Lanky Landon.
First I was too fat, then too skinny. Nothing I could have done would please those bullying assholes and as soon as I stopped trying to, my life was easier.
"What are you thinking about?" Dakota asks, her hand is warm now as she wraps her fingers around my wrist and she lowers my arm to my side. Her body presses against mine and she leans her head on my chest. She takes another drink of water and sits the cup down on the counter.
I haven't responded yet, I'm aware of that. I just don't know what to say because in reality I was actually thinking about when I was a fat kid, and a too thin teenager, to now. Under my superficial thoughts, I was thinking about if she wanted to talk our way into possibly get back together.
How do I bring that up?
Should I bring it up again, or see which way she takes the conversation?
I wait it out. I shouldn't be trusted to keep my mouth from saying anything stupid. I've never been the best at knowing what to say or when. I'm not that cool guy who can lean against the counter and be all, "I was just thinking about us getting back together and running off into the sunset and living happily ever after".
I don't even know how to keep eye contact when I'm nervous about her answer. I simply just suck at being that guy.
Surely, this is one of those things that I can blame on my father. I've been patiently waiting for one of these times to come up where I can cash in my "crappy dad" coins and blame my dad for dying too early to teach me how to be a man. But even as the thought passes through my mind, it's irrational and not true. It wasn't his fault and still isn't, but I want someone to blame other than myself.
If I had a man to talk me through my teenaged years, to explain how to talk to women, I would know what to say. It must be his fault that I overthinking everything. Dakota is still waiting for an answer from my mouth, but probably won't get one because I just don't know what to say.
"Landon," she breaths my name like she's coming to some sort of resolve and I'm just standing here, disappointed in the anticlimactic blame game.
I don't feel any better now, blaming my lack of a father for my shitty communication skills. I must be missing something because this doesn't relieve any of the consequence. Turns out, blaming a dead guy for my issues now doesn't make too much sense. Now that I've learned this, I find myself wondering how two people can have similar experiences but come out with completely different scars.
"Dakota," I say her name back to her and she turns her cheek and I gently push her hair down, caressing the thick curls with my fingers.
I've spent hours, probably days of my life touching these strands, calming their owner. Her hair has always been one of my favorite things about her. Her fingers grip at the back of my shirt, fisting the starchy fabric. Never again will I try to iron my shirts under Tessa's watchful eye. She went a little overboard on the starch spray but I didn't notice until now when I can hear the crunch of the fabric.
Dakota holds me tighter and I dip my head down to kiss the top of her head. She sighs, melting into my chest.
"I made a huge scene," Dakota's voice is soft.
I keep one hand on the counter to hold us up and wrap one around her back.
"Oh god, this is so embarrassing. Of course you aren't dating."
Something about the way she said, 'of course you aren't dating' sits weird with me. Is she assuming that because I'm hugging her in my kitchen, I couldn't be dating her because I wouldn't do that? Or that the idea was impossible from the start?
Either way, I shouldn't care. I'm not dating Nora and I'm pretty sure that Norah has absolutely no desire to actually date me. She eats guys like me for breakfast. I need to stop thinking about Nora.
Dakota lifts her cheek from my chest just long enough to speak.
"I feel like shit," she says.
"Because you drank too much or because you made a scene?"
"Ugh," she groans against my chest. "Both?"
I pat my hand against her back. She's heavy, exhausted and pulling the drama out when she looks up at me. Her hands are on my back, at the waist of my jeans. She reaches up, pulling at the fabric so it un-tucks from my jeans. Her hands are a little cold again when she touches my back. The ache of familiarity as her fingertips move in circles over my back mixes with the coconut smell of her hair and I'm a man obsessed.
I've been here before, immersed in her scent, her touch. I feel her fingers press into the small of my back and I mold to her body. I'm ever so accustomed to this. To her. It's only natural that I fall back into this routine. She touches me and I see only her.
"Let's go to your room," she says just as her lips touch mine. She keeps them there, barely skimming mine.
"No one is here, right?"
Tessa's gone.
Check.
We don't have to sneak around like when we were kids. I've never been able to actually fuck her in the privacy of an empty house, not that I can tonight, but all of our encounters were hushed kisses and subdued moans, rushed hands and sloppy tongues.
I've never been able to slowly devour her body in the way I dream of. I want to run my tongue down every inch of her brown skin and spend extra time where she needs it the most. I want to taste every inch of her, hear every sound of hers.
Not tonight though, not like this.
Now that I have my own place, I could take her in my bed and do every thing I've longed to do since we were teens. I remember how amazed I was the first time she wrapped her lips around my cock. I think back to the many times she wanted to try things. It all felt so experimental then, it felt exciting and our list of favorite things to do quickly became sexual. That's all we did for a while, all we wanted to do.
Dakota's hands move to the front of my body, circling around my belly button and her fingertips slip into the top of my briefs. I grow under her touch, hard now and I can't begin to fight it. It's science after all. I haven't been touched, outside of one kiss and a few touches from Nora, in months.
Dakota proves that she still remembers my body when she rubs her index finger over the sensitive skin above my hipbone. I jerk away from her tickling and she laughs, pulling me closer. She's in a much better mood, but this feels an awful lot like pulling a blanket over a sparking fire. Eventually, it will burn up just the same.
(I'm leaving France in the morning for Vegas for RT- Romantic Times convention! I'll update Tuesday :)