cheekbones still jutted out like they were challenging you to a boxing match.
He was more tan now than he had been in high school. Must have to do with working outdoors. He’d grown taller too—still had a couple inches on me—and his rangy frame had filled out a little. Connor had always carried himself like he wanted to do some damage. His muscles said that these days, he could back up that threat.
The wary set to his eyes was familiar, but it looked more natural on him now than it had in the past. How many of the past ten years had he spent on his guard, for that to look natural? He reminded me of a wolf in the wild. I wasn’t sure if he was going to run or bite.
“What are you doing here?” Connor asked.
Bite it was.
His tone left no doubt as to his feelings about seeing me. Which—okay, I really needed to work on those boundaries, because yeah, it hurt. But on the other hand, did he have to be such a dick about it? He knew my class was coming today.
“The park clean-up?” I reminded him, keeping my voice even.
It helped that there were third-graders streaming past us, along with about eight other parents. I was not going to make an ass of myself in front of Connor again, and I certainly wasn’t going to do it in front of half the gossip-engine of Adair.
What didn’t help was that part of me still wanted to reach out and touch him, just to reassure myself he was real. How pathetic was that? He wanted nothing to do with me and I still just wanted to lay my head on his chest and breathe deep.
Connor frowned. Ripping my mind out of my very regrettable fantasy, I frowned back.
“I told you about it at the meeting. We talked about it for like, ten minutes.” Had he been that checked-out the whole meeting, or just the part when I was talking?
Maybe I didn’t want the answer.
“Right.” Something flashed in Connor’s eyes, but whether it was actual recollection or something else, I couldn’t have told you. “Yeah. I just forgot it was today, I guess.”
“Okay. Well, in case you—”
“I really ought to—”
We both stopped. His desire to get out of there immediately could not have been any plainer. I sighed.
“That’s fine, I’m not trying to keep you. I just wanted to say that—”
“Look, can we just not do this?” Connor took a step towards me and lowered his voice, glancing over his shoulder at my class, now waiting for me to join them twenty feet away. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
“I just thought, in case, you know, you’d missed anything else, that I should tell you—”
“Jesus, Julian, I don’t want to hear it,” Connor hissed. “I’m sorry if you had some idea in your head about us, but things ended years ago. Just drop it, alright?”
He brushed past me—close enough that I caught a whiff of his tantalizing scent, cardamom and campfire—and I whirled around to face him.
“I was trying to tell you the other things you might have missed at the meeting,” I snapped.
Connor stopped walking, his shoulders stiff. He didn’t turn around and I sure as hell wasn’t going to the trouble of walking around in front of him again. Did he have to be such an ass?
“Eleanor is bringing some of the women from her bridge group here two Saturdays from now. Since you clearly can’t stand to breathe the same air as me, I can only assume you’d like to avoid her, too. But hey, my apologies for trying to do you a favor.”
A muscle twitched in Connor’s jaw. After a moment, he deigned to turn around. Slightly. Like having me directly in his line of sight was too offensive to contemplate
“I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah. I gathered.”
He paused again. Was it too much to hope for an apology from him?
“Is there anything else I missed?”
Apparently it was.
I swallowed the urge to scream. Or throttle him. There was still a crowd of children and parents at my back, and it probably wouldn’t bolster my case for continued employment at Adair Elementary if I murdered someone in front of their eyes.
“Well, I wouldn’t know, would I? Did you pay attention when Tom was talking about the water quality reports he wants to run? Or when Eleanor was discussing whether we should go to that party Scott Nash is hosting in two weeks, and what strategies we should use