Chapter 33

33

Lloyd finds me at the top of the Mall at Buckingham Palace, near an entrance to St.James's Park. It's pouring down with rain, a welcome respite from the stifling summer heat. Raindrops thunder against the ground and ricochet off the top of my umbrella, which is barely holding up in the downpour. The weather has driven away anybody who harbored ideas of a lazy summer picnic sprawled on the grass in the park or reading a book under the shade of a tree, but a group of tourists strides past me, led by a man with a neon orange flag sticking out of his rucksack and talking into a microphone.

The relative lack of people mean it's easy to spot Lloyd arriving.

His sneakers splash through puddles, his jeans damp; the hood of his raincoat is pulled up over his head and his hands are buried tightly in his pockets. A couple of rogue curls have been caught in the rain and are plastered to his forehead. As he approaches me, he reaches up as if to push his hood down, but seems to think better of it and turns the gesture into a wave instead.

"Hey," I say, when he's near enough.

"Hi. I got your text. Thanks for…" He gestures vaguely between us and around us. Then he jabs a thumb toward the park. "Shall we go for a walk?"

I nod, and we fall in step next to each other but an arm's length apart. We're close enough to talk without feeling like we're intruding on one another's space. There are thick, purplish clouds overhead; the park stretches out in front of us, so far that we can't see the other side of it.

I texted Lloyd last night, asking him to meet me here. I think we both have some things to say that are better said in person, I toldhim.

His reply was short, simple. Straight to the point.

I think you're right.

It was too exhausting to even contemplate looking at the other messages waiting on my phone after the emails leaked. Lloyd had sent a lot. He left some voicemails, too, but I didn't have the energy to listen to them.

It's nothing he can't tell me in person today, anyway. This is the conversation we never got to have last night. One that, I think, we should've had a long time ago.

"How're you doing?" Lloyd asks after a minute. "After…yesterday."

"Better. I heard Tasha got fired."

"Yeah. I knew she didn't like you, but bloody hell, that was…Who does something like that?"

"What do you mean? How'd you know that?"

Lloyd pulls a face, shrugging one shoulder. "Just some of the things she said sometimes. I talked to all the interns when I was around the office. She said she thought you were really up yourself."

I can't help but snort. Tasha's resting face was looking down her nose at people.

"I kind of got the impression she was all talk. That she hadn't really been doing much, and not doing a stellar job at the stuff she did do," Lloyd adds.

Huh. Somehow, I'm not too surprised. It adds up with her reaction when I accused her of coasting. But I don't want to talk about Tasha anymore.

"I should've tried to speak to you yesterday," I say. "I was never going to send those emails. They were just—cathartic. Helping me work through my own stuff, which I realize now I kind of took out on you…I don't even know why I…Anyway, I'm sorry they got out and I dragged you into this mess with me. I know your dad was…He didn't seem too happy about the whole thing."

He scoffs, but it's more resigned than anything else. "You could say that."

I wait, wondering if he wants to tell me more, wondering if I have any right to ask, or if that's unfair of me, after everything.

Lloyd's catches my eye as if hearing my unspoken question, then tells me, "He was furious to think I'd been screwing around with an intern— again. All he really knew about my ex was that she broke up with me and turned down a job offer from Arrowmile a couple of weeks later—I was too embarrassed to tell him what really happened between us. He said I was putting our name and reputation on the line. How I should know better—but it's like I told you, I never meant…That night we met…I was never supposed to…"

"I'm sorry it got you in trouble."

Lloyd sucks in a sharp breath and draws to a stop in front of me. Rain trickles off the end of my umbrella and onto his face, slaloming down his nose. A frown puckers between his eyebrows, but when his eyes fix on me, they're so serious it makes the rest of the world fall away.

"I was never supposed to fall for you the way I did," he tellsme.

Me either.

My breath hitches, a reply sticking in my throat. My heart starts racing, doing somersaults—doing a whole damn decathlon.

When I don't say anything, Lloyd rushes on.

"We had something, that night we met. I know you laughed at the idea of love at first sight, but I believed in it. I believed in that with you. We had something, and the smart thing to do would've been to stay away, but…Every time I saw you, I fell a little harder. I knew—I mean, I thought you didn't feel the same way, especially after you said the internship meant more to you than me, so I didn't want to make a big deal of it. But the stuff you said in your emails…Annalise…"

Lloyd trails off; his breath shudders out of him, washing across my face. I can taste it—it tastes faintly like coffee, and something sweet. It makes me want to lean in to kiss him, to drag my tongue along his lips.

He stands there, jaw tight and chest rising and falling heavily, his gaze locked on mine.

The frown is still there, but his eyes are wide and earnest, a glimmer of hope against hope illuminating them, stark contrasts with the gray world around us. Raindrops continue to land on his face and trickle down from his temples, his nose, along his lips and jaw, down his throat, where they disappear beneath the raised collar of his raincoat.

He shifts forward slightly—just an inch, maybe two—and hesitates. Terrified of being too sudden or careless with this brittle, barely there moment that engulfs us, so breakable. Irreparable.

He'd prefer this limbo of longing for each other and doing nothing about it, so long as we got to stay in each other's lives, than risking it all for the chance of more.

And I should be thinking that, too. I had been, up until recently. None of this should change anything; I'm still leaving soon, and we'll spend the next year at different colleges, in different cities, living totally different lives. We'll part ways, and we'll both be heartbroken.

It shouldn't change anything.

And, yet.

I step closer, my feet crunching on loose stones on the path. It sounds so loud, even with the rain rippling on the pond nearby and bouncing hollowly off the leaves of the plants around us. I step close enough to bring Lloyd just under the cover of my umbrella, close enough to feel the heat of his body radiating outward.

His eyes flit to my mouth, but then he looks firmly back into my eyes.

And I raise my eyebrows, a smile playing on my lips.

"You really wrote me poetry, Fletcher?"

I feel the tension sliding off his body, shed like an extra layer of clothing. He's lighter for it, and the frown finally disappears from his face. He gives a breathy chuckle, rolling his eyes as he turns his head away, but I lift a hand to cup his cheek, warm and damp beneath my palm, and turn his face back toward me.

"Can I read it?"

"Maybe one day," he says, and then—then he kisses me.

He wraps an arm around my waist and pulls me flush against him, pressing his lips to mine in a delicate kiss—barely a kiss at all, lasting only a heartbeat, our breath mingling as we stand wrapped up in each other—and then another kiss that's so fierce and desperate he must be pouring an entire summer's worth of want and heartache into it, or maybe that's me, or both of us all at once.

I'm vaguely aware of the rain drenching me when I drape an arm over his shoulder, my umbrella sliding out of my fingers to dangle from the rope handle looped around my wrist so my hand is free to slide into Lloyd's hair. I'm not even sure which of us pulled the hood of his coat down.

I'm only aware of every place our bodies are touching, the searing heat of our kiss, his arms wrapped firmly around me to anchor me against him like if he lets go, if this ends, I'll vanish.

It's everything, and I'm delirious.