Litany Of Sins

9 In The Passenger Seat

CHAPTER 9

In The Passenger Seat

Standing before the mirror in nothing but her bra and underwear, Lila hovered on the edge of indecision. Dinner with Everett felt like an invitation to reopen old wounds, yet she had given him her word. She knew she owed it to him to be civil; he had always been a good man, even back when they were young and naive.

“Get your s**t together, Lila,” she muttered to her reflection. Taking a steadying breath, she reached for her simple, two-tiered baby-blue crop top with delicate tied straps. Pulling it on, she tried to convince herself that the past was finally irrelevant. It had been over ten years; surely, that was long enough to move on.

As she pulled on her light brown skirt, she forced herself to recite the hard facts. “You moved on after Everett,” she told the reflection in the mirror, needing the verbal confirmation. “And look at the result: a relationship that ended because the man cheated on you with your best friend. Keep that in perspective, Lila.”

She secured her short skirt with a crisp zip and a button, then raked her fingers through her hair to smooth the strands. “It is just dinner,” she murmured, reducing the evening down to its most basic components in an attempt to lower her pulse. “It will not be catastrophic. It is literally just a meal.”

Lila closed her eyes, and the sterile silence of her bathroom was instantly swallowed by a rush of heat—a decade-old ghost that refused to stay buried.

She took a shaky breath, and the wall of clinical detachment she’d built around her pulse crumbled. Suddenly, she was not in Brisbane. She was back in the tangled sheets of that old dormitory building in the university, the air heavy and electric.

Memory was a cruel thing. It did not just bring back images; it brought back the weight of him. She could vividly feel the crushing, beautiful pressure of Everett above her, the solid, heated expanse of his chest pressing against her ribs, grounding her to the mattress.

She remembered the friction of his skin against hers—a texture that was at once familiar and devastating—the rough, calloused pad of his thumb tracing her jawline as he moved with a rhythm that had been both deliberate and desperate.

She let out a sharp, involuntary exhale that sounded far too much like a hitch in her throat. She could hear it, too—the ragged, breathless way she had gasped his name, Everett, his own name pulled from her chest, stripped of all her usual polish and control.

She remembered how he had looked down at her, his hazel eyes dark and unfocused, his movement heavy and consuming until she had felt like she was splintering apart, only for him to pull her back together.

It was the feeling of total surrender—the one thing she despised about her past, and the one thing her body could not seem to forget.

Lila snapped her eyes open, her breath coming in quick, shallow hitches. The bathroom mirror was still there, the cool porcelain of the sink beneath her fingertips, but the ghost remained. She stared at her own reflection, her pupils blown wide, and the clinical facade she had been building felt impossibly thin.

“Just dinner,” she whispered to the woman in the mirror, but her voice sounded breathless, the memory of that heat still prickling against her skin. “It is only dinner.”

With a final, methodical tug on her laces and one last glance in the mirror, she stepped out of her apartment and into the cooling evening air. The sight of the black car idling at the curb hit her with the force of a physical blow.

Suddenly, the Brisbane streetlights faded, replaced by the ghost of a college town in the U.S., and she was standing back on that old curb, waiting for Everett to pull up just like this. Her pulse spiked—an erratic, frantic thrum that had nothing to do with excitement and everything to do with the dread of the unknown.

She forced her feet to keep on moving, closing the distance between the sidewalk and the door. “Just dinner,” she whispered, desperate to keep the memory at bay.

As she neared the vehicle, the passenger door swung open before she could even reach for the handle. Everett was already looking at her, his grin bright and disarmingly familiar. “There she is,” he said, his tone casual and warm.

Lila forced a polite, thin smile and slid into the seat, careful not to let her skirt ride up or her posture slump. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” she murmured, keeping her gaze averted as she buckled her seatbelt. “I just finished my shift and had to scramble to get ready.”

Everett chuckled softly as he shifted the car into gear, the engine purring to life with a quiet, expensive hum. “No apology necessary, Lyle. You are worth the wait—and besides, you look like you have had a hell of a day.”

His eyes flicked to her for a second before returning to the road. The interior of the car felt intimate, too small, and saturated with the faint, persistent scent of his cologne. It was the same scent he had worn in college—clean, slightly spiced, and maddeningly comforting.

“I am fine,” Lila said quickly, staring out the window at the passing Brisbane streetlights. She reached up to fiddle with the straps of her top, her fingers brushing the fabric nervously. “The shop was a disaster today. We had a rush right at closing time.”

“Coffee shop stress,” Everett mused, steering the car around a corner with effortless grace. “A far cry from the ER, isn’t it?”

Lila went completely rigid. She did not want to talk about her former life, especially not with him. “It is different,” she replied, her voice cooling by several degrees. “It is manageable. It has a start and a finish, which is more than I can say for my residency.”

Everett did not miss the defensive shift in her tone. He glanced at her again, his smile softening into something more genuine, less predatory. “I did not mean it as a jab. I am just saying... You look like you are actually breathing again. You did not look like that when we were twenty-two.”

Lila pressed her lips together, refusing to give him the satisfaction of a full answer. “And where exactly are we going, Everett? Please tell me it is somewhere with enough background noise that I do not have to engage in a psychological autopsy of my twenties.”

He laughed, a low, rumbling sound that seemed to fill the car. “You are still just as prickly, aren’t you? It is a quiet place. Somewhere, we can actually hear each other think. Unless, of course, you are afraid of what you might hear.”

Their gazes locked, the silence in the car suddenly thick and charged. Lila felt the weight of his attention until she could not take it anymore; she inhaled sharply, breaking the contact to stare out the side window.

A faint, knowing smile touched his lips the second she averted her eyes. Satisfied, he shifted the car into drive and eased away from the curb, merging into the evening traffic.

“Just make sure you actually know where you are going,” she said, her voice brittle. “As long as we are not spending the night wandering around lost, then that is fine.”

“Fortunately for you, this rental comes equipped with Waze, so we are not going to be wandering anywhere.”