Maybe he would never get up the nerve to tell her, to make a move, to make things happen.
And that thought was enough to make his heart feel deflated in his chest.
NINE
Kai
“Chickenshit,” Lincoln’s voice broke into my office, making me snap out of my own swirling thoughts, finding he had already opened my door without me noticing.
“Sorry?”
“You heard me,” he said, moving in a foot to kick his door closed. “You’re a chickenshit. And I’d forgive it if I thought you were just some poor sucker without any game. But I’ve been on jobs with you, man. I’ve seen you charm life back into old, dusty panties. You can turn it on and use it to your advantage. It’s not that you don’t know how to get what you want. You can sweet talk anyone into anything. So I can’t forgive it that you are sitting your ass in here being a fucking pussy. What? Daydreaming about her. When she is fifteen feet away. And you could finally stop daydreaming about her. Because you could have the real thing. So, in conclusion, you’re a chickenshit.” He finished as he dropped down in the seat across from me, propping his legs up on my desk, interlocking his fingers and using them to hold onto the back of his neck, making his chest broaden.
Lincoln didn’t get the Jules thing.
Not my feelings for her per se, but my lack of action regarding them.
Lincoln was an action person. Especially when it came to women. You would never find him nervously peeling the label off his beer while he tried to get up his nerve to talk to some girl at the bar.
And, sure, maybe it helped that he looked like he could star as the leading man in some primetime dramatic romance.
But Lincoln was a firm believer that it had nothing to do with looks on our part, that it had everything to do with how we presented ourselves, how we approached the women we were attracted to. I’d seen him give lessons to some sad little milksop we had been on a job for a while back, taking him to the bar, telling him what to wear, what to say, how to approach women.
And it worked.
If he ever needed to give up his job as Quin’s negotiator, he could charge good money to host pick-up artist courses for men who had no game.
And Lincoln used his own personal game constantly, picking up women in bars, in supermarkets, in the line at the coffee shop. Sometimes just for fun, just because he could. Other times, because he wanted to hook up. And, oddly, just as often, because he wanted to start something up. Something more serious. Well, as serious as he ever got with women. They almost always petered out around the three-month point. Whether that had to do with the women he chose or his own lack of commitment to long term was anybody’s guess.
But as such, he didn’t get it.
My interest in Jules.
And my acceptance of there never being anything more than what there already was.
“She just got her heart broken, Lincoln,” I insisted, already knowing how lame an excuse that was.
Even if it was true.
Which, to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure about.
She’d cried, sure, right at first. On my chest Through my shirt.
But since then – aside from getting teary about hurting me – she hadn’t seemed to be mourning.
Maybe it was hard to mourn someone who had been ready to kill you. Or maybe her feelings for him weren’t as you might have expected them to be.
Maybe she hadn’t loved him.
Maybe she had been in love with the idea of him.
Or maybe if there had been love, it had been the kind that grew from shared experiences in life, in learning to live with one another. The way people with arranged marriages learned to love one another. Maybe it hadn’t been a mad love affair like it had looked like from the outside with how quickly things had progressed.
“Don’t give me that,” Lincoln insisted, shaking his head. “That girl has a good head on her shoulders. So good, in fact, she let herself think she loved that bastard when it was clear she just thought she should love him. She’s not heartbroken. Maybe her pride took a bit of a battering, but all the more reason for you to get your head out of your ass, and help her build it back up again. And not as her friend, Kai. She’s got enough of friends. She needs a man who sees her for who she is, who digs everything she has to offer. That is what she needs after all this. And you and I both know you are the man for the job.”
“She doesn’t…”
“Then show her. Convince her. You know Jules. She sometimes can’t see things that fall outside her tunnel vision.”