Love at Second Sight

Chapter 20

Saying goodbye to close ones is always the hardest.

~Edin Dzeko

***

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

He lay on the bed listening to the wall clock tick away. Zac couldn't sleep all night. Today was the day. The day of the gala. The last day she would be here. She'd already told him she was leaving with all her luggage right after the gala. She was going to some airport hotel to stay there for the night. She'd have left the city by tomorrow evening. And, that was it. The end of whatever they had. End to whatever new beginning could've had, before it even started. The one woman he loved didn't love him back. What an irony.

He groaned and got up. No use thinking about things that were already out of hand.

You love me too much to do that—Oh, believe me, I don't.

She didn't love him. At all. Maybe if he told himself that over and over he'd probably come to terms with it by the next decade or so.

He went downstairs and saw Savannah talking to Yvonne. They sounded jolly. And pretty much on the verge of cracking up, both of them.

"You could do better, Yvonne. I have a better one. The skeleton model in my biology class was a bonehead," Savannah said, somehow managing to keep a straight face until the end, and then bursting out laughing.

Yvonne tried to hold back her laughter, but watching Savannah cracking up, she too started laughing.

"That—was—a—good one—Savannah," she managed between bouts of laughter.

"I know, right!"

"Mornin' ladies," Zac said. He watched them both go still, then look at each other and then burst out again. What the hell? He stood at the edge of the bar table watching both of them alternately. "May I know what's happening here?"

Savannah puffed out, her laughter subsiding. He could see on her face how much she was controlling herself from not laughing again. That small smile on her face, those wide eyes looking at a laughing Yvonne and deep breaths she was taking to keep her composure—all of those signs gave her away. She was barely able to control, but she was able to—that counted.

Finally when Yvonne, too, stopped, Savannah told him, "We were having a pun competition. Trying to get the other to laugh with your pun-making-slash-narrating skills."

"And what was the pun that got you rolling over so?"

"The skeleton model in my biology class was a bonehead."

Both of them looked at him expectantly, hoping that he'd double up too. But no. He didn't.

"What?"

"You didn't find it funny?" Yvonne asked him. He looked at her and gave her a look. She knew him enough to know what that look meant. He hadn't liked the pun.

"Whose was it?"

"Mine," Savannah chirped.

"It was good. I liked it fine," he told her, making Yvonne raise an eyebrow at him.

"But it didn't make you laugh?"

"But it didn't make me laugh."

"And you say you liked it just fine?"

"And I say I liked it just fine."

Yvonne shook her head, a small knowing smile on her lips. Oh, Zac. He had it so bad for her.