Page 7

The house was quiet, just how I hated it. My best friend—and roommate—Greyson was heading into a meeting with the resort’s event coordinator when I left work earlier, so I knew he wouldn’t be home before I finished dinner.

Plugging in my phone, I stripped the flannel I’d been wearing all day and pulled on an old T-shirt I found as soon as I walked in my closet.

When I looked down on my way to the kitchen, I realized it was one of Greyson’s shirts that got mixed in with my laundry, but I wasn’t taking it off.

In the kitchen, I glanced at the clock on the microwave and went to the refrigerator to take out the chicken thighs I moved from the freezer before I left this morning.

“Alexa, play cooking playlist.” Seconds later, my kitchen was filled with 90s R&B. Then I grabbed the remote from its resting place on the island and turned on the TV. I hit ‘mute’ immediately and changed the channel to ESPN to watch the commentary with subtitles about tonight’s games. The mounted TV was still pulled from the wall and angled toward the kitchen from last night so I could see it while I cooked. I debated lighting an incense, but it would be better after I cooked.

When he walked in later, Greyson would probably point out how much was going on. He didn’t understand my constant need for stimulation. I, on the other hand, didn’t understand how he could exist in complete silence for so much of his day. Every time I tried that, my thoughts got too loud and nothing good came from that shit.

And that was the problem. Because when I sat with my thoughts, the last conversation I had with my dad replayed in my head.

“Don’t you want something else other than what you’re doing? You’re supposed to be home with us, continuing my legacy, not running behind that friend of yours. You should be doing so much more, Noah. You don’t even like the mountains, but you couldn’t wait to jump when that boy said ‘jump,’” he’d finished on a huff.

I shook my head, using the last three limes we had to clean the chicken.

Whatever legacy my father thought he was leaving behind didn’t faze me. I’d known all my life I didn’t want to be where he was, and that had always been the part he couldn’t come to terms with.

My life in Bliss Peak was exactly how I wanted it.

I wasn’t in an office pretending to care about selling used cars with him in Charlotte, and he hated that. He hated any reminder that I had a mind of my own.

But I agreed with him on one thing, somethingwasmissing. It wasn’t my career, but something else that left a gaping space in my chest that I didn’t understand.

It had always been there. But in the past year, the hole had grown slowly and persistently, stretching until I couldn’t ignore it.

Don’t you want something else other than what you’re doing?

It wasn’twhatI was doing, it was the absence ofwhoI wanted to do it with. Somehow, I blinked and I was turning thirty last month, which meant it had officially been two years since my last serious relationship. Two years since I’d shown up on Greyson’s doorstep after my last breakup and asked if I could stay for a while.

A whileturned into two years.

If I was being real with myself, I knew I couldn’t be Greyson’s roommate forever. He’d get married…eventually. Start a family of his own. He never really talked about his future, but that was the energy I’d always gotten from him. He was the settling down type, the type people took seriously. And sometimes I wondered if he was putting that off because of me.

I bit the inside of my cheek. Settling down was supposed to be my thing. My sister liked to call me a hopeful romantic because of how sure I used to be about where I’d end up by thirty. And for good reason; I’d wanted to be somebody’s husband my whole life. A family man. But the second I got the chance to be just that, I’d run like a fucking bat out of hell.

Using my foot to open the trash can, I tossed the used limes inside and walked back toward the counter.

I was about to wash my hands when a blur of something in the window above the sink stole my attention, and my head whipped in that direction.

A few seconds later, the blur passed the window on the opposite side of the living room and all I could do was stand there in awe.

“What the hell was that?” I muttered the question to myself, freezing in place to see if it would happen again. I started counting down from five and when I got to two, it did.

A woman wrapped only in a towel and a shower cap jogged past the kitchen window and my eyes swelled. She was barely keeping the towel up as she ran and suds clung to her chest and back.

“Woah, there’s a half-naked woman running in our yard.”

Wait.

There was a naked woman running around our house.

Whywas there a half-naked woman running around our house? And what was she running from?

On her second lap, I finally got out of freeze mode and walked toward the door to open it so she’d see me on her next go round. To anyone who’d never been here before, the ‘front’ door wasn’t obvious because it was on the side of the house and barely distinguishable if you weren’t paying attention.

This woman clearly didn’t have time to decipher that design choice while she was in the middle of escaping whatever was chasing her.