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“I mean, I—I don’t know why I just said that,” she stammers, staring down at the floor tiles like she wants to singe an escape hatch into them with her eyes. “I mean, I am a lesbian, but it’s not like you needed to know that. I mean, it’s fine that you know that. Most people who know me know that. Not that you know me. I’m babbling. I should stop. I—”

“Hey.”

Her sentences are starting to run together so fast she sounds like a glitching android about to combust. I push off the island and walk over until I’m standing right in front of her.

Her jaw clamps shut. She’s breathing hard enough that her nostrils flare, her chest heaving under her pickle shirt.

It is pretty cute that she has a pickle shirt.

“May I?” I ask, pointing at the ‘blunt objects’ in her hands.

She holds them out to me without saying a word, those big eyes of hers flaring wider, and I set them down on the nearest counter. I come back over and stick out my hand.

“How about a proper introduction? I’m Andrea King.”

For a moment, I think all she’s going to do is keep staring. Then her hand wraps around mine, her grip limp and tentative for a second before tightening into a surprisingly firm handshake.

“Your hand is cold,” she murmurs.

I glance down at where our palms are pressed together, her skin warm against mine.

“From being held hostage in the fridge,” I answer, my voice lower now too.

She winces. “I am so sorry. I—”

“Make it up to me,” I interrupt. “Tell me your name.”

“Right, right. Yeah.” Her eyes lock with mine, and we’re close enough now that I can tell her irises are the same deep blue as a swimming pool on a hot summer day. “It’s Naomi. Naomi Waters.”

CHAPTER 4

Andrea

Iwake up to find seventeen texts and three voicemail messages from Nick waiting for me. I groan and flop back down onto my bed instead of heading for the bathroom. I ignore the voicemails, but I do scan through the texts. They started just after midnight last night and petered out around two, which means he’s probably still sleeping after a round of consolation binge-drinking with his buddies.

I guess I can’t judge him too hard. I didn’t even drink last night, and I’m only waking up at ten.

The messages are pretty status quo: requests that we talk morphing into pleas for me to come back that eventually become typo-ridden statements about how he’s better off without me.

They’re not even particularly mean or rude texts. They’re just the normal things you’d expect a regular twenty year-old drunk guy to send to his ex-girlfriend a few hours after she dumped him and left the city in one of his friend’s cars.

I drop the phone onto the comforter that reeks of rose-scented dryer sheets and blink at the piercing daylight streaming through the room’s sheer curtains.

I think that was the worst part of yesterday: when I looked at Nick and realized just how damn regular he is.

When I met him at a party a few weeks after my high school graduation, I thought he was the most exciting thing to ever happen to me. I thought he’d whisk me away in the car his cousin helped him build from scratch—which barely ran well enough to legally be on the roads, but which seemed like the coolest thing in the world to me at the time—and make everything better. So when he asked me to go back to Montreal with him for a week, I said yes.

A week turned into a month, which turned into a whole summer, which turned into a phone call that nearly gave my mother an aneurysm when I told her I wanted to take a gap year before coming back to Toronto to start my internship.

I thought maybe after a year, I’d know why even just the thought of the internship I’d been working towards my whole life was starting to clog my lungs like the smog of Toronto until I couldn’t breathe at all. I thought falling in love with Nick would help clear all the confusion out, but when we got into yet another one of our stupid arguments yesterday, I stopped and just looked at him, and somehow, I knew I never loved him at all.

I blow a lock of hair off my face and then push myself up to my feet again. I dragged my suitcase and guitar up here last night but left the garbage bags full of random household crap in the entryway. The suitcase sits at the foot of the double bed like evidence reminding me yesterday did indeed happen.

I really did bum a ride all the way to Ottawa and then nearly got bludgeoned to death by some random girl living in my dad’s house.

I can’t help grinning at the thought. As hard as I try, I can’t imagine Naomi actually doing anything with her makeshift weapons. After we introduced ourselves, she got so flustered she could barely form words. I told her I was crashing at my dad’s place after breaking up with my boyfriend in Montreal and then tried to get some more information out of her. All I managed to extract before we said goodnight is that she’s the daughter of one of my dad’s employees and is staying here all summer to look after the house and the cats.

I can’t decide if my body is craving breakfast or a shower more, so I settle on a quick rinse. I wipe the steam from off the full-length mirror once I’ve stepped out of the glass shower in one of the several guest bathrooms. I drop the thick white towel to the floor and stare at my hair.