Page 57 of Emmett
I wake to the rich scent of cinnamon and vanilla filling the house, accompanied by the clanging of metal and the sound of Emmett cursing. What the fuck is he doing out there?
Yawning, I get out of his bed and stretch out my back, cracking my joints before heading through the hallway and into the kitchen. Fuck, I’m getting old.
Emmett stands at the stove with a spatula in hand, seeming to ignore the gloopy yellow mess all over the counter next to him.
“What are you doing?” I laugh, pulling a handful of paper towels from the roll above the sink.
“Ro tried to teach me how to make her french toast,” he explains, “so I’m trying to make that.”
I wet the paper towels in my hand and use them to mop up the egg mixture that has splashed all over the counter. “Was the mess part of the recipe?”
Glowering, he slides the spatula under one of the slices of bread on the pan in front of him and gives it a flip, the uncooked side making contact with the pan with a hiss.
“Look,” he snarks, “the only cooking I do is in a microwave or a blender, okay?”
I chuckle, squeezing the back of his neck. “Just cook that egg all the way through. I don’t want salmonella.”
“Don’t tempt me to poison you, menace,” he grumbles under his breath.
It doesn’t take long for the empty plate on the counter to be stacked high with golden-brown french toast that honestly looks decent, considering that he’s never made it before. It’s really kind of cute, in that ‘newborn baby deer trying to walk on its own for the first time’ kind of way.
We quickly finish our breakfast, which is surprisingly good; he didn’t give me much hope when he said that his child-stepmothertriedto teach him how to make it, but it could almost compare to something that one of my chefs might serve. I guess that I don’t have much room to judge him for his lack of confidence; I haven’t cooked a meal in so long, I don’t think that I’d even remember how to boil water correctly if asked.
“You said it wasn’t easy,” Emmett says as he rests his mug into the sink, “when you came out.”
“Telling my parents was the ‘easiest’ part,” I tell him, making air quotes with my fingers. “I trusted them more than I trusted anyone else in my life and I thought that they would help me because they loved me. It was everything that came after that was hard. The first thing that my parents did was tell me that I was sick, and they asked if I was trying to anger God.”
I don’t miss the anger that flares behind his eyes as I speak.
“The second thing that they did was invite our priest to dinner so that he could pray over me and tell me how tofixmyself. I did the fifty Hail Marys that he told me to do, I prayed six times a day for months to becured. When my parents realized that none of it was working, they dropped me off at my grandparents’ house with three t-shirts, a pair of jeans, and a stack of paperwork that said that I was no longer theirs. I haven’t seen them or my siblings since.”
“And your grandparents…?”
“Infinitely more accepting than my parents and God,” I answer, pulling a sip of coffee from my mug. Stepping over to Emmett’s refrigerator, I pull the dry erase marker from the top of the magnetic calendar attached to the door and jot my address down in the corner.
“Come by my house after work,” I instruct him. “I should be there before eight.”
“What if you’re not?”
“Well,” I muse, my hand landing on his ass with a hard smack. “I seem to recall waiting for you while you threw yourself a nice little tantrum. So wait for me.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Emmett
Since being back to work, I haven’t really found myself rushing through anything; I spend most days taking my time and putting in the effort to show Dad and Davis that I’m serious about this and that I can be trusted with my position here.
Today, however, I rush. I fly through as many emails as possible, speak a mile a minute through all of my phone calls, and take lunch in my office so that I can get even more done. It doesn’t change the hours in the day, but it makes it feel like I’m getting through it just a little bit faster.
I know that I shouldn’t be this excited at the idea of meeting up with Nash, but it’s all I can think about. All I want to do is get out of here and get lost in him, but keeping him a secret won’t work longterm and I know that I eventually have to either commit to it fully or let him go.
As the hours whiz by, I knock on the door of my dad’s office, interrupting a conversation between himself and Rowan as I step inside.
“Sorry,” I tell them. “Just wanted to make sure you got the messages I forwarded to you about the collective. I want to give them an answer before the end of the day.”
Turning to his computer, Dad clicks through a few things. “You’ve been running around like a madman all day, bud,” he says. “Are you trying to get out of here early for something?”
Almost as if in slow-motion, I watch playful mischief cross over my best friend’s face, and she looks at me with that same look the kid in school who asks ‘are you going to collect our homework?’ gets right before he speaks up and ruins everyone’s day.