Page 69 of Emmett
Climbing out of my car, I peek into Rowan’s empty Bentley, which sits on my driveway in the space that she deemed hers almost as soon as I closed on the house. I think Davis is rubbing off on her a little too much anymore.
When I walk through the front door, Ro is sitting on the couch with some cheesy rom-com playing on the TV. It’s the same one she’s probably watched fifty times by now; shy girl goes home to her old small town for the holidays, runs into the guy she knew and hated in high school, suddenly they’re in love with each other over the course of a weekend and a broken-down car somehow ties into it all. It’s corny and ridiculous and I hate that it’s on my TV right now.
I drop my gym bag next to the couch with a chuckle and head for the kitchen to grab a cold bottle of water beforereturning to my friend. “You didn’t have to come check up on me,” I tell her as I settle onto the floor opposite her.
“I’m not checking up,” she insists. “My kids are in bed and my husband was watching golf while he played stocks…I ran away.”
I lay back on the floor, rest my head on my arms and kick my feet up onto the coffee table – which are immediately pushed off by Ro, who lets out a disgusted huff.
“You could have told me about him sooner.”
“I tried to a couple times. Chickened out, though.”
“So tell me now.” With a shrug, she pulls herself to a standing position and clicks off the power to the TV. “We can make some cookies and you can tell me all about it. But start with the good stuff first so I don’t go into it hating him as much as I think I’m going to,” she tells me, tapping her finger against her neck.
“I need a shower.”
“Go take one,” she tells me. “You’re useless until sprinkles anyway.”
An appreciative smile creeps across my face as I head down the hall toward the bathroom to take the world’s fastest shower. I rejoin her in the kitchen no more than ten minutes later and take a seat next to hers at the island counter, watching as she measures out ingredients, because she’s right, I will absolutely wreck the dough. My cooking expertise stops at microwaving vegetables in a bag.
While we work, I tell her almost everything. I leave names out of the stories, but I do tell her all of the other parts that she wants to hear. She wears a smile while I talk, the same one that she gets when Sarah puts the right colorful shape into the corresponding slot in her puzzle or when Maciespells a challenging word correctly on the first try. It’s a mom smile, and it’s warm.
It scratches at the empty space where the ones I should have gotten from mine are supposed to be.
“You invited the good in,” she says. “And you learned something new about yourself.”
“That’s quite a spin to put on it,” I laugh.
“Am I wrong?” She raises her brows as she spreads frosting over the top of a cookie and passes it to me. “You told me one time that people can get over being scared, and you did that. You should be proud.”
I’ve made too many mistakes to be proud.
I’m too goddamn sad to be proud.
I don’t tell Ro that, though. Instead, I reach for the jar of sprinkles and top off every cookie that she passes to me until all twenty-four of them are covered.
She hangs out with me for a while as we scarf down way too many cookies and I somehow manage to steer the conversation away from Nash or my mom or breakups or bloody knuckles or anything else that I know she wants tofix.
It isn’t until she checks a message on her phone that she wears the ‘I wanna go home to my husband, but it’s weird to tell his son that’ expression that she’s developed over the past couple of years. I clap her on the shoulder and head for one of the cabinets in my kitchen, pulling out a tupperware container. “Go home,” I tell her. “And for Christ’s sake, take these cookies with you.”
“Are you sure? I don’t w—”
“Ro,” I laugh, “get out of my house.”
Hopping off of her bar stool, she kisses my cheek and wraps me in a too-tight hug. “You’ll be okay? You have your key?”
“Yes and yes,” I tell her as I push her toward the door. “I’m just gonna do laundry and go to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”
With another hug and another kiss to my cheek, she climbs into her car and pulls out of the driveway, and I go to my room. I look at the cardboard box sitting on my desk and for a second, I consider opening it, but I decide that it’s something that can be Tomorrow Emmett’s problem. I shove it further to the side as if its contents are radioactive and I climb into bed, the earliest that I have in a long time.
I pick up my phone from my nightstand and scroll through my contacts until I reachMENACE. My thumb hovers above the phone icon for too many seconds too long before I toss the phone to the other end of the bed and press the heels of my palms against my eyes.
Fuck.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Nash