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It was well past lunch, and it was a Saturday, for fuck’s sake. A man could have a beer on a Saturday afternoon.
Back on the couch, with my feet propped up on the plush ottoman, I took a long pull and sighed, knowing that the locked door and my own stubborn nature would keep Poppy at bay. The game held enough of my attention, and the ten-minute arrival that Poppy warned me of was incredibly accurate.
The truck’s engine approaching my house had me resting my head back on the couch and staring at the ceiling, and the footsteps on the front porch had me closing my eyes.
Bam, bam, bam!
My glare swiveled to the front door. Honestly, was she trying to break it off the frame?
Poppy peered into the house—damn the trend for larger panes of glass—and she arched an eyebrow when I didn’t immediately get up.
I held her gaze and took another leisurely sip of my beer.
She rolled her eyes, then raised her fist again.
Bam, bam, bam!
“I’m not leaving,” she called in a singsong voice, only slightly muffled through the door. “And if you’d open the door, you’d realize that you don’t actually want me to.”
“Wanna bet?” I whispered.
I swear she could read lips because her eyes narrowed dangerously.
I raised my beer in a mock salute, which she clearly didn’t appreciate.
At that moment, her face changed, a gleam in her eye and a self-satisfied tilt to her smile that caused a rolling sense of unease through my belly. And then Poppy turned, motioning to someone I couldn’t see.
The car door closing echoed through the woods surrounding my house, and despite my best effort not to be, I found myself curious. Poppy’s fingers flew across the screen of her phone, and as she hit send on the text, her eyes locked on mine through the glass of my front door.
Poppy: Trust me, you’ll want to unlock this door.
Me: Who’s out there, Poppy?
Poppy: You owe me, big brother.
Then she tucked her phone away and turned her attention toward her unseen guest, and the curiosity, unwelcome though it might be, sharpened into something more persistent. My legs moved before I gave them permission, and I stood for a moment in the middle of the family room.
From the windows flanking the front door, I could see all the way down my driveway and through the tall fir trees that dominated the stretch of land that separated me from the road. Whoever Poppy brought with her was out of view, but through the barrier of the home, an insistent tugging came from the inside of my ribs.
Something—someone—important waited outside of that door. Even with her minor bouts of little sister annoyances, Poppy would never play a game like this if it wasn’t important.
I swallowed around the block tightening my throat and moved toward the door. As I flipped the lock, my eyes moved past Poppy, and the breath snagged like flames in my lungs.
Harlow.
In a weaker moment, when I missed my friend and wasn’t sure how to reach out to her after so much silence, I calculated once how many days it had been since I last saw her. At the time, it was something staggering, like three thousand nine hundred and four. Even more than that now.
In my head, that growing list of days was an insurmountable barrier that I didn’t know how to hop over even though a simple phone call or email or message would’ve opened up a door to the person who knew me best.
Time had been kind to her, but that didn’t surprise me. I always knew it would be. Her face was still all high cheekbones and big, dark eyes, her body was softer curves now, and her expression held none of the surprise that mine likely did.
Fucking Poppy.
While I stood there and stared at my childhood best friend, time stretched out into something tactile. Whether I wanted it there or not and whether she’d admit its existence, some invisible rope had always tethered Harlow and me together. We’d both had to ignore it for a while because the truth of it kept us from creating the futures we wanted.
And right now, I wanted to grab onto it and pull, just to see if it was still there. It was an anchor lodged next to my heart, this person who’d always been so important to me.
My hand gripped the frame next to the door as I pulled it open, and Harlow’s mouth tugged to the side in a crooked smile.
