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Am I going to see you tonight?
Think I’ll go out for a beer.
Shoot pool in a short skirt.
Check out the local nightlife.
Do you like Raisinets or Sno-Caps better?
Milk Duds or Junior Mints?
Ocean or mountains?
I want to see you.
Come for dinner.
To my surprise, he does. His aunts and his grandma crowd around the table in the kitchen with his mom, and there are cousins big and small with paper plates, fruit salad with whipped cream and marshmallows, stringed chicken cooked all day in a Crock-Pot.
When he takes his plate to the couch, I follow. I sit beside him and ask, “How was your day?”
“Got a lot of texts.”
“Anything interesting?”
He stares at the TV with his plate balanced on his lap and bites into a pull-apart roll slathered in butter. “Nope.”
But he slants me a look, and the smart-ass tilt to his mouth makes me flush with heat.
I’ve seen that smile in bed, over dinner, in his car, in the bakery, in every corner of our lives together.
I miss that smile.
“You can’t ignore me into disappearing,” I say.
He just chews and swallows, staring, straight ahead.
I lean close and whisper so only he can hear me. “I’m not leaving until I know you’re okay.”
Everything about him gets still. He doesn’t even breathe, and I’m holding my own breath in sympathy, so caught up in him that I don’t even realize it un
til he draws air deep into his lungs and turns toward me. His face bare inches away.
His thigh hot alongside mine.
His eyes, his nose, his mouth, his face.
God.
There can’t be another woman. Not between me and West—there can’t be, because if there were, I wouldn’t feel like this. I couldn’t feel like this. This alive. This real.
Not if he didn’t feel it, too.
“So if I tell you I’m okay, you’ll go?” he asks.
“I have to believe it.”
My white shirt is reflected in his eyes, a glare against the darkness of his pupils.
