Being there in person, working on our project together, it would be thrilling.
But now the thought fills me with sick dread.
“Sometimes our imaginations aren’t big enough,” Dottie says with total conviction. “Ican imagine it quite easily.”
“Tell her you want her,” Ann insists. “If you do that, I’ll let you babysit my date with George, although I assure you it’s entirely unnecessary.”
I nod, although not because I agree. I sense it’s the only way they’re ever going to leave. Also, I can’t possibly allow Ann to go on that “date” unchaperoned.
The next day,Nora and I are sitting at the dining room table in her mother’s house—now our parents’ communal house—wearing matching apple-patterned sweaters much too hot forthe weather. Nora’s only inches away from me, near enough that I could easily reach out and place my hand on the sweet curve of her thigh, but it feels like she’s unreachable.
The other day, she was cradled on my lap. Laughing with me.Kissingme.
Now, she’s acting aloof, as if the last two weeks happened to someone else.
Maybe it’s an act, put on for our parents’ benefit…
Or maybe the past couple of weeks was the act.
The mere thought is making me want to throw something. Maybe I shouldn’t care, but dammit, this woman has gotten under my skin. Again. Meanwhile, I have to listen to our parents talk about their honeymoon, even though I have absolutely zero interest in long stories about berry picking, farm-to-table cuisine, and couples’ spa treatments.
Our parents seated us on the same side of the table, while they’re sitting across from us, holding hands when they’re not serving food—roast chicken, potatoes, and broccoli, because Mrs. Applebaum-Peebles apparently believes in the food pyramid now as much as she did when she was my second-grade teacher.
“What have you been up to while we were gone?” Nora’s mom asks, her eyes landing on Nora.
“Not much,” Nora says. Then she shocks me by rubbing the side of her socked foot against mine. (Mrs. Applebaum-Peebles has a strict no-shoes-inside policy.) She’s not smiling, precisely, but her lips have risen at least two millimeters on either side—nothing a person who’s not obsessed with her face would have noticed.
I sit up straighter, my pulse thrumming faster. “Yeah, nothing too exciting. Just some band performances.”
My father skewers me with a pointed look. “Are you sure about that?”
“Uh, yeah.”
He adjusts his glasses and makes ahumphsound. “So there’s nothing special you two would like to tell us? No big reveals?”
Suddenly, I feel like I did when that old geezer with the cane drenched us with water in Apple Ridge.
They know something, or at least they think they do.
“I forgot to water your plant a few days ago,” I admit. “And I seriously considered letting Dottie and Ann into your house to leave that present I brought over.”
He stares me down from beneath a furrowed brow.
Huh. His eyebrows look less fluffy than usual. I wonder if Mrs. Applebaum-Peebles grooms them for him.
“Your eyebrows look different,” I comment.
“They look great,” Nora says before glugging a long gulp of red wine.
I snap my fingers. “Did they do it at your couples spa thing?”
There, I was listening.
My father frowns but runs a finger over his eyebrows, one after the other. “My eyebrows are beside the point.”
“Where were you two on Thursday evening?” Mrs. Applebaum-Peebles asks Nora, giving her a you’re-in-deep-trouble look.
Fuck. Fuck.Fuck.
