“I’ll never say no to twists.”
We walked to the front of the shop where the registers were. I studied the figurines in the glass display case: a nightmare-inducing combination of grotesque creatures and trolls.
Brooklyn handed the young, mousy girl behind the counter his credit card, and I noticed the girl get flustered when she touched Brooklyn’s hand. I was relieved I wasn’t the only one Brooklyn had that effect on.
“The . . .” the girl piped up. She twirled Brooklyn’s card between her hands. “The card isn’t working.”
“What?” Brooklyn’s face twisted into a puzzled expression.
“Yeah.” The girl fidgeted and avoided eye contact with him. “I ran it a few times, it keeps declining.”
I watched Brooklyn’s throat ripple as he swallowed and gently lifted the card out of the girl’s hand.
“Do you want me to—” I tried to offer to pay, but Brooklyn shook his head at me.
“No. I got it.” He thumbed through a wad of cash in his wallet, pulled out a twenty-dollar bill, and handed it to the girl. “Sorry. You can, uh, keep the change.”
We left the store and lingered under an overhang, the rain coming down harder now than it had been, and thunder rumbling in the distance.
“Stay here,” he told me. “I’ll go get the car.”
“I’m not gonna melt, you know,” I replied with a faint smirk, hoping to diffuse some of the tension I felt building in the air. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, of course.” He put his hands to my forearms and forced a faint smile. “I’ll be right back. Promise.”
The way he emphasizedpromiserepeated itself in my head. It was almost as if he thought I wasn’t going to believe him when he said he’d be right back. When he did pull up to the curb, I decided to leave the thought behind on the rain-soaked sidewalk.
By the time we got to Brooklyn’s house, the rain had become torrential. A clap of thunder vibrated the whole house as he led me through the front halfway and back to the kitchen I’d sat in during our last brief visit. Everything seemed smaller in the dimness of the storm outside, without sunlight flooding the rooms through all the open windows.
I took my same stool at the kitchen island while Brooklyn pulled a few things out of the fridge and placed them on the island—a tub of butter and a stack of yellow Kraft cheese wrapped in crinkling plastic.
“You hungry?” he asked as he grabbed plates from a cabinet next to the fridge. “I don’t wanna brag, but I make a pretty mean grilled cheese.”
“Can’t say no to that.” I smiled at him, which seemed to alleviate the lingering tension in his eyes. I’d seen him smile so much, it kind of sucked to see him so uneasy.
Suddenly the speaker at the far end of the counter blared to life, sending some upbeat, chirpy pop I wasn’t familiar with to every corner of the kitchen.
“Do you know this song?” Brooklyn asked.
“No, should I?” I almost had to yell over the music.
Brooklyn held his hand out to me. “Allow me to educate you.”
The moment my palm slipped into his, he yanked me off of the stool and twirled me around the kitchen as the song picked up.
“What is this?” I tried to catch my breath between words, although I wasn’t sure if it was Brooklyn’s wild dancing or how close our bodies were that made my lungs beg for fresh air.
“I really refuse to believe you’ve never heard KC and the Sunshine Band.” Brooklyn shook his head. “It’s a classic.”
Before I knew it, he was singing out loud, trying not to laugh as he belted out the chorus. He wasn’t even a particularly good singer, but the way he crooned out the lyrics so naturally made my heart swell.
We both danced like idiots across the kitchen floor, so tuned in on laughing and trying not to trip over each other’s feet that we didn’t hear the front door open.
“Why the hell does it smell like burnt cheese in here?” Stella scurried into the kitchen with two bags of Whole Foods groceries and carelessly dropped them onto the countertop. Brooklyn and I stumbled over each other as we stopped our lurid dancing and realized there was bread and cheese burning on the stove.
“Oh shit.” Brooklyn dashed to the stove and managed to salvage one of the sandwiches.
“Brooklyn.” The warning tone of voice came from his mother, who walked into the kitchen shortly after Stella with her own bags of groceries. “How many times have I told you if you use mayonnaise instead of butter, it won’t burn.”
