“Where are you going?” Bailey stood as well.
“The Fillmore.”
Birdie’s face lit up as she rose to her feet. “Oh, who are you seeing?”
“The Old 97’s.”
It was one of the few times that I hadn’t been asked to go to dinner. Although the guy was a promoter, so it was sort of his schtick. After a quick Google dive, I’d found about two dozen photos of him at shows with women. It didn’t bother me that he took women to shows, but I was not going to be posing for any photos to be another notch on his social media belt.
Seeing all of them had almost been enough to make me call off the date, but I really did like the Old 97’s, so I figured might as well give it a shot.
My sisters both pulled me into a hug. The affection gene had skipped me. Or maybe it had just gotten disconnected when I lost my mom, I wasn’t sure. I did remember hugging her a lot before she died and loving those hugs. But after she was gone, even hugs from Grandma Betty, who was known for her world-class embraces, felt uncomfortable. Bailey and Birdie didn’t suffer my same discomfort.
After telling them I’d see them bright and early for the shoot, I headed through the house and down the front steps, and on the way to the car, I told myselfnotto glance over to the Knight house. I could see out of my peripheral vision that the moving van was gone, in its place was an SUV, and the garage door was open. Everything in my head was screaming to keep walking, face forward, eyes on my Tesla, and do not glance right. It seemed there was an even greater force that caused me to act on my base instinct and turn my head.
When I did, I found Adam was kneeling in his garage, white t-shirt, jeans, and a ball cap on backwards, putting some furniture together. Everything sort of happened simultaneously. My head turned at the exact moment he looked up, and we both froze.
I had a minor out-of-body experience. One minute I was Billie Bliss, workaholic with a black belt in emotional repression, and the next I was inexplicably starring in my own sports drink commercial, but instead of glistening athletes, there was Adam Knight in faded Levi’s, a white t-shirt, and a backwards Giants cap, assembling what looked like a bunk bed in his garage.
My breath caught in my throat when he wiped his hands on a blue shop rag, and then—no exaggeration—stood to his feet, backlit by the late afternoon sunlight, looking like the unholy love child of a Marvel superhero and an Abercrombie & Fitch model who’d fallen off the wagon and discovered carbs.
It didn’t help that my brain immediately ran an internal slideshow of every Adam I’d ever known: Adam at seven, knocking on my grandparents’ door to see if I wanted to go to the park; Adam at eleven, riding his bike in circles around the block while pretending to be chased by the FBI; Adam as a gangly thirteen-year-old, accidentally breaking the mailbox with a wayward firework; Adam at almost eighteen, on the day of his high school graduation, coming over early for me to fix his tie.
Adam now was none of those Adams and all of them at once. His jawline was sharp enough to cut glass and covered in the kind of scruff that made me want to reach out and touch it, just to see if it was as soft as it looked. His shoulders, always broad, had somehow gotten broader. And his forearms—holy mother of Hemsworth brothers, the forearms—they were tan, tattooed, and dusted with dark hair and veins that stood out like little blue highways every time he flexed.
He wasn’t even doing anything sexy. He wasn’t fixing a car or throwing a football or swinging a hammer. He was just…there. Assembling furniture, a drop of sweat made its way down the side of his neck, which, for reasons I will not examine too closely, made me feel faintly religious. All I could hear was the blood pounding in my ears and my shallow breaths.
I didn’t realize that I’d stopped walking, but I must have because my feet were no longer moving when he lifted his right hand, and his lips curled in a half-grin as he said, “Hi.”
It’s not that I could hear the word down the driveway. His voice didn’t carry over the noise of the kids playing in the backyard, Mrs. Cable’s TV, and a car alarm from a nearby street, but my memory of his voice filled in the sound.
I found myself saying hi back. Sort of. I opened my mouth and tried to reply, but no sound came out.
His grin widened as he began walking towards me, never breaking eye contact. If there was a world record for Most Intense Staring Contest Ever, he would have just shattered it. Everything felt like it was happening in slow motion. With each step he took, my heartbeat got louder and faster, like the Jaws soundtrack. Bud-dum. Bud-dum. Bud-dum.
As he approached, my hands had gone numb. I was clutching my purse hard enough to leave permanent indentations, and my Apple Watch buzzed, probably because it thought I was experiencing a cardiac event. For a second, I considered just ducking behind the mailbox or making a run for it, but that would have meant breaking the only rule left in my dignity playbook: Do not, under any circumstances, let Adam Knight know you are still in love with him and you have been since the first day that you met him.
I was on the porch sobbing, and all of a sudden, a boy came and sat down next to me. “Hi, I’m Adam. I’m your neighbor.”
I looked up and gasped when I saw him. I didn’t gasp because I was surprised he was there, he’d just introduced himself. I gasped because of his eyes. He had the warmest, kindest, prettiest brown eyes I’d ever seen. I didn’t know why I loved his eyes so much at four years old, I just knew the first time I looked in them, I wanted to look into them forever.
Any other six-year-old boy probably would have frozen, turned around, or not known how to handle a crying girl, but not Adam, he asked, “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
Even though I had butterflies in my belly, the grief I felt for my mom overrode them, and I broke down again, sobbing. “I miss my mom.”
“Did your mom leave, too?” he asked.
“No, she died while she was having my baby sister.”
“Oh, my mom just left,” he stated plainly.
I nodded, and tears flowed from my face. I cried, and cried, and cried. Then he just sat beside me on the porch and was quiet. He didn’t talk, didn’t tell me everything was going to be okay, he didn’t tell me anything, he just sat beside me while I bawled.
I don’t know how much time passed. Five minutes, ten minutes, thirty minutes, or ninety minutes, before Grandma Betty called me in for dinner.
He just hopped off the porch and said, “See you tomorrow.”
I stood up, wiping my face, and he was halfway across the yard before he turned and asked, “What was your name?”
