This is getting out of hand. I shoo away those butterfly sparkles.
“Um, so, did you… did you need something?” I ask, and then cringe because I sound like a jerk.
Lark groans. “Sorry. I should let you go. I just—”
He stops, but I’m literally hanging on the edge of the driver’s seat.
“You just what?”
He’s quiet for so long, I can make out the sounds of a truck rumbling past him.
“You were gone when I came down just now, and I wanted to see you before I left.” His voice downshifts to a lower register. “And maybe kiss you good morning.”
Is there a Snapchat filter for lady parts? Golden butterflies? Sparkles? Fireworks? Volcanoes?
“Oh—” The sound is sort of breathless, sort of strangled, and the only one I can manage right now.
When he speaks again, I hear the return of his confidence. “And I wanted to see if you felt like working on your business plan this evening.”
My eyes drift to the visor mirror I was using to clean up my crying mess. I’m not at all surprised to see my mouth hanging open.
“Sound good?” Lark asks when I’ve been speechless for way too long.
“Y-yeah. Sounds… That sounds great.”
It’sPen who picks Tyler up an hour later, and no matter what she and I offer, Tyler is not giving us anything. I have no idea what he bought. No idea what he plans to do with it. Pen just said he came out with a large shopping bag that was more empty than full and he flat out ignored all her questions.
Alrighty, then.
He’s still in his room when I get home after a short day at the salon, and for the first time I can remember, I don’t hear the TV. He’s listening to Jason Mraz. Jason Fucking Mraz.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Jason Mraz. Who can get through “I Won’t Give Up” without breaking into song, vowingI gotta learn what I got and what I’m not and who I am?
Not me.
But pre-accident Tyler would have snorted with laughter before stealing my FireStick remote and changing my Spotify playlist from Beach Pop to Raised on Rock. In my apartment. While Maisy was napping.
So the curiosity is eating me alive.
So much so that I have to take my laptop and hide out in the living room on the opposite side of the house so I can’t hear croony love songs like “If It Kills Me” and “More Than Friends.” But that’s okay, because in advance of my little business planning session with Lark later today, I start making spreadsheets. A spreadsheet with lists of changes I need made to the dining room to convert it to a salon. Another with a list of equipment I’ll need to purchase. Another I’ll share with Pen for marketing. Business cards. Signage. Website. She’s already offered to help me with all of this, but once I get going, I can picture everything, and it starts to seem, well,doable.
By the time I leave to pick up Maisy from daycare, I have made six spreadsheets, and I feel inordinately proud of myself.
I’m making Maisy a peanut-butter banana snack when Lark comes home.
I might also be sort of dancing to “Remedy” as I’m doing it.
“Whoa.”
I look up at Lark’s shape filling the doorway and freeze—butter knife in hand and hip cocked to one side.
Maisy’s at the table with her Paw Patrol Dino Rescue HQ, and she stops zooming Marshall’s car and snaps her gaze between Lark and me.
Lark gapes at me like I’m not fully dressed. Like I’m Salome performing the Dance of the Seven Veils right here in my kitchen and he’s bound to lose his head.
It’s a look that literally no one has ever given me, and I feel both powerful and an unwieldy sense of recklessness in the face of it. Like I’m a six-cylinder sports car on a hair-pin turn that’s slick with black ice.
I’m about to go over the guardrails, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
