She gets to the house a little after four as planned. The kitchen is wrecked. She stands in the kitchen doorway with her bag sliding off her shoulder, taking in the whole mess.
“What,” she says, “are you doing?”
“Making you a pie.” I gesture at the flour all over the counter and the dirty dishes that keep piling up. Rowan makes this look easy. It’s not. “It’s not going great. I want to be upfront about that.”
She looks at the pie. She looks at me. “You’re making me a pie.”
“I left you that little note that told you I would. I keep my promises, Linwood.”
Something moves across her face that isn’t disbelief, and she sets her bag down and crosses the wrecked kitchen toward me, and she says, quietly, “I still have the note.”
“You do?” I ask, surprised. That means it traveled with her.
She nods. “I kept telling myself I’d throw it out, but it’s in my room, leaning against my lamp because it was the one piece of proof I owned that any of it had been real.” She looks up at me. “I kept it through the entire week I spent swearing to myself it was never real.”
I put the pie in the oven before I can do anything stupid with my hands, and then I turn it on.
“You didn’t preheat the oven?” she asks.
“Preheat.” I look at the dial like it betrayed me, pull the temperature up on my phone, set it, hit start. “There. It’s cooking. Probably.”
She laughs softly, under her breath, and then the laugh runs out, and the kitchen goes quiet around it. The hum of the oven. Flour on every surface. Her, two feet away, reading me, while I can’t read one thing back.
I had a speech. I worked on it for days. It’s gone — every word, the second she looks up at me — and what’s left underneath is the part I never figured out how to rehearse. So I cross the last of the kitchen and take her hands in my disgusting flour-covered ones, and there’s a joke right at the tip of my tongue, but I leave it where it is.
“I made you a pie,” I say.
She nods once. “You did.”
“It’s going to be terrible.”
“It’s going to be so bad,” she agrees, gently.
“I made it anyway. With my own two hands. No Rowan.” I look at her. “I’m no good at the saying-it part, Linwood. Never have been. I’m better at the doing, and the doing is about to come out of that oven looking like a crime scene.” I flash her a smirk. “But I did all of it on purpose. The plane. The pie. You. None of it got picked for me. I picked it.”
She goes very still.
“My whole life got chosen for me. You know that better than anyone.” I let my voice stay plain. I don’t dress it up. “You’re the one thing in it that’s mine, because I’m the one who picked it. I pick you, Aspen.”
She plays with my fingers and says, “That’s a lot of pressure to put on a girl you’ve known your whole life.”
“Yeah, well.” I let the grin come back. “That was the speech. Days of work. You’re welcome.”
Her eyes go bright, and she blinks at me like she’s mad about it, like I tricked her into feeling something on a Monday. She’s not laughing it off. She’s covering, and she’s letting me watch her cover, which from Aspen Linwood is the whole entire thing.
“So,” I say. “You gonna leave me hanging? I’ve got flour in places flour should never be.”
She fists my disgusting shirt. “Yes,” she says. “Obviously yes — you absolute lunatic, it’s been yes for days.” She looks at my mouth. “I just didn’t think you were ever going to pick me on purpose.”
“Well.” I put my hand over hers on my chest. “I did. And I’d do it again every day, and I’m extremely smug about it, so.”
“There he is.”
I grin. “He never left.”
I grab my phone and hit replay on a YouTube video. The song blasts loudly on the house speakers. She throws her head back and lets out my favorite sound in the entire world when the song starts playing.
“Girls Just Wanna Have Fun?” she asks with a big smile as I start dancing. “Are you serious, Ermington? This is your favorite song?”
