Page 62 of Challenge Me

“You can.”

“I’ll get them in the next one. Just because you believe in me.”

She grunted and started writing again. “Cringey.”

With a chuckle, I turned my attention to Avery. She was staring out the window, but after a second, she looked at me.

“You did great,” she said. “As you always do.”

“Thanks.”

With that, the table fell into silence. I shifted my attention at intervals, unsure what part of this was the most awkward. There were a dozen things I needed to bring up between the three of them, and I dreaded each one in its own way.

Truthfully, I had no idea what things looked like going forward, nor did I know what they should look like. As I’d told Remi, under the surface this whole thing was fake. But there was more than one layer beneath this façade, and I didn’t know which ones were closest to collapsing.

Remi wasn’t supposed to meet Avery, and especially not Mallory, yet here we were. We weren’t supposed to be intimate behind closed doors, but that ship had capsized. I wasn’t supposed to be interested in the stranger behind the bar who listened to odd music and had deceptively keen eyes, and here I was letting him have dinner with my family while I wondered what else he’d written in that notebook of his.

Where did those words come from? How many layers existed between what lived on the outside and what he kept in his heart? What about the things that lived all the way down in his soul?

Wonderful. I was becoming pathetic. If I wasn’t careful, I’d start speaking in unsolicited verse.

It wasn’t until after our food came that I managed to shake off the burst of melancholy.

“I heard you’re staying with us,” I said.

Mal smiled a little. “Is there room for my cars?”

“Of course there is. It’s the same place we stayed a couple years ago. Remember?”

She nodded once. “How high?”

“Eleventh.”

Her nose wrinkled, but she didn’t comment on it.

“Is something wrong with the eleventh?” Remi asked, trying to sound cheerful. “Don’t tell me it’s haunted.”

When she didn’t look at him, I thought about what he’d said when I first got here. Now that I’d had a chance to calm down, the gold digger comment made me frown. If it had been anyone else, maybe even Avery, I might not have paid much attention to it. People tended to make assumptions when you had a job like mine—money like mine. But this was Mal. She wasn’t cruel or judgmental.

I didn’t know how she’d figured out who Remi was. She must’ve seen it online, or she could’ve heard about it. From whom?

Glancing at Avery, I took in the neutral expression she had on her face as she listened to Remi tell a story about a house he’d lived in that had a tire swing. It used to move on its own, but he insisted it wasn’t the wind.

She and I had been together since we were too young to know what love was about. We learned together. I just hadn’t figured out what I was about back then.

Did she hold onto resentment? Were we more at odds than I’d originally thought?

The idea sat uncomfortably in my stomach, and the food in front of me no longer felt appetizing. When I set my fork down, Remi’s hand settled on my leg beneath the table. Only a second later, he started to draw it back, but I grabbed it and held it in place.

I couldn’t rightly say why or how, but I found it easier to focus on what was in front of me.

“Can I see?” I asked, tapping Mal’s notebook.

She hesitated for a moment before she turned it around and folded her hands on the table. I started to read, and a smile slid onto my face as I turned to the picture she’d drawn on the next page. The handful of times she’d hung out with Roman had done a lot for her art. I’d have to send him a gift or something.

When I’d finished all of the pages she’d written since I last saw her, I shut the notebook. She didn’t meet my eyes, but I knew that she was paying attention.

“It’s amazing, Mal. I can’t wait to see what happens next.”