Page 34 of Falling For You

I grabbed the curtain rod and walked to the register. I didn't know what to do with what Wyatt had just said, and I still didn't know if I could trust him. But something about the way he said it loosened the knot in my stomach for the first time since the day he opened my package.

CHAPTER 13

Chocolate Chip Cookies

WYATT

Barb's car was in the driveway when we got home. Birdie spotted it before I'd put the truck in park.

"Barb!"

She met us at the front door with a paper bag. "I brought cookies."

Birdie took the bag with both hands and inspected the contents. "Chocolate chip?"

"Would I bring anything else?"

I carried the department store bags inside while Birdie sat at the kitchen table with a cookie in each hand, telling Barb about the glow sticks and which colors were needed for Halloween.

We settled into the living room after. Barb in the armchair with her romance novel and her reading glasses. Birdie in her corner with the coloring book, working on a deer surrounded by flowers, tongue out in concentration. I was on the couch with the TV on playing a show I wasn't watching.

I was thinking about Andy Walsh.

I didn't know when it started, or what it was about her. What I did know was that the first time I teased her and she didn't threaten me, she just gave me that look. Dry, sharp, and completely unimpressed. It genuinely made me laugh. I wanted to see it again, every single time. Then she smiled at me on the walk home after she beat Travis at darts, and I knew I was going to spend a long time trying to earn that smile.

She looked like she was going to break my heart the first night she walked into The Lantern with her braid loose over one shoulder, and I was going to let her. Her face at the store this afternoon when I told her the secret was safe, that was the first time I'd ever seen her be vulnerable. All I wanted was to make sure nobody ever made her look like that again.

I'd been in trouble for a while and I'd been pretending I wasn't. Noticing the curve of her hips in those tight gym pants, mowing the same strip of lawn three times while she read on the porch in shorts, watching the flush climb from her neck to her cheeks when she sprinted across the street in slippers. And I had absolutely not been thinking about how she'd look in that lingerie.

"You seem different lately."

Barb's voice pulled me back to the living room. She'd put her book down and was watching me over her reading glasses.

"Different how?"

"Lighter." She let her glasses drop to the chain around her neck. "Is there someone?"

I laughed. "Barb."

"That's not a no."

I didn't know what to say to that. It wasn't like Andy and I were anything. We weren't even close to anything. I just knew that I liked her, and I didn't know if I could do anything about it.

"You've been on your own a long time, Wyatt." Barb set her book on the armrest. "You're allowed to go on dates. You know that, right?"

I looked at the TV I hadn't been watching. Barb was Lillian's closest friend. She helped me pick out the ring when I decided to ask Lillian to marry me. Some part of me still felt like doing anything about how I felt would be betraying the woman we'd both lost.

Barb looked at me like she'd read my mind. "It doesn't mean you loved Lillian less if you decide to love someone again."

She picked up her romance novel and found her page like what she'd said was simple.

"Daddy, look!" Birdie held up her coloring book. The deer was brown with a blue nose, flowers in every color she owned surrounding it.

"That's beautiful, Birdie."

"Can I have another cookie?"

Barb was already getting up. "One more."