Page 55 of The Scent of Happiness

“Oh, so I know her.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you implied it.” Derek drummed his fingers on the side of his coffee cup. “Let me think. Who do we both know?”

“I said I didn’t want to tell you. I implied that it was none of your business. Don’t you have to get to work?”

“This is my breakfast time,” Derek said. “You came in here, talking to me. You could have had your java in blissful silence.”

“That’s what I’m going to do. Thanks for the coffee.”

Theo headed toward his room, which is what he should have done the moment he came home, instead of hinting around at things better left unsaid. The only friends he and Derek had in common were people they went to school with. And just the other day, Theo had been asking about Brooke. It would only take Derek a moment to figure it out.

“Oh, no shit!” Derek blurted before Theo got two steps. “You slept with Brooke Nesbitt! Dude!” He was half out of his seat now, leaning over the table, holding up a meaty palm for a high five.

Theo did not return it. He held his coffee in front of him like a shield. He’d told Brooke to keep things discreet, made her promise not to tell anyone, and what did he do? Practically blurted it out to the first person he saw. He rubbed his forehead and drew his hand down his face. “This conversation is not happening.”

“You want to keep it on the downlow, that’s cool.” Derek picked up his cereal bowl and drank the milk from it. He belched. “I won’t tell anyone.”

“Thank you.”

“You know what? No one would believe me anyway. Who is going to believe that Cannondale High School’s number one nerd slept with the prom queen?”

“My God, Derek.” Theo put his mug on the table. “We are not in high school anymore. We’re adults now. At least, some of us are.”

“I know, I know.” Derek got up and put his dishes in the sink. “Just let me process this for a minute. Because this is, I mean, this is great. This is like the sequel to every teen comedy movie ever made.”

Chapter Seventeen

Brooke tried to go back to sleep after Theo left, but she rolled around, shifted position, and punched the pillows, trying to get comfortable. After an hour, she gave up and grabbed her phone.

She looked at her favorite soapmaking groups on Facebook, but they reminded her of all the design challenges that she’d missed the deadline for. Over in the beginner’s group, they were arguing about palm oil, having the same debate they had every few months, so she exited without posting anything.

Might as well get up and start her day. She peeled off Theo’s t-shirt and brought it to her nose. Even though she’d been wearing it for hours, it still smelled like him. She’d love to recreate that scent for a soap, but how? She couldn’t even define it, much less reproduce it. It was uniquely Theo.

That scent was going to haunt her. She had a full eight hours at the library today, and she couldn’t go to work thinking about sex. She needed to wash away any notion of him, using the strongest-smelling soap she had.

She found her bathrobe crumpled in the back of her closet and put it on. She grabbed her keys and went out to the garage. The pavement was cold under her bare feet, but it would only take a moment to get a fresh bar of soap and then she’d jump into a nice hot shower.

She ran a hand over the shelves, trying to decide. She needed a bar she’d never used before to shift her senses and her thoughts. She chose a cocoa brown soap she called Mocha Monday, hoping it would wake her up and erase any hints of Theo. She’d bought a similar lotion on a whim. Now was the time to try it.

But even when she was under the shower spray, with the richness of chocolate and the pungent pop of coffee, her thoughts were of Theo’s hands caressing her skin, his lips kissing her all over, his body pressed to hers.

And then her mind snapped to the way he’d left so abruptly and in such a bad mood. Lawyers and their clients were not supposed to have a relationship. So they’d messed up. But Theo’s reaction seemed overblown. He claimed he didn’t regret sleeping with her, but everything from his body language to his tone of voice to the worry lines on his forehead told a different story. And the way he’d raced out of her place at the crack of dawn said it all.

Theo was a guy who hated to lose. And, it seemed, he also hated to make a mistake. His pursuit of perfection meant that every stumble was a huge hairy deal, simply because it was so unusual.

Brooke, on the other hand, was less bothered. After all, she screwed up on the regular. It had always been this way. She’d been told from the time she was a little girl to sit down, sit still, don’t fidget. School, church, bosses, and basically the whole rest of the world loved to tell her what she was doing wrong. Use your words. Don’t do that. You missed this. You’re late. Why can’t you keep this straight? This should be easy. What’s wrong with you? You’re defective. You’re bad.

She was better now, but she still dropped the ball on numerous occasions. She was constantly scrambling for a workaround for this or a fix for that. It was her daily life.

She thought back to the soapmaking class she’d taken from Dixie. It had been a disaster, but Brooke hadn’t expected it to turn out any other way. Weird, though, how Dixie had turned it into a personal vendetta. Brooke didn’t get it. People were going to mess up. Sometimes they were going to mess up epically. You had to find a way to get over it.

As she rinsed her hair, her mind drifted back to Theo. She tried to imagine his life. Theo was someone who expected success and then actually got it. He planned for things to work out and they’d just…work out. What was that like? Even Emma, the best planner Brooke knew, didn’t think like that. Emma made order out of chaos but she didn’t expect it to be permanent. She almost counted on people backsliding. Repeat customers were a big part of her business.

Brooke’s phone alarm chimed in the bedroom for her regular wake-up time. A follow-up would ring in five minutes, but that didn’t mean she could ignore this one. She needed to take her meds, but she couldn’t take her pill on an empty stomach, which meant she needed to get out of the shower and get breakfast before her whole day was thrown off.

She dried herself and doused herself in lotion, then put on her go-to library outfit—a black, long-sleeved shirt and a baggy gray jumper with gray tights underneath. She put her hair into a ponytail and popped on her red-framed glasses. In the kitchen, she poured herself a bowl of cereal, and then remembered she was out of milk.