Page 136 of All the way home

“No you fucking won’t,” Zach says mildly.

“Tell me EVERYTHING!” Mara presses a hand to the side of her face, grin wide in excitement. “You are, like, living in a Hallmark movie or something.”

“I know, right?” He can’t stop smiling.

“Spill. Everything. Go.”

So he does. To the best of his ability, Zach recounts the events of the last ten hours, and Mara listens with her hand clapped over her mouth, eyes widening further with every detail. When he gets to the kiss, she squeals—actually squeals, enough that he nearly chucks his phone—and then sighs, hand over her heart.

“How does it feel to be God’s favorite?” she asks.

“Okay, I just think this is, like, karmic turnaround or whatever. From earlier, when I lost my bag and my headphones, and broke my phone, and—OH.” He claps a hand to the side of his head, remembering a forgotten detail. “Seth called me again.”

“Literally what the fuck does he want?” Mara wrinkles her nose. “Does he not know he’s last season? Is he not aware he’s old news? Has he not clocked that he’s stale—”

“Okay, okay. Do you want to see the message or not?”

“Gimme.” Mara flops down on her bed, flat on her back, hair in a dark fan around her head. “I want it. I lust after it.”

“Okay, pipe down.” Grinning, Zach opens the message. Before he reads it through, though, he snaps a screenshot and sends it to Mara.

“This is long as fuck,” Mara squawks. “Oh, he wants you carnally. Again.”

“Shut up, I’m trying to read this.”

Mara shuts up.

Apprehension bleeding through him, Zach reads.

Hey, Z. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to listen to my voicemail, but I wanted to get a chance to say what I never got to when we talked, and I wanted you to know I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have treated you like that and I really messed things up between us. I’m sober now and I’m just trying to make things right. Please text me back.

“Okay, he is for sure either trying to harvest your organs or recruit you for an MLM,” Mara says.

Zach rolls his eyes, shaking his head.

Really, it’s less perturbing than he’d thought it would be. Before today, that message would have triggered a sick, burning nausea.

“What are you going to say?”

Zach snorts. “Fuck if I know.”

“Look at you!” Mara exclaims. “Unbothered! Thriving! You don’t even care, do you?”

“It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that—”

“It’s that you have a new man now, huh?”

His cheeks go hot. “Stop, we don’t know that.”

“Yes the FUCK we do!” Mara brings the phone close to her face, so it’s just her eyeball in frame. “Let me have this. You have a new man and he’s criminally hot and I think you should be celebrated for it.”

Her picture freezes as a notification pops up: Ten-percent battery warning. With a muttered curse, he gets rid of it and says, “My battery’s shot. I gotta find a charger, can I call you back?”

“Yes, unless you’re busy,” Mara says, waggling her eyebrows in a way that is so truly offensive that he hangs up without saying goodbye.

Slowly, he struggles to his feet.

He has a charger in his backpack back at the gate.