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She frowns. “Silas doesn’t like tomatoes, remember?”
Sometimes the nosiness of this town is helpful, other times it leads to conversations I don’t feel like having.
“It’s not for Silas.”
She frowns when I don’t name the other person.
She must be feeling generous because she doesn’t prod further.
“Give me ten minutes, hon.”
“Thanks, Ruth.”
She turns in my order to the cook before scurrying off to help another couple that just walked in.
I pull out my phone, scrolling through random shit as I wait.
By the time I get my order paid for and head back to the car, I feel slightly calmer. Lindell forces you to slow down and take a deep breath.
All the serenity I found in the diner fades away the second I open the car door and climb inside.
“I have to go,” Rick says, a smile on his face that hasn’t been directed at me in years. “I’ll call as soon as I get back to town. Yeah. Mhmm. Will miss you, too.”
After pulling my burger and fries from the bag, I hand it to him. It smacks against his chest a little harder than I had intended, but I don’t apologize. I stopped doing that about the time he decided that since I wouldn’t be his lover, I couldn’t be his friend.
“Seriously?” he hisses when he pulls back the wax paper surrounding his burger. “Onions?”
I nod as I take another huge bite of my own food. “You get it all the way.”
I want to smile with glee when he cringes at me, talking with my mouth stuffed with food. It’s a rude gesture, and if I ever did it at home, my mom would smack me in the head. But I feel this pull to make him feel as annoyed as I’ve been already today.
“I haven’t eaten onions on my burgers since high school,” he mutters, pulling the onions off and dropping them back into the bag.
I shrug. How would I know this type of shit?
“How about a thank you for the food?” I say instead.
“If you would’ve waited, you wouldn’t be out six dollars.”
“If you would’ve been a little quicker on your phone call with your boyfriend, I wouldn’t have had to go inside and get your food.”
He narrows his eyes at me, but I keep stuffing food in my mouth. Not only am I starving, but I don’t have it in me to sit in this car all day and fight with him.
“One, Rex isn’t my boyfriend. Two—”
I snort. “Rex? Seriously?”
“You know what?” Rick wraps his sandwich back up, placing it gentler in the bag than I would’ve bet with how irritated he is. “I’ll eat it later.”
We both know as he reverses out of the parking spot that he won’t eat it later. If I don’t throw that food away at our first gas fill-up spot, it runs the risk of still being in here when we head back this way at the end of the summer. I make a mental note not to clean up after him. It’ll serve him right to have his car smelling horrible. It’ll be much worse than the onions he’s so damned worried about stinking up his breath.
“It never happened,” I tell Rick when he grabs my arm before I can climb out of bed.
Last night was wild. The memory of his lips on mine kept me up much later than I thought it could, but it won out, fighting the exhaustion I felt from the adrenaline crash after being held hostage.
“It did,” Rick argues, once again not taking the out I’ve offered him. “You kissed me back.”
“You’re mistaken.”
“Landon, please.”
I scrape my hands over the top of my head, tears I thought that dried up last night once again a burning threat behind my eyes.
“We just need to forget it ever happened.”
“I wish I could, but I can’t.”
I turn to him, my lip twitching at the sight of his out-of-control mop of hair. The pillow lines on his face are familiar, something I’ve seen every time he has stayed the night with me. The frown marring his otherwise handsome face is brand new.
“We have to,” I argue. “Still best friends?”
Stupidly, I offer him my hand as if we have to shake to agree to the friendship that we’ve nurtured for our nearly seventeen year lives.
He looks down at my hand, slow to agree, but eventually he nods, shaking my hand.
That was the very first lie I can remember Rick telling me.
“Why would I ever be worried about my breath when I’m around you?”
I look away from him, my eyes locked on the quaint row of buildings on Main Street as we drive out of town.
I don’t bring up the kiss. We’ve never talked about it since the morning after it happened.
Maybe if we had, things would be different. But it’s like the thorn in the lion’s paw, making both of us angry and aggressive when all we really needed to do was reach into the painful area and get rid of the problem so we could heal.
