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“Probably.”
My honesty was enough for him. He shrugged his skinny little shoulders, grabbed his pillow, and marched down the hall and down the stairs to the room where I slept. Following behind, I scratched my head while he got comfortable, trying to decide if my sister was gonna kick my ass for allowing this.
“Fuck it,” I muttered. I was tired. He was tired. And this way I’d know when he woke up, and he couldn’t sneak out to get some cake for breakfast or something.
“Can we go out to breakfast?” Ford asked. He was sitting cross-legged in the bed next to me. I rolled onto my stomach because I’d been having a very good dream about Charlotte.
“Where do you like to go?”
He considered that for a few moments. “I can pick anywhere I want?”
“It’s gotta be local, but yeah.”
Ford peeked at me from underneath his lashes. “Can we go to McDonald’s?”
My head lifted off my pillow. “That’s where you want to go?”
“Dad always said it was junk, and he didn’t want his kids eating junk.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to say that his dad was a self-righteous prick, but I decided to keep that opinion to myself. “Yeah, kid. We can go there.”
He jumped out of bed with a whoop of joy and tore off to his room to get dressed.
We spent the day, and evening, rotating through a list of things he wanted to do. I’d deal with the fallout with Tansy later, because Ford happily informed me that he’d never been able to watch movies as late as I’d let him.
I couldn’t get Charlotte out of my mind. I wondered what she was doing. Wondered if she, like me, was thinking about our kiss for the millionth time.
I thought about calling her a few more times than that, but every time I picked up my phone, I managed to talk myself out of it.
There was nothing to talk about. Mainly because I couldn’t find the words to pick through the tangled thoughts in my head.
Changing the rules now was messy.
We had a countdown hanging over our heads—when she’d go her way, and I’d go mine.
And it was messy because I was starting to want all sorts of things that weren’t mine to want in the first place. The kiss, undoubtedly, wasa mistake that we should never repeat again. But I wasn’t sure I was capable of being around her without kissing her again.
This type of want had never registered for me, to the point where I wasn’t sure it ever would. You couldn’t miss something you’d never had.
I had it now, though. And I wasn’t sure I knew what to do with it.
The next morning, I woke up with Ford’s legs shoved into my side, because even though I’d promised pancakes and bacon for breakfast the next morning if he stayed in his own bed, he’d crawled in next to me sometime around midnight after he’d had a nightmare.
“Can I still have pancakes, though?” he whispered once he was curled into a ball on his side of the bed.
I’d never cooked pancakes in my life, but damn it, he was looking at me with those eyes again.
“Yeah, why not?” I mumbled. “Can’t be that hard to figure out.”
I was wrong, as it turned out, because by the time I’d scraped a doughy mess into the trash and then a burned one after that ... we took one look at each other and opened a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch instead.
He wanted to watchHarry Potter, and when I told him I’d never seen the movies, he somehow convinced me to watch the first two back-to-back. We were about to start the third when an exhausted Tansy pulled into the driveway with Felicia in tow.
My niece looked pale and tired, my sister even more so.
Ford greeted his sister with caution, wiping a single tear off his cheek when she left the room and Tansy went to get her settled into bed.
I ruffled his hair. “See? I told you she’d be okay.”
