“How did you know I was thinking of leaving?”
Her laugh was an exhalation, but it was so familiar to me that I could imagine her doing it. She did it when she was embarrassed or feeling awkward. She’d have closed her eyes, almost shy, shifting her weight to one leg, moving her hair off of her shoulder. “Because I know you pretty well.”
It took every ounce of willpower I had to keep my hand off the doorknob, to keep myself from flinging it open, pulling her into my arms, and saying, Let me show you how I want you to know me. “Better than anybody.”
I did resist her, though. Because this wasn’t about me. It was about her. So I rested my elbows on my thighs and brushed some water out of my hair with my fingers. The next move would be up to her. I wanted to push her, yeah. But she’d have to come to me first.
The door thumped lightly, like she was putting her hand to the wood. Or maybe even her forehead. I imagined what I could see through the door. Her sexy lines. Her curves. Her.
“Please don’t leave.” And then the floorboards creaked again, and the door of her bedroom squeaked as she pulled it closed.
She’d left me some cold roast chicken and a salad in the fridge. I ate it standing up at her kitchen island, while the rain battered the windows. I opened and added it to the running tab in my head of stuff I’d used and that she wouldn’t let me pay for, but that I’d pay her back for somehow. In lumber or hardware or labor, or just by putting cash into her wallet when she wasn’t looking. I’d done it before, and I’d do it again. It was easier than bickering with her about it. I always took care of her, whether she knew it or not.
I polished off the salad—spinach, blue cheese, cranberries—fucking delicious like everything she made. I rinsed out the bowl and put it upside down on the drying rack. Cupcake sat in the corner of the kitchen, just a little smudge, trembling with the storm. I pulled off a piece of chicken from near the bone to give to her. She stopped trembling and sniffed the air.
Sniff. Sniff-sniff. Tail wiggle.
I held the little piece of chicken down at her level—roughly even with the baseboards, she was so tiny. She leapt up onto her hind legs like a ballerina and took it gently from my fingers.
When I’d finished the chicken, and given Cupcake a few more choice pieces, I put the bones in the garbage—locked up tight behind a child lock that I’d installed for Rosie’s grandma to keep Julia Caesar out—and picked up Cupcake. We watched the rain tumble down, battering the forest and splashing off the hood of my truck and the closed convertible roof of Rosie’s Bug. Seeing a summer storm in Maine never, ever got old to me. I scratched Cupcake’s chest and took a swig of my beer. She licked the condensation off the bottle, and I turned to take her to the couch with me. But just as suddenly as the storm had started, it stopped. Like someone turning off a garden hose that had been spraying on the window.
“See?” I whispered to her. “All better.”
In response, Cupcake squirmed up and gave me a big lick on the cheek. Magic!
I put on my flip-flops and carried her to the door, placing my beer on the bench in the entryway. I got her suited up in her pink harness and clipped the retractable leash on, and then we headed outside, me with my beer and her with her tiny tennis ball. Outside, it was cool and fresh, and the puddles on the sidewalk posed a huge challenge to Cupcake, who stared at them like they might be twenty feet deep for all she knew. I picked her up and carried her out into the grassy area under the magnolia. I set her down, and she plucked her way through the grass, which was almost too high for her to see past. But step by step, she got braver and more certain, even bounding through it for a second. So goddamned cute. Automatically, I turned back to the house to see if Rosie had seen it.
There she was. In her bedroom window. The night had closed in around the house, and she was framed by the light of her bedside lamp. In that moment, I was every heartbroken guy who’d ever yearned. I was every man who’d ever ached. I was every Romeo since the beginning of time. She was so fucking beautiful, I forgot to think. I forgot to breathe. I just took her in and thought, Goddamn it.
I held her stare for a second and smiled up at her. She smiled, too, and turned away.
Cupcake munched on some grass, and I whistled softly to get her attention. She bounded over, and when I picked her up, I felt that her feet and chest were wet with rain. She didn’t seem chilly, not yet, but I didn’t want to chance it. I thought about the woodshed and the fire pit, which Rosie hadn’t used yet this summer. I thought about how to tempt my very own Juliet out of her room.
And then I gave Cupcake a little nuzzle that made her groan and asked her, “You know what Rosie loves even more than cupcakes?”
16
Rosie
S’mores. He had to be making s’mores. Lying on my bed, I’d heard him gathering things from the pantry. I’d heard the screen door squeak open and closed. When I smelled the wood burning in the fire pit, I launched myself off my bed. The light from the flames danced on his rippling biceps, showing off his silhouette. I saw he’d gotten Cupcake comfy on one of the old Adirondack chairs that were beside the fire. He’d moved it back slightly, to keep her away from shooting embers. On the arms of one of the chairs sat what I’d have recognized from a mile away: an extra-large bag of double-puffed marshmallows. In his hand, one of the telescoping marshmallow forks that I’d gotten for my gram.
“Oh, Julia,” I whispered. “What a man.”
Her tail swished side to side like a snake and whapped me on the arm. Max placed the handle of the marshmallow fork carefully on the edge of the fire pit. He adjusted the logs with the fire tongs, to keep the flames low. As two logs collided, a spray of sparks arced through the darkness, mirroring the fireflies on the edge of the tree line. He was just so manly and sexy—he could’ve been a blacksmith just then, with the sparks and the flame and the brawn, using his hammer to pound…
God. I flopped back down on my bed backward, snow-angel style. The headboard banged against the cracked plaster. A sprinkling of dust came down like a handful of dry brown sugar. I blinked hard to get a few stray flecks out of my eyes.
For a long moment, I stared up at the ceiling. A little bit of the leak from the bathroom had seeped over the wall, and it reminded me of the tide coming in. What I wanted to do, of course, was be with Max. I always wanted to be with Max. I’d wanted to be with Max when Loafers took me out, and I’d wanted to be with him every second since.
But then there was the land of Should. I hated visiting Should. That was where regrets lived, like piranhas in the water. That was where embarrassment lived, a funny smell from the gutters. I’d never known why I spent so much time in Should, but I hated it there. What I should do was resist. What I should do was forget. What I should do was be good. What I should do, should do, should do…
What I should not do, probably, was throw myself passionately into my best friend’s arms, saying all sorts of dirty things that I’d never, ever imagined saying to anybody, let alone to someone I’d known my whole life and who teased me for how rarely I uttered the word fuck. Who’d once seen me with my face dotted all over with Clearasil while I was wearing headgear and never even cracked a joke about it. I should not throw myself at that man.
I sat up, propping myself on my elbow, and scratched my nose with my palm. On the bottom bookshelf at the far end of the bedroom were all my old yearbooks. I tried to think back, asking myself if Max had ever—even once—made me feel crappy for anything. If he’d ever made me visit Should.
Only one memory came back to me. We were seniors in high school, and I still hadn’t been asked to prom. I figured I wouldn’t be, and that was okay with me. I wasn’t exactly the most popular girl in our class. Max hadn’t asked anybody either, and I thought maybe we could go to the movies, drown our sorrows in sour gummy worms and The Matrix. But one day, in fourth period, I did get asked, by a guy who was nice enough, all in all. Yet before I could tell Max in the five minutes between periods, he asked me himself.
<
br /> He’d looked so sad in the eyes when I’d turned him down. And yet, even then, he hadn’t made me feel crappy. I’d made myself feel crappy for the hurt I’d seen in his beautiful eyes.
I scooted off my bed and crawled over to the bottom shelf. I hooked my finger over the binding of the biggest yearbook, from our senior year when our school used a fancier printer than they had before. It was a shiny black volume with slippery pages that smelled like a new magazine, even all these years later. On the inside cover was Max’s letter to me, with strong masculine letters, the most important thing in the whole book. Other friends from that year had signed around it, but nobody had encroached on Max’s spot. It was almost as if I couldn’t get my eyes to move over the note—I’d never read it, I’d never had the courage. I always felt funny when he said nice things to me, so I tried to avoid it if I could. But though I couldn’t bring myself to read all that he had written, I did let my eyes pass slowly over a few lines. The best friend anybody ever had. And I’m the luckiest guy in the class of 2000. Maybe ever.
At the bottom, he’d signed it Love forever and always,
Max.
I pulled my eyes off his writing and thumbed through the yearbook. From the pages, old memories flashed back at me. People I’d lost track of, people who I knew entirely too much about from Facebook. People who had moved on to crazy and wonderful adventures, and people who had been happy to stay in Truelove. In the superlatives section, right after Most Likely to Get Arrested (which went to Fletcher!) was Most Likely to Get Married. There, in the middle of the page, was a black-and-white of the two of us in front of a bank of lockers. Max Doyle and Rosie Madden. Underneath, the yearbook staff had added, Just kidding.
Next to that, someone had written, by hand, not!
I let the book fall open on the floor and put my elbows on the carpet, cradling my chin in my palms. Not. Had everybody seen it coming except me? Was I the only one blindsided by what might’ve been inevitable all along?
A whistle filled the air—quick and sharp. I got up off the carpet and looked out my window. Now, he wasn’t even making a show of looking busy with the fire. Instead, he’d approached the house, and he was looking up at my window, with a bag of marshmallows in one hand and a box of grahams in the other. At his feet sat Cupcake, at attention. A proud little lady in a white and navy sweater that looked a lot like one I owned.
Max asked, “You coming?” I could hear his voice through the thin panes, even from a floor away. “Or am I supposed to eat all these alone? Because you know I will.” He shook the box of grahams, and I saw his heavy, beautiful eyebrows go up and down, lit by the frail beams of the porch light.
“He’d never,” I told Julia, who’d turned her face away from me and mashed it into the spine of A Moveable Feast.
“Oh yeah, I would,” Max said, either because he’d read my lips or knew me well enough to answer without knowing what I’d said. Or both. “I totally would.”
I opened the window, not quite wide enough for Julia Caesar to escape. The smell of the smoke wafted inside, and I felt my stomach start to growl right away because I hadn’t eaten since lunch. My whole plan had been to wait for him to go to bed and then douse myself in bug spray, get a pint of pistachio ice cream from the freezer, and go eat the entire thing while lying in the grass and I listened to The Cranberries on Spotify. It was gonna be magnificent. But this?
This was much, much better.
“Where’s the chocolate?” I asked. I didn’t raise my voice, really. It was quiet enough out there that he’d have heard me from fifty yards away.
Now his smile got even bigger. Unapologetic, manly, flirtatious. Gorgeous. Perfect. Max. “In my pants.”
There were tragedies, and then there were tragedies. “Brute! You’ll melt it!”
“Am I that hot?”
Groan. Without even thinking, I put my hand to my forehead like I was checking for a fever.
He laughed, but then got serious again. “Get down here, Rosie. I promise I won’t make a pass at you.” He held up the marshmallows at full extension, like some sweet variation on the Hunger Games pledge. May the marshmallows be ever in our favor. “Promise.”
We got Cupcake tucked in for bed in her crate and headed out toward the fire pit. Just as we stepped out of the pool of light from the porch lamp, Max let go of my hand. “Hang on,” he said, and within a moment he’d returned with one of my gram’s quilts over his arm. He draped it over me where I sat in one of the Adirondacks, took the warm chocolate bars from his back pocket, and then turned his attention toward roasting duty.
He always did it just right—not too burned on the outside and plenty gooey inside. He handed me one of the telescoping forks, and I pushed the button to make it retract. I pinned it between the grahams and the chocolate. The cracker didn’t snap, and it stuck together beautifully, just as it should. Normally, I couldn’t get this kind of melt on the chocolate unless I preheated the grahams. “Your pants are the perfect temperature.” I licked chocolate from my fingertips. He tipped his head back in a silent laugh and poked at the fire with a stick. I held the s’more out to him, and he took it, meeting my gaze. He looked at me differently now, I could see that for sure, but not in a bad way. Just with a new intensity that made me tingle. “We should remember that. Two minutes in your back pocket to the perfect s’more.”
He nodded without taking his eyes off mine. He took a big bite of the graham sandwich, and a little smudge of marshmallow fluff stayed on his lip. I tucked my feet under me and came up on my knees. The boards ground into my shins, but I hardly felt it. I reached out and cleaned up the fluff for him. His eyes followed my fingers, and he stopped chewing when I touched him. I froze, utterly captivated by the feel of his skin on mine. I stayed there for one second, then two.
“Fluff,” I explained and sucked on my own finger to wash it away.
Max cleared his throat and looked into the fire, wiping his mouth with the meaty part of his thumb. From the forest, the crickets chirped, and I imagined a book I’d once illustrated about a nighttime forest orchestra where a possum conducted, the frogs sang tenor, and the crickets played the strings. “I’m going to try to get back to normal,” Max said.
“Okay.” I took a deep breath. My heart was doing the thing that I could only really equate with how it had felt to wait for my very first boyfriend to pick me up for a date. It felt like in place of my heart was a clothes dryer, spinning and spinning.
“And ask about normal things.”
“Right.” It wasn’t spinning on the gentle cycle.
“Just for the record, I don’t want to ask about normal things.”
“Noted.” High heat, for cotton and sheets.
He nodded once. “How’s the book?”
The book. What book? The yearbook? How did he know about the yearbook? Was I so transparent that he even knew that while wallowing without my ice cream, I’d looked for him in our… Oh Jesus, Rosie. No. He’s trying to get back to normal…just like you asked him, just like he said he would literally one second ago. “It’s okay! The author’s great. But fairy tales are hard.”
Max’s eyes darted over to me.
“Just, to get out of the standard trope,” I babbled. “Pink frills don’t really cut it when the princess is a hired dragon slayer.”
He smiled, still looking into the flames. “I’d love to see it,” he said.
Not unlike that moment when he crashed my date with Jed of the Lady Socks, I was filled with two competing yet equally strong emotions. First, joy. I loved showing him my work. Nobody was more exuberant or delighted—nobody noticed my favorite details like Max. You’re so good at their emotions, Rosie. I don’t know how you do it. You make a whole world spring from nothing. But two, horror. Merely hours ago, I’d found myself modeling the ratio of waist-to-chest of the man sitting in front of me right here and now. “Full disclosure, the prince looks just like you.”
Max froze with his teeth half sunk into the second half of his s’
more.
“Not on purpose. But every time I sit down to draw him, boom.” I crunched into my own s’more. “There you are,” I said, though it came out as little more than a spray of graham crackers, but Max understood me. I think if we’d been on opposite ends of a tin-can telephone, we’d have understood each other just fine.
“So I’m your prince?”
I leveled him with a stare, trying to fake seriousness. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, champ.”
He clicked his tongue against his teeth and then went back to stoking the fire. “The princess look like you?” he asked, looking sideways at me.
I thought about it, scrunching up my nose as I imagined her. “Yes. Kind of. Sundresses and Converse.”
Max bit his lip and smiled into the flames. He jabbed at the smoldering fire with the poker. The friction of the logs sent an ember cartwheeling through the air. It landed on the quilt in my lap and sprang up into a tiny blaze.
17
Max
I slapped my hand to her inner thigh to extinguish the fire, and Rosie stared at me.
“Fuck, sorry. You okay?” I asked, but I didn’t take my hand away. In fact, I gripped her tighter, and it had fuck-all to do with putting out fires.
“I’m okay. Are you okay?” Her eyes were wide and innocent almost. If not innocent, then maybe shocked. The fire crackled in the pit, and for one slow-motion second, I gripped her thigh to show her I wanted—so fucking much—for her to be mine again. To show her that the way I was burning for her was even hotter than anything that fire pit could throw at us. For that thigh to be the one I and I alone would grab and kiss and worship. For that body to be mine. For her to be mine. I’d seen her smiling self in the photographic negative of the world that used to make sense. I’d seen the depths, and I wanted to dive deep again.
So Good (An Alpha Dogs Novel) Page 11