Chapter Eight TruthDare But You Can’t Pick Dare #2
I raise my eyebrow when I notice the two cups of coffee in her hands. Maybe salvation isn’t that far off after all. I’d dance with the devil for a cup of coffee at this point. Why not?
“What’s this?” I ask, gesturing to the two cups in her hands.
“Why do you hate me?” Nikki asks, the same smile stuck on her face. The same cheery tone she just wished me good morning with
falling out of her mouth again, easy as breathing.
“What?” I ask, stunned by how forward she’s being.
The old Nikki was the queen of beating around the bush, so desperate to avoid confrontation and uncomfortable conversations that she’d skirt around them until we both exploded, all rational forms of communication long gone out the window. Now, here, today, she’s actually meeting things head-on?
Suspicious.
“Tell me why you hate me, and you get the coffee. You still like oat milk and three sugars, right?”
“Yes,” I regretfully admit. It’s possible that I haven’t changed as much as I thought.
“Tell. Me,” she says, carefully enunciating each word behind her perfectly glossed smile.
“You’re blackmailing me?” I huff.
“No, I’m bribing you. There’s a difference.”
“Fine, keep your coffee, then.” I shrug, even though I’m practically a cartoon animal sniffing the aroma so hard I risk floating
toward it.
“Fair enough,” she says. “I’ll drink it myself.”
“You hate oat milk,” I remind her.
She tilts her head, eyeing me. “Not anymore. Not for years.”
“Since when?”
“Since you took off and it was one of the last things I had to remind me of you. You left me a half-full carton. It was the
only thing of yours you didn’t take or toss. I got drunk and chugged it and then cried when it was gone. From then on, whenever
I got groceries, I would replace it.”
“Oh,” I say awkwardly, letting her admission settle over us before I remember myself and pull out my order pad, mumbling,
“Did you need more flowers?”
I’m still searching for a pen when Nikki sets the coffee down on the counter and slides it toward me. I look up, confused.
“Drink it, it’s yours. I was just kidding about the ‘tell me’ stuff.”
“No, you weren’t.”
“No, I wasn’t.” She smiles. “But I’d rather keep things light than run you off again. If you don’t want to talk about that,
then pick something else.”
“Like what?”
“Like anything,” she says, and the strangest part is that she sounds like she really means it.
“How about your order?” I ask.
She sighs, and then pulls out her phone, showing me a complicated arrangement. “Can you do something like this?”
“I’m missing a few of the flowers, but I think I can pull together something similar. Where’s it going?”
She rambles off an address and I jot it down, sighing at the sight of the familiar LA zip code. The curves of the numbers
feel so foreign under my pen now, but I remember when they used to belong to me too.
“Is this another ‘thank you for letting me bang your brains out’ arrangement?” I ask, trying to keep myself on task. Trying
to remember to be snarky and cool and calm. Trying to remember not to fall apart because she’s wearing that goddamn perfume
again and it’s taking all my willpower not to lean into her neck and—
“Glad you remember my skills in bed so fondly.” She smirks, like she can tell exactly what I’m thinking.
I blush and shift in my seat, grabbing for one of the little note cards we write messages on and doing my best to ignore her
comment. “What do you want on the card?”
She frowns and then humors me. “How about ‘This week was magical. All my love, Nik.’”
A surprising jolt of jealousy twists deep and angry in my belly, writhing its way under my skin until it reaches my fingertips.
I write out the words, nearly tearing the paper in the process from the force of my scribbling.
“Holding the pen a little tightly, aren’t you, Ducharme?”
“It’ll go out tonight,” I say, effectively dismissing her.
“Perfect, thank you,” she says, but she doesn’t move.
“Can I . . . help you with something else?”
“I thought you’d never ask.” She grins and reaches into her messenger bag, pulling out another small stack of papers. “I have
another chapter for you.”
“I told you I wasn’t doing that at the diner,” I say, even though I can practically already hear my mother’s disappointed
voice.
Sorry you raised a coward, Mom.
“Technically, you said, ‘I can’t do this right now.’ I’m not even convinced that you were talking about the chapter—there
was a lot going on at that point. Either way, it’s not ‘right now’ anymore. It’s later. Will you read it later?”
I look up at her, I mean really look at her. Her words are cheerful, sure, but her eyes are tired like she hasn’t been sleeping and her lips are drawn tight
from nerves—just like they used to get right before someone yelled “action.”
I sigh. “Leave it on the counter and I’ll see what I can do.”
I watch the relief spread through her face before I look down at my little pad and pen. She slides the papers toward me and
then steps back. “See you later, Ducharme.”
I don’t take a sip of the coffee until after she’s left. I hope that it somehow tastes all wrong so I can throw it away.
It’s frustratingly perfect.
Nikki is back again the next morning, two coffee cups in tow. She’s added a giant M&M cookie that I recognize as being from
the bakery down the street. I never used to eat garbage like that when we lived together, so I know this is just a guess on
her part, but she’s dead-on. Again.
Fuuuuck.
I accept the coffee and cookie and grab my order pen and pad. “Don’t talk until I drink this. My coffee maker is still on
the fritz.” My pen hovers over the order sheet, but Nikki says nothing—not even after I pointedly tap it a few times. My eyebrows
shoot up as I look at her. “Nikki.”
She sucks her lips into her mouth and shrugs, her eyes wide.
“What are you doing?” I snap. “Stop being weird. I just told you I haven’t had my coffee yet.”
Her cheeks puff as she blows out a breath, leaning over the counter. “I don’t know what to do right now. You told me not to
talk,” she says, her voice barely even a whisper—it’s more like her lips are forming words as she exhales. There’s hardly
any sound at all.
“Oh my god.” I groan. “I meant let’s do the flowers first so I can wake up before you bombard me about the new chapter, okay?”
“Sure,” she says, keeping her voice quiet as she quickly orders another elaborate arrangement to be shipped out to somebody
in LA I’ve never heard of. “And for the record,” she adds, “I’m actually trying extremely hard not to annoy you . . . which
is why I wasn’t making a peep. I remember what mornings were like when you didn’t have any coffee. Yikes.”
“I wasn’t that bad,” I protest, pulling together as many flowers as I can with one hand while chugging my coffee with the
other.
“You told Eliza to go fuck herself once when you were still pre-caffeine. And don’t get me started on all the empty mugs you
would leave in our shower,” she says, taking the flowers from me to free up one of my hands. Our fingers brush against each
other’s and I swear her breath catches.
“Okay, for one, I would have told your agent to go fuck herself at any hour of the day, caffeinated or not,” I say, shoving
more flowers into her hands as I move around the store. “As to your second point, I was multitasking. Coffee in the shower
is underrated. Plus, if I drank while the conditioner sat for a bit, I’d be all perked up by the time I was out. You should
thank me for my efficiency.”
“Riiiiight,” Nikki says, stretching out the word. “It was definitely fueled by your commitment to efficiency and not at all
by your massive caffeine addiction and obsession with staying up too late.”
“Hey!” I laugh. “I’m not the one with addiction issues.”
The words fall light and teasing out of my mouth before I really register what I’m even saying. Nikki goes still beside me,
and I don’t blame her.
“Oh my god, I was joking, but that was too far,” I say. “I’m sorry. The words just came out. I swear I’m not making light
of—”
“It’s okay,” Nikki says, although some of the brightness has left her eyes.
“No, it isn’t. I shouldn’t have brought it up at all, and definitely not as joke.” I groan, dropping my head back before meeting her eyes again. “The chapter?” I offer. “Want to talk about that instead?”
“Depends on if you’re done with that,” she says, tapping the lid of my coffee with a small smile. She’s throwing me a bone—navigating
us back into safer waters—and I’m not about to look a gift horse in the mouth.
“Close enough,” I say, tipping the coffee cup back and chugging it. “All done. Too bad my shower’s upstairs. I guess I’ll
just leave my empty on the counter or something.”
She lets out a tiny laugh, more of an exhale than a sound. “You could just put it in the garbage.”
I press my hand to my chest, gasping as I walk back to the counter. “This is recyclable, Colletti!”
Nikki blinks at me. “You really have changed if you’re even recycling your own stuff now.”
“I helped recycle when we lived together!” I yelp.
“Sure, sure,” she says, following me back and setting the rest of the flowers on the counter. “If by ‘helped recycle’ you
mean ‘left all your cans and cardboard boxes on the counter for me to deal with,’ then yes. You were an expert recycler.”
I fight off a second smile, tipping my chin up proudly. “I do count that, actually,” I say.
“I stand corrected.”
“You do. Speaking of . . .” I pull out the pages of the manuscript from the drawer next to me, passing them back to her and
then making myself busy with her order.
I glance up at her a few times as she flips through the dozen or so pages that detail our first few weeks of filming.
Her eyebrows have pinched together—a look of confusion?
Concern? Something else?—slipping across her face as she takes in everything I’ve marked as needing to be revised.
She catches me the next time I look at her, our eyes meeting, and my stomach flips as I rush back to trimming the stems.
“You took out all the stuff about us,” she says. Her voice is neutral, but her face is giving her away.
“You’re mad.”
“I’m not mad,” she says. “I’m just curious.”
“It wasn’t accurate.”
The disappointment on her face morphs back into confusion. “What do you mean it wasn’t accurate?”
“You made it sound like you were obsessed with me and I was oblivious.”
“I’ve been obsessed with you since the day we met,” she says, her eyes flashing. “You were oblivious or at least you pretended to be.”
My stomach flips again, but in an entirely new way that sends heat spooling through my veins. I swallow hard and look away.
I don’t know how to respond to that. I don’t even know if I should. But I do know that I absolutely cannot read into her using
the present tense. Alarm bells screech in my brain.
“I’ll be right back. I have to grab the shipping stuff,” I say, rushing past her. Cowarding out again.
She reaches out as I walk by, two of her fingers colliding with my wrist, soft and gentle but enough to stop me in my tracks.
I look down at where our bodies meet. I blush remembering all the times her two fingers made me—
“Please stop running,” she says.
My eyes snap to hers. “I’m not running, I’m just getting a box,” I say, my voice sounding strained.
She nods, letting her hand fall away. I instantly miss the warmth.
“Come in the back with me,” I say, because I’m an idiot. Because I’m confused. Because closure is the last thing I’m looking
for when I’m this high on a simple touch.
Nikki follows me into the glorified closet, a new spring in her step.
“This is where the magic happens,” I mumble, scanning the shipping shelves for the right size box. I grab the nearest one
and spin around to face her. “And by ‘the magic’ I mean ‘the empty boxes and vases,’ of course.”
Nikki crowds closer to me, so close I swear I feel her body heat through the fabric of my long-sleeved tee. She leans against
the metal rack, raising her eyebrows, like she can tell how flustered I am with her in my space.
“Close quarters in here,” she says, eyeing me, our bodies just a few inches apart.
I take a deep breath, trying to calm my racing heart, only to find the air tainted with the familiar smell of Nikki. Her perfume, sure, but also her hair spray, her bodywash, the lotion she constantly applies to her hands to keep them soft.
She smells exactly the same—she smells like home.
No. No, she smells like our old apartment. Not home. Home is here. Home has to be here, I tell myself. What the hell am I doing?
Nikki reaches for me, like that’s something we just do now.
She curls her hand around a lock of my hair.
“I like it shorter,” she says. “Since we’re allowed to talk about hair now and all.
” She gives it a little tug. A tiny gasp escapes my lips as I remember all the other times her hand has had my strands wrapped around it.
“Nikki . . .”
An iPhone alarm shatters the moment, and she pulls back. “I have to go,” she says, sounding regretful about it.
I nod, not trusting my voice.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, though.”
She smiles at me one last time, tucking my hair back before turning away, and then I’m alone—watching her leave—haunted by
her lingering scent.