Chapter 22
Luke
She put her walls back up.
Just when I thought I’d never see them again, she built each and every one even taller and stronger than ever.
She asked me what happened the night before?
What the hell did happen the night before Grant’s party, and why is it a complete blur?
I know I drank a lot with the guys that night, more than I ever had before, and it was years ago, but did I really blackout the night I destroyed my relationship with Annie?
I’ve been pacing outside her door all day, hoping to see her, but she’s been avoiding me. She only comes out when I’m not around—either when I’m letting Rosie out or when I’m in my room.
My hands are in the pockets of my jeans, and I feel the tube of cherry lip gloss I stole of Annie’s a little while ago. I carry it with me as a reminder of her, along with the tattoo on my thigh that has finally fully healed. Both a secret I keep for myself, aside from Eddie who was with me for the tattoo.
We’re supposed to leave for Mia and Eddie’s for Sunday Dinner, and I know Annie wouldn’t miss it, so I’m biding my time, just outside her door .
We need to leave now to make it there by six.
And I’m getting impatient.
I need to see her.
Just when I’m about to knock on the door, it opens. Annie is wearing an oversized t-shirt and jean shorts, her brown hair slicked back in a bun at the back of her head. Her lashes are long, framing her big brown eyes, and I spot a few freckles on her nose from being out in the sun this summer.
I can also see the slight redness to them, and my chest cracks.
I clear my throat. “Um, ready to go?” I ask, hoping we can both just ignore that I was waiting outside her door like some kind of stalker.
She nods, and it’s out of character.
Why isn’t she telling me to fuck off, or rolling her eyes at my “stalker tendencies”?
She stalks past me, grabbing the containers of brownies she packed up. One minute, the brownies were laid out on a cooling rack on the counter. I go outside to take Rosie around the block, and when I come back, they’re in her containers.
“Are we bringing Rosie?” she asks quietly, and her voice sounds familiar yet foreign.
“You heard your mom, Ro-Ro. Let’s go see your sister,” I say, grabbing her leash from where it’s hanging by the door, and hoping to get anything out of Annie—asking for a smile would be delusional, but an eye roll, a death glare, a quip about her not being Rosie’s mom.
I need something from her.
Hearing the noise of the leash, Rosie hops off the couch and comes to sit, her tail wagging as I bend down to clip it up to her collar, but still, Annie doesn’t say anything .
As I stand, I see Annie has already opened the front door of the apartment and started walking down the hall.
The car ride to Mia and Eddie’s is the same.
Annie doesn’t say a word.
I watch her out of the corner of my eye as I drive, and her usual edge, that confidence that I’ve watched blossom over the last seven years, is gone.
***
I knock on the door to Mia and Eddie’s, holding the containers of brownies Annie made. One has frosting, the other powdered sugar. Emmett, Annie, and Mia like brownies with frosting, and Drew, Eddie, and I like powdered sugar on ours. It took one Christmas four years ago, arguing over which way is better, for Annie to say she’ll just make both.
“Shit,” Annie mutters under her breath, but I don’t have time to ask her what’s wrong before Drew opens the door. Eddie and Emmett are on the couch, Eddie holding Lennon in his lap as she stares at the faces Mia is making at her from the floor.
“I’d say something about me having to play host while they occupy my baby, but I feel like we all share houses at this point,” Drew says with a smile, grabbing the containers of brownies from me.
The three of us follow her into the kitchen, Rosie proving Drew’s point that each of our homes is as much of ours as they are each other’s, waltzing right into Mia and Eddie’s place like she owns it, plopping down with Daisy on her dog bed.
Mia looks over at us from where she is on the floor in the living room, and her smile instantly drops when she looks past me and sees Annie a few steps behind me .
“Ann, what’s wrong?” Mia asks, and the entire room shifts. Drew sets down the brownie containers and turns to Annie, the guys looking up from Lennon and directly at us.
“I—” Annie starts before slapping a head against her forehead and letting out a shaky exhale. “I forgot the powdered sugar for the brownies.”
She says it like she’s a second away from crying, and I think we all know she’s not upset about forgetting something at the grocery store. Drew and Mia immediately fall into action.
Drew walks over to Annie, gently placing a hand on her arm like she is tending to a wounded animal. “It’s okay. We can run and grab some,” Drew says before turning to the living room. “Right, Mia?”
Mia is already up from the floor and walking into the kitchen. “Absolutely. We can go right now. The boys can handle baby duty and dinner until we get back.”
Mia is already grabbing her purse and keys, and Drew is pushing Annie out the front door. I try to catch Annie’s eye, but she won’t look at me. Drew looks over, meeting my eyes, giving me a little nod that says, “We got her.”
I feel so many emotions rush through me as the door shuts behind the three of them, but I don’t have time to process them before I turn back to the living room, where Emmett and Eddie look at me, Eddie still holding Lennon. “You wanna tell us what that was about?”
A laugh escapes my throat, one free of humor, at how I’m supposed to answer that question. “I have no fucking clue,” I say, running a hand through my hair before basically throwing myself to the ground in front of the two of them .
Mia and Eddie’s apartment is about the size of mine; a big living room that connects to the kitchen, with a dining table that separates the two rooms. Their living room has a white fluffy rug in front of the couch, and I feel the material tickle the back of my neck as I lay back, pressing my palms into my eyes until I see stars.
“Well, you can either tell us your side of the story,” Eddie continues, gently putting Lennon into her portable rocker as Emmett watches his every move. “Or, we can hear Annie’s side of the story from the girls later tonight. Your choice.”
I let out a groan, only for Emmett to kick me in the head. “Ow,” I mumble, letting my arms fall to my sides. My vision is blurry as my eyes re-regulate to the light.
“What did you do?” Emmett growls, and it actually sparks a little fear in me.
Emmett took a while to warm up to me. Whether it was because he suspected some sort of history between Annie and me or because I made every effort to counter his grumpiness when I started working for him, I’ll never know. The two of us built a relationship solely because I refused to let him not like me.
I spent our shifts together trying to get him to talk to me, smiling at him, and asking about his day even when he looked like he wanted to kill me, but it worked. We’re more than coworkers or friends, we’ve become family along the way.
But right now, Emmett doesn’t feel like that.
Right now, he feels like someone who will hurt anyone who hurts Annie.
Emmett and Annie rarely acknowledge their history. Emmett is over a decade older than us, but he’s known Annie since she was a kid with her dad always bringing her to the bar he frequented before he left her and her mom.
Emmett hadn’t seen her since she was in middle school when she randomly turned up for a job the summer after we graduated high school, a lot happening to the both of them during their time apart.
I sit up from where I’m lying on the floor and shake my head, pushing myself up to standing and walk over to the dining table where there are stacks of plates and bowls and piles of silverware. “I honestly don’t know what I did, but I know I did something.”
Eddie and Emmett follow me, Emmett keeping Lennon in his line of sight but following Eddie to the table.
I start setting the table, just to have something to do with my hands.
“How do you not know what you did? Annie is always the first to tell you when you do something to piss her off,” Eddie mentions, holding out a hand to help me set a plate for all six of us.
I look over at the oven, seeing a timer for twenty more minutes. “Aren’t we on dinner duty until they come back?” I ask, not being able to look either of them in the face while I avoid Eddie’s question.
“The lasagna is basically done. Just need to throw the bread in the oven and toss the salad, but we’ll wait for the girls,” Eddie answers.
I nod because what he’s really saying is “talk”.
So I do. I start at the beginning when I met Annie in first grade, all the way until the last time I saw her the night of Grant’s party, and I can’t stop. I tell them about running into Annie at Lenny’s and seeing her for the first time in months, and I try to put into words how it felt to see her—that new person she was.
I talk about my feelings for her and how all they’ve done is evolve over the years, and I tell them about how I can’t picture my life without her.
My shoulders feel lighter and lighter the more of our story I share with Emmett and Eddie, who genuinely listen and ask the occasional question as they help me set the table. They never once make me feel guilty for not telling them the truth about Annie and me, and I’m grateful for that.
While I’m at it, I tell them about how she’s always been there for me, during all the shit with my dad and my decision to give up what I wanted to do to please him. They know the complexities of my parental dynamics, all of us at one point over the years confiding in each other about our issues with our own families. They echo Annie’s sentiments about doing what I want, not what I think my dad would want.
I tell them about my decision to not become a lawyer and how I want something that’s mine, and that I just don’t know what it is yet.
I see a thought cross Emmett’s face when I say it, but I don’t pause to ask him about it, wanting to get everything out before the girls get back.
I know Annie doesn’t want our friends to know our whole history, but I can’t do this anymore. I can’t keep my feelings for her to myself if I’m going to get her back.
I need help figuring out what the hell I did wrong in the first place.
“Wait, was she with you that night before the Grant guy’s party?” Eddie asks. We finished setting the table, so we’re now just standing around the set dining table. I’m leaning on the chair in front of me, rocking back and forth on my heels.
“No,” I answer, “but I had a lot to drink, and I didn’t drink at Grant’s party the following night because of it.” I exhale. “I honestly barely remember that night.”
Eddie crosses his arms as Emmett leans back on the kitchen island behind him. “But Annie said something happened that night?” Eddie’s brows are tight, his green eyes concentrating on me.
I shake my head. “The hockey team got together with our coaches for dinner that night, and then we all decided to go to one of our teammates' house because his parents were gone for the weekend. Grant was always able to get alcohol at a gas station by the high school because he never got ID’d.”
I wrack my brain for any other memory of that night. “I remember taking shots—a lot of them. We did one for every guy on the team who wasn’t pursuing hockey in college.” I shiver at the thought of how much alcohol was consumed, seeing as though only two guys on the team were sticking with hockey in college.
“So what? A handful of shots in a few hours?” Emmett questions.
“More like eighteen shots in less than two.”
Eddie’s eyes widen as Emmett shakes his head. “No wonder you don’t remember shit,” Emmett scolds. “You’re lucky you didn’t need your stomach pumped.”
While I completely agree, I don’t want to dwell on how I was 18 and stupid with no knowledge of alcohol limits. “It’s safe to say I blacked out.”
“I’m assuming you don’t remember anything after taking the last couple of shots?” Eddie prompts.
“Barely,” I answer, wracking my brain for any memory from that night, a night I never thought twice about until now .
“Are you sure you didn’t say anything or do anything that could’ve hurt Annie’s feelings? We know you wouldn’t hurt her, but that’s a lot of alcohol and you were young.”
I shake my head, my hair whipping my cheeks. “It was just the guys from the team. They barely knew Annie, just knew her as my girlfriend and a friend of their girlfriends.”
“Was she friends with any of their girlfriends?” Emmett asks, all of us invested in getting to the bottom of this.
“Yeah, but—” My body freezes, and I feel like I want to vomit. It’s as if my body is having memories that my brain can’t quite conjure up. My skin feels tight and hot, like I’m coming down with a fever, and everything feels like it’s going in slow motion. I feel like I’m trying to move through water, but I can’t get my arms or legs to move fast enough.
“What is it?” I hear Eddie ask, but I close my eyes. The memory is there, but I can’t make it out.
What happened to me that night?