Chapter 5 Sab #3
“Before breakfast?” I crouch, my giant body dwarfing hers in ways that makes my heart clench and remind me she used to live in a world where Roidy Dwayne paid regular visits. “How’s your brain going to work without croissants, mon petit c?ur?”
Croissants I now have in abundance thanks to our shopping expedition yesterday, but Esme doesn’t much care. She wants to read the Christmas books I bought in July and I live to make her happy, so we sit and do just that until the growling in my belly starts to frighten her.
“Bear in there.” She pokes my stomach. “Un ours,” she repeats in perfect French.
“Clever girl.” I kiss the dark waves on her head that make her look like Tam. “Can we eat now?”
She’s not that fussed until I break out the Nutella. Then she’s all in, and we eat in the living room, on the couch, which turns out to be the stupidest idea I’ve had for a while.
Croissant crumbs.
Brown stains that look a hell of a lot like something else.
With Esme bombing around on a sugar high, it takes me a while to clean up, and it’s probably the first time in the last week or so I forget Galen exists. It’s afternoon when I chase Esme into the garden and catch a flash of auburn hair in his kitchen window.
He’s home.
Merde.
Somehow, knowing he’s in his house makes it feel closer. Makes him feel closer, as if his hot gaze is all over me, and I don’t entirely hate it, save the royal state of me after a Nutella-fuelled morning with a toddler.
I have Rudolf-red Play-Doh in my beard.
In the bathroom, I scrub it out while Esme watches L’Apprenti Père Noel in my bed, and I try not to peep through the open window at the terraced house on the other side of the fence, next to the alley.
Cinnamon Row sits higher and posher than Cosmic Avenue. It makes Galen’s house seem taller than mine, and I have to tilt my head to study his bedroom window.
You don’t know that’s his bedroom.
But for once, the heckler in my brain is wrong. I’ve fitted eight kitchens in Galen’s style of house on Cinnamon Row, and unless he’s camped out in the box room at the front, I’m definitely staring at his bedroom.
So stop.
I manage it. But probably only because the curtains are drawn and there’s nothing to see. Plus the distinct lack of noise filtering out of my own room that has me on high alert, a suspicious quiet that means Esme’s either napping or emptying my sock drawer again.
As it happens, she’s fast asleep, which leaves me at the kind of loose end that spelled trouble even before I found Galen.
Or he found me.
I take a baby monitor downstairs and outside.
Sit on my back porch and ignore the workout equipment I lugged out last weekend.
It’s the kind of moment where I miss cigarettes, but nothing and no one could convince me to take up smoking again.
I don’t want my baby girl to ever scent that shit on my skin.
I want her to think I’m strong, and yet the weight bench doesn’t call to me.
Instead, my phone does. I dig it from my pocket and reply to a message from Tam, telling him I don’t need him to cook me Sunday dinner, all the while knowing I’ll let him do it anyway.
It’s good for Esme to know what Sundays are all about.
It’s good for me too, but I’m not thinking about that as I let the coiled heat in my belly guide me to the app buried deeper in my phone. To the chat thread that has me hyperventilating as I realise I never answered Galen’s question this morning.
HotCraic97: Do you want to?
I’ve fallen into a well-trodden routine of overthinking every response I send him, then typing out the truth anyway. It’s a pointless way to waste time, one I can’t seem to stop, but with the searing memory of his kiss fighting for dominance with the frigid winter air, I give in pretty quickly.
LeLionDuBois96: I think so, but I’m shit-scared I’ll be too nervous to do anything
I don’t know what Sunday means for Galen. If he’s getting in from work or just heading out. If he’s sleeping. If he’s fucking someone.
Lots of someones.
Fuck. Heat rattles me, despite the cold from the icy deck seeping through my clothes, and I brace for his silence. And a long wait for him to break it.
But like this morning, his reply is lightning fast, and throws me for a loop.
HotCraic97: You never need to be scared around me
So far, I haven’t been. Even when I was kissing him. When he was kissing me. So I type out the first words that spill into my crowded brain.
LeLionDuBois96: What if you’re not there?
HotCraic97: What if I am?
I blow out a breath. What the hell is he saying? That he wants to hook up with me? That he’ll hold my fucking hand while I hook up with other people?
Other men?
Fucking hell. I try to imagine an encounter with multiple participants.
With Galen there too, and I’m so out of my depth it’s not funny.
I find myself trying to recall if Tam ever used apps like FlingIt.
Shake my head as it dawns on me that even if my big brother had ever needed to, I’d have been too off my nut to notice. Too self-absorbed.
Too selfish.
Galen’s typing again. Guilt is a wicked beast, but anticipation wins the day. Those flickering dots become my sole focus and I’m in danger of gnawing my bottom lip clean off.
HotCraic97: That’s to say, if you ever need a wingman for a meet, I got you
The message pops up, but the dots don’t go away. Galen keeps typing for ages before he abruptly goes offline.
A frown folds my face in half. My thumbs hover, as if by typing out a message he’ll suddenly reappear and unfuck the complex place my imagination has taken me to. A low-lit room…somewhere, where every connotation of what he’s saying plays out in HD.
Him.
Me.
Other people.
The more I think about it, the more I like it.
The more I hate it.
I want it…maybe?
I know I want him.
Galen.
But what if this is the only way he wants me?
Merde, my head feels more tangled than the Christmas lights I promised Esme I’d get down from the loft if she chilled out in my bed for a little while.
And I know it’s a me problem. One that years ago I’d have blasted through with a bag of sniff and an endless night of nothing.
But these days I have nothing but silence for company, at least until Esme wakes up, and it leaves me at the mercy of the fear I’ve carried since I first told Charmaine I’d noticed the same hunk of muscle in the street she had.
The one she had to tear her gaze from to notice I was speaking.
“Why are you always trying to be like your brother? You know you’ll never, like, be him, right?”
Ugh. I do not need to relive that conversation right now.
Even thinking about it has me wanting to pitch my phone over the fence and never look at it again.
Never mind that it’s Galen’s fence and I haven’t replied to most of the messages he’s sent me today.
A reality that sends a different fear coursing through me.
I’ve been out here too long. I need to get the lights from the loft before Esme wakes up.
Untangle them without her tiny hands getting caught in the wire, and make a plan for how I’m going to wrap them around her favourite tree in the garden.
I need to message Galen back before he gets bored of my shitty dithering and moves on to someone else.
Fuck it.
I rise, typing. Fire a message into the black, then toss my phone onto the frost-dusted deck, abandoning it, turning my back on the house on the other side of the fence.
It’s a reckless message.
Impulsive.
Probably a mistake.
But something deep in me—something quiet and insistent—won’t shut up, or let it lie.
I’ve only just met him. It shouldn’t matter this much. And yet, I can’t live with that Friday night kiss being the first and last time he looks at me as if I’m the one lighting him on fire, or any other metaphor that doesn’t pun badly with his occupation.
I don’t want that kiss to be the end.