10. Grocery Store Girls
Grocery Store Girls
Josie
With the shared stress of the day, my lingering exhaustion from overheating, and the various drugs we’ve taken, Wyatt and I retire to our separate bedrooms when we get back to the cottage.
We stopped for our prescriptions and fast food on the way, riding and eating in almost total silence as the sun set.
I can’t believe I’ve been here an entire day already.
The whole thing feels like a hazy dream.
I’m out almost immediately after climbing in bed, after only a few seconds of anxious thoughts about the fact that I am sharing a house with Wyatt .
I wake up with the sun the next morning, starving and sleep sated.
From my bed, I can hear Wyatt’s steady breathing, which is heavy but not quite snoring.
The weird intimacy of it sends a burst of restlessness through me.
With my swelling almost completely resolved, getting out of the house and moving sounds great.
It also will put some needed physical distance between me and Wyatt.
The temperature is just warming up and so are the cicadas, who drone on and off sleepily rather than maintaining the consistent buzz that comes in late summer afternoons.
I walk to the end of the driveway and, upon seeing zero zombie pigs lying in wait, head to the stop sign and back.
I steer very clear of the sides of the road and any plants.
When I get back, feeling endorphin happy and summer sweaty, I bypass the cottage and wander down to the dock, where I sit on a wooden bench built right near the end.
Even with the heat increasing exponentially by the second, it’s peaceful.
Something about the light on the waves and the gentle slap of water against the boat calms the skittering nerves that have plagued me almost since I got here.
I could live here. The stray thought slams into me and makes me jump to my feet and head inside.
Because no—I cannot live here. At least not more than however long it takes to get Wyatt back on his feet, crutch-free. And if I have my way, it will be as few days as possible.
First step: Get Wyatt to his follow-up appointments.
Which sounds deceptively simple and turns out to be stupid hard.
“No,” Wyatt says simply when I ask to speak to his doctor.
“What do you mean, no?”
“I mean,” he says, slowly, like spacing out the syllables will help me understand, “no.”
We’re having this argument, which sounds very much like the kind I’d have with one of the students at my school, in the kitchen.
After my walk and a quick shower, I sat down and shoved the blueprints out of the way to write a grocery list. A dire necessity considering the barren state of the kitchen and of my stomach.
Wyatt crutched in a few minutes later, looking disheveled in the way only very good-looking people can. Meanwhile, I’ve got wet hair starting to frizz and clothes wrinkled from being stuffed in a suitcase. I’m assuming there’s no iron in the house.
“Wyatt, that’s why my brother has me staying here. My job is to make sure you see the doctor and—”
“No.”
“Fine,” I tell him. “I won’t talk to your doctor. You talk to him. Make an appointment, and I’ll drive you.”
“No,” he repeats.
“I don’t accept your no,” I tell him loftily in a case-closed kind of tone. Even though I’m positive he can out-stubborn me. “We’ll circle back to this conversation later.”
Because it’s too early for this, especially since the only caffeine I’ve had since I arrived in Kilmarnock was a disgusting cup of hospital coffee I practically had to bribe a nurse to bring me.
“But for now, I’m going to the store.” I set down my pencil and fold my grocery list.
And then I almost fall out of my chair when Wyatt says, “I’ll come with you.”
At Wyatt’s insistence, we end up at the Rivah Maht. I find myself muttering the name over and over in a very bad Boston accent as I walk inside, Wyatt crutching along behind me.
Because this is a thing I do now—I share a house and grocery shop with Wyatt Jacobs.
The teen girl behind the nearest register looks up from a magazine. She has platinum hair and three eyebrow rings. On a scale of enthusiasm, her expression is about a one-point-five out of ten.
“Welcome to Riv er Ma rt .” She pronounces both words in the proper way, not how the name is spelled, vindictively saying the r ’s. Picking up a paper, she holds it out to me. “Map?”
“A map? Of...Kilmarnock?” I ask.
The main part of the town is like six blocks, if I’m being generous. Maybe more like three.
“A map of the store,” she clarifies. “Take it. Trust me.”
Before I can explain that I have, in fact, been inside a grocery store in my life, Wyatt appears next to me. The girl’s expression shifts to recognition. “Oh,” she says, and snatches the map out of reach. “Guess you don’t need this.”
I don’t think I needed it anyway, considering I’m not some grocery store novice. But now I kind of want the map. Too bad the employee has disappeared behind one of several empty registers and is flipping through a tabloid magazine.
“Do you come here often?” I ask Wyatt as we move past the register, then huff out a breath when he arches an eyebrow. “I mean literally. Not like a pickup line.”
“Yes” is his enlightening answer.
The man has mastered single syllables. He should sell an online training course.
Briefly, I wish for his antibiotic to fail. I vastly prefer feverish Wyatt to this closed-off version. Which is, I guess, his default setting.
For years Jacob has tried to brush off my assessment of Wyatt as a series of misunderstandings. Just like he did the other day with Wyatt calling the cops on me.
But at a certain point, patterns speak to character. You can only chalk up so many incidents as misunderstandings.
It wasn’t an accident when Wyatt tagged along with Jacob for my nineteenth birthday, which resulted in two of my friends getting into a fight over him that permanently tore apart my friend group.
Or when Wyatt also felt the need to come to my graduation celebration, then got a call about some issue with a sponsor that required him to leave in the middle of dinner, taking Jacob with him as well.
No biggie. I didn’t need my own brother at my graduation dinner.
And both situations are made worse in the context of the night Wyatt and I met.
During the spring of my freshman year of college, I came home for a long weekend. At the very last minute, my brother decided to come home too. I was thrilled. When Jacob left for college I missed him a ridiculous amount, but inexplicably I missed him even more when I started school.
I got home first, and our house shifted into the usual frenzy of excitement whenever Jacob is involved.
My parents and I rolled out all the metaphorical red carpets for my brother.
Mom baked his favorite cake—tres leches, which to me is not a cake but a sponge soaked in dairy.
The pantry and fridge were stocked with his favorite foods, and I even scrubbed the toilet in our Jack and Jill bathroom, my least favorite chore.
We fell just short of hanging a banner on the front porch.
And I think if Jacob had given more than twelve hours’ notice, Dad would have made one at the print shop he owns.
As it was, he was too backed up with orders for birthday yard signs and a set of car magnets for a steamy romance author featuring a man’s glistening and overly muscled torso.
(I only know because Dad sent me a selfie with the car magnet, his face next to the abs looking appropriately frightened.)
When Jacob’s car pulled into the driveway, however, he wasn’t alone. Mom gasped at the sight of another figure, probably thinking it might be a woman—which would have been a first.
But it was a man who stepped out of the car.
Not just technically a man in that he was over eighteen.
Where my brother still hadn’t outgrown his boyish qualities, Wyatt already looked like a man .
Both in his build—tall and broad—and the way he carried himself.
There was something firmer and steadier about him, something more serious about his eyes.
And he had the kind of handsome features normally reserved for A-list actors.
All of which made me suddenly feel very young and very self-conscious.
“This is Wyatt,” Jacob said after his required extensive hugging of Mom and Dad. “He plays hockey.”
I stiffened at this, but no one noticed. Maybe no one except Wyatt, whose slate-gray eyes stayed pinned on me even as he shook Mom’s and Dad’s hands.
When Jacob noticed me slipping behind our parents, he yanked me past them and toward Wyatt. “Don’t be shy,” he said. “Come meet the man who’s going to make me rich one day.”
Before even finishing high school, my brother decided he was going to be an agent. Once he had this plan, he never wavered. Clearly, Wyatt was aware, as he didn’t protest or even react to that introduction.
But when Wyatt held out his hand, I had a reaction. It wasn’t about him specifically. More about his size. Who—and what—he reminded me of as he stepped closer, towering over me.
I flinched, taking a big step back, almost behind my brother, like he was going to be a human shield between me and his new best friend.
My reaction, one I hadn’t planned but couldn’t take back or explain, seemed to mortally offend him. Though I felt bad, I had no intention of explaining to him or my brother.
I scurried into the house and attempted to avoid Wyatt.
The same way I’d avoided all Jacob’s jock friends since my junior year of high school.
I couldn’t skip dinner together, during which I felt Wyatt’s heavy stare— glare?
—on me all the way up until I helped clear the table and retreated back into the safety of my room and its locked door.