Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Eighteen

Ainsley and I stand outside Miles’s apartment door, laden with groceries and about to knock, when I hear the distant strains of a vaguely familiar song. I can almost place it. I put my ear to the door but then Ainsley rings the doorbell and the music abruptly cuts off.

Miles answers the door, sliding his phone into his pocket. He’s wearing his new reading glasses, and I almost reflexively slap them off his face. He’s not supposed to be hot. That’s not part of our deal.

“We need your kitchen!” I power through the hotness.

He blinks at me and Ainsley. “Sure? Hey, Ains.”

She salutes and we bustle past him, kicking our shoes off and hauling our groceries.

“Not complaining,” he says, drifting after us into his kitchen. “But there’s a kitchen downstairs.”

“Mom’s working down there and I really, really wanted to make her a birthday cake. As a surprise,” Ainsley says.

“Secret mission,” I add.

“Ah. Okay.” He’s hands in his pockets, watching us unload a bunch of stuff and open and close his cabinet doors looking for everything we need.

“We’re good,” I tell him over my shoulder. “Feel free to go back to brooding. Ainsley, reach that mixing bowl up there.” I lift her up to stand on the counter so she can grab the thing I can’t reach.

Miles strides over, lifts her off the counter in one hand, and reaches up to grab the bowl with the other. “I’ll stay and help,” he decides.

Half an hour later I open the oven door and Miles carefully slides three layers of sheet cake in there. One chocolate, one vanilla, and one Funfetti.

“I still don’t understand what Funfetti is,” Miles says as I close the door on the cakes.

“It can’t be explained,” I tell him. “Only intuited. ”

Miles is already piling dishes in the sink. “I’m just amazed you two managed to make a baked good without adding cocktail onions.”

“That’s only for cupcakes,” Ainsley informs him. “And it doesn’t have to be onions. Sometimes it’s lunch meat.”

He turns around in horror, and Ainsley and I crack up laughing.

I steer her by the shoulders to the bathroom. “Wash hands, please. We can watch a movie or something while the cake bakes, but I don’t want you getting cake batter on Miles’s couch.”

While she washes up I go back to the kitchen and start wiping the counters down.

“You really know how to trash a place,” Miles says, picking up the bowl of chocolate cake batter and swiping his finger through the remains.

“It’s part of my charm.”

He waggles his batter-y finger in my direction. “Speaking of your charms, I really think you need a unibrow.”

He’s threatening to draw one on with cake mix, so I lunge forward and lick the batter clean off his finger. “Problem solved.”

His jaw drops open. He tries to say something and fails, his finger still extended. His eyes land on my mouth and then go back to his finger. I watch while his system reboots. And then finally, “There was raw egg in that.”

“Are we gonna watch Ghostbusters or what?” Ainsley asks, back from the bathroom and hands on her hips.

“I’m in! Miles?”

“If you can figure out how to pull it up on my TV, we can watch it.”

She scrambles to the couch and roughly twelve seconds later she’s shouting back to us, “It’s three ninety-nine to rent, can I do it?”

“Knock yourself out,” Miles calls.

She starts it and Miles and I finish cleaning up his kitchen. As he’s wiping down the last countertop, I raid his fridge and make a plate of veggies and cheese and crackers for Ainsley to snack on.

We go plop on the couch next to her right as the old lady screams in the library. Ainsley eats her snack for a bit and then leaves the rest.

I realize then that he’s got his eyes closed, one arm along the back of the couch behind me, his feet crossed at the ankles in front of him.

I’m not sure if he’s dozing or what. His glasses are off and with his eyes closed he’s not distracting. Actually, he looks sort of…soft. His hair is getting longer these days and as I study him I realize that it grows in a natural cowlick on the left side of his hairline.

So strange, when his eyes are open, he’s fierce and almost handsome. When his eyes are closed he’s not handsome at all and much more huggable. I find myself wanting very much to lean into the negative space created by his open arm along the back of the couch. It looks very warm there, next to his chest.

Ainsley laughs and it brings me back to the movie. When I glance back at Miles, his eyes are open again, but he’s looking at me, not at the screen.

The timer on the oven dings and I scramble up, away from the couch. My heart seems to be running up a hill inside my chest. I wonder what’s at the top.

An hour later Miles is holding a plate stacked with frosted cake and we’re making a game plan outside Reese’s apartment.

“Ains, we don’t want to spoil it at the last second. So you go in and distract her. If she’s in the kitchen, bring her to your room to show her something. Miles and I will get the cake set up on the kitchen table.”

“Okay.” She nods solemnly and then lifts her watch and beep-beeps it. “In exactly five minutes I’ll bring her to the kitchen, so have the candles lit.”

I lift my matching watch and set the same alarm. “Deal.”

She uses her key and slips in through the door.

“She’s so excited,” I whisper up to Miles. “I love seeing her like this. Sometimes she seems almost too mature for her—”

“Catch the door!” Miles hisses.

Too late. The door clicks closed behind Ainsley and locks us out.

“Shit.” Now we’ll have to ring the doorbell to get inside and we’ll ruin the surprise. “What do we do? Clock’s ticking!”

“I have keys,” he says.

“Really? Then why are you always ringing the doorbell?”

“You’re the nosiest person I’ve ever met, so you might not realize, but it’s not actually polite to enter someone else’s home without permission.”

“Well, birthday cake surprise wins over manners today.”

“The keys are in my left front pocket.”

“Oh.” I blink. “Let me take the plate—whoa.”

We iced the cake when it was way too warm, and the three layers may have been a little ambitious. The whole thing is slippery and tenuous. Miles carried it down here like a wire walker at the circus. When I try to take the cake now, the whole thing slides an inch to one side.

“Too risky,” he says, then lifts the cake plate to eye level, clearing the way for me to retrieve the keys.

Okay. So. No big deal. Just have to put my hand in Miles’s pocket. Cool. Easy as pie.

If I dither, this’ll get weird fast, so I just step forward and go in for the kill. I plunge my hand wrist deep into his front pocket. It’s very warm in there.

He grunts and clears his throat.

“Good lord, how deep is this pocket?” I have to go up on my tiptoes to get the right angle and I still have no contact with keys. “Men have all the luck. Girl pockets are like the size of a pack of Tic Tacs. Meanwhile you could hide a dictionary in here.”

He clears his throat again as I’m forced to fish around. My fingers close around something. “Wallet.” I push it to one side and his hips kick accordingly away.

“Careful,” he says menacingly, eyes narrowing on me.

“Right, right, sorry. There’s good stuff in there, I forgot. I’ll keep it at the forefront of my mind.”

“Keys, Lenny. Focus.”

“Right.” I keep fishing. “Unidentified piece of paper.”

I swerve around it and his hips kick to the side again and this time it’s accompanied by a—surely involuntary—chuckle.

“Oh, my God.” I still. “Tell me—did I just learn—are you ticklish?”

My delight must be as palpable as our clear power imbalance.

“Lenny, I swear to God, if you make me drop this cake…”

“Right, right.” I’m scuba-diver deep in this man’s pocket right now and finally, there at the bottom, my fingers close around the keys. “Got ’em.”

Is it just me or does it take an absurdly long time to extract my hand from his pocket?

Finally, I’m free and I jingle the keys, grinning up at him.

He glances at me and then away. And yes. Those are pink cheeks.

He blushes and he’s ticklish. I literally can’t wait to ponder this later.

For now, we’ve got a mission.

We sneak into the apartment and set up the cake, wincing when the lighter seems suspiciously loud. But all goes off without a hitch and Reese gasps and laughs when she comes into a dark kitchen, lit only by the candles on her birthday cake.

“Happy birthday, Mommy!” Ainsley shouts, launching herself bodily at Reese.

Reese scoops her up and then sits right down on the kitchen floor. “ Thank you, baby! I love my cake so much.”

It’s the best cake in the world. Sloppy and sliding off the plate, candles tilting wretchedly this way and that. Hot pink icing mixed with sort of a gray icing that was meant to be purple.

Miles has his hands in his pockets and he’s standing a few feet back, like he doesn’t want to get in the way of this beautiful moment.

How silly. Doesn’t he know that he’s one quarter of this beautiful moment? I elbow him forward.

“Happy birthday, Reese,” he says low. I realize then that Reese’s birthday might actually be a bit of a sensitive moment for the two of them, given their family history. But if it is, Reese chooses to breeze past it. She stands up with Ainsley and then comes over to give Miles a brief one-armed hug. It’s casual and it delights me. I hope he realizes that that kind of hug is not the polite and obligatory kind. That’s a thanks, bro hug.

And so the four of us eat terrible cake before dinner.

If ads affect your reading experience, click here to remove ads on this page.