Chapter 22
TWENTY-TWO
“We’ll just figure it out as we go.” Those words played on repeat through my head for the next two weeks when I woke up with Bree in my bed almost daily.
She looked like an angel in the soft light of morning, her features smooth in sleep.
Her dark hair was in stark contrast to my pillow and always made for a striking scene.
I wanted her here. Not just for now but going forward. I couldn’t say that I wanted her forever—we were far too new for that—but I definitely didn’t want this to be a temporary thing.
In hindsight, it had been inevitable we would end up here.
Our chemistry was palpable. We both felt it.
My question was, could we navigate what felt like messy lives—or more like messy pasts—to keep this up?
I wanted that for us more than anything, but Bree was skittish.
It all revolved around her mother. Bree had been taught at a young age that men didn’t stick around.
Her mother had brought an endless stream of different men into their home after her father left, and none of them had gone the distance.
I, on the other hand, had been taught that life was fragile. My father had loved my mother with everything he had. I didn’t doubt that. Once she was gone, a part of him had died too. What was left was not that attractive.
He couldn’t be alone. I’d figured that out years before.
Being alone was too much for him. He needed someone to take to charity events and go to dinner with him.
The wives, since my mother, hadn’t been love matches.
They’d been temporary distractions. He didn’t feel even a fraction for them of what he’d felt for Mom. He was living half a life.
I couldn’t fix that. We didn’t talk about our feelings in my family. If we did, he would inevitably say something that would make me angry. He would make dismissive comments about his bond with my mother even though I knew they weren’t true. It was beyond frustrating.
So we didn’t discuss anything of importance. We had dinner about once a month and conversed through emails—never texts—otherwise. That was fine. I had other things to worry about—like Bree, and keeping her. I was determined to do just that and needed to figure out the correct way to make it happen.
Her natural instinct was to cut her losses before real feelings developed. There were already real feelings brewing between us—I didn’t doubt that for a moment. I just needed to get her to embrace those feelings. It wouldn’t be easy, but I was determined.
Next to me, she stirred, and I smiled down at her. “Hey, sunshine,” I drawled in a teasing voice.
She was the opposite of sunshine in the morning. She was grumpy to the point of being hilarious. I didn’t mind, though. I adored every obstinate inch of her.
“Ha ha.” She wiped her mouth, which was always her first instinct. She was a bit of a drooler, although I would never say that to her. I didn’t mind—it was just another thing I found cute—but she was self-conscious about it, making me wonder if her mother used to make fun of it.
Everything that irritated Bree seemed to stem from her childhood.
“What’s the plan for the day?” I asked when she snuggled closer, her head landing on my shoulder.
I slid my arm under her and tugged her tighter against my side. This was my favorite part of the day—us waking up together. She was soft and pliable, cuddly even, before she put her armor on to face the world.
“Work,” she replied. “I need to get some words in.”
She wasn’t the only one. I was ahead of schedule and racing toward the finish line on my fantasy book. It was good. I acknowledged that. But the mystery was still filling my creative well.
Our routine hadn’t changed all that much in the past two weeks.
She spent the night. I made breakfast most mornings, at which point I tried to sneak in things like avocado toast and omelets to see if she would eat them.
She never complained and ate everything I put in front of her—another thing that was ingrained in her because food had not gone to waste when she was a child—but whenever we went out, she still ordered from her self-imposed limited menu.
It had become something of a personal challenge to get her to order something else. So far, she wasn’t budging.
After breakfast, she went home to get cleaned up.
One thing she refused to do, much to my chagrin, was bring clothes and toiletries to put in my house.
I’d suggested that almost from the beginning, because she mocked my two-in-one shampoo and conditioner.
She’d denied me right away, which I took personally …
until I thought it through. Growing up, Bree couldn’t afford to replace shampoo, toothpaste, and hairbrushes.
Now she made sure to take care of those things.
She’d even admitted she spent more on shampoo and conditioner now than they’d spent on a week of groceries when she was a kid.
She wouldn’t risk leaving those things behind until she felt completely comfortable with me.
I couldn’t force that to happen—I wouldn’t want to if I could—but she had to get to a place in her mind where she equated me with safety.
So I waited and made sure she knew exactly what I wanted to offer her. I didn’t push. This relationship was being built on Bree’s timeline, and I was totally fine with that.
We still met to write by the pool area three days a week, driving there separately. The pool would no longer be an option in two weeks, when school ended. I was actively looking for another place for us to write outdoors, but I hadn’t come up with anything yet.
Two days a week, we wrote at our respective houses.
We were both cranking out words, which I took as a good sign.
On days we didn’t write together, we still ate dinner together.
We still passed out in my bed together. Our two lives were overlapping comfortably.
I had never been happier. Bree seemed happy too.
Well, except for one thing. Her mother was still living with her and showed no signs of leaving.
She appeared to still be dating my father, too, which should have been uncomfortable for both of us, but Bree was brutally blasé about it.
My father would dump her mother—the only one who didn’t seem to realize that was Sylvia—and they would go their separate ways.
Bree had warned me that her mother was likely to turn dramatic when it happened, to the point where she would confront my father publicly.
I’d considered warning him—there was nothing my father loathed more than a public display of crazy—but I opted against it.
My father needed to learn a lesson about his dating.
If Bree’s mother would be teaching him the lesson, so be it.
“We have another event tonight,” I reminded Bree, my fingers tracing light lines on her shoulder.
Her skin was soft and smelled of coconut.
Her scent, even hours after she’d applied lotion over every inch of herself before sleep, was intoxicating.
I hadn’t even realized I liked the smell of coconuts until spending time with her.
“Yeah.” She blew out a sigh.
I glanced down at her. “Do you not want to go?”
“It’s not that,” she replied hurriedly. “I’ve had fun at the events. It’s just…”
“Joey,” I said.
She nodded. “He’s going to be there. I just know it.”
We had no proof that Joey was the one who’d slashed her tires.
I’d asked to see the footage from the parking lot, despite her waving off the whole incident as if it was no big deal.
It had been a big deal. She’d been afraid that night, standing out in the open.
I didn’t want her to be afraid about anything.
Unfortunately, the cameras in the lot weren’t much help.
The Chinese restaurant didn’t have the right angle.
The bar’s camera that focused on that area was broken.
All I’d managed to make out was a furtive shadow in the distance.
It could have been anybody, including random vandals.
But Joey’s continued focus on Bree was enough to convince both of us it wasn’t random.
“We’ll Uber together this time,” I said decisively. “As much as I enjoy zipping around on the scooter, it’s just safer to Uber.”
She didn’t argue. “I need to try to get some words done this afternoon.” She tilted her chin. “Where is tonight’s event?”
“River House Seafood.”
“Ooh.”
She sat up, giving me a nice view of her bare back. She was slim and strong and made everything in me yearn. When we were together like this, I couldn’t help touching her. Fortunately, she didn’t seem bothered by it. She grabbed her phone from the nightstand and started typing.
“What are you doing?” I asked, my eyebrows knitting.
“Seeing what their menu is like. I was thinking we could go early, just the two of us, and have dinner before the readers start arriving.”
That was what I wanted, so I nodded, settling in at her side to look at the menu.
She loved looking at menus more than anybody I’d ever met.
Bree was a foodie but not for the regular reasons.
She’d gone hungry as a child, and more than once.
She talked about food and having to ration the groceries her mother had deigned to buy her as a child.
She thought it was normal. I never pointed out it wasn’t.
“What looks good?” I asked. I would play this game with her, even though it made me sad, for the rest of our lives.
“They have fried green tomatoes.”
“One of your favorites.” I’d memorized all her food preferences. It wasn’t just breakfast that had her clinging to routine. She had a regular rotation of dinner dishes as well. “There are fish tacos,” I teased as I watched her scroll.
She gave me an evil look. “What did I say about fish tacos?”
“That they should be outlawed.” I wasn’t a fan of fish on a taco, but Bree took that dislike to a weird place. Her views always made me laugh.