Elsie
Chapter Twenty
Sometimes, I lamented being an only child.
There were good parts, sure. Namely, having all of your parents’ attention all the time.
And there were bad parts, like having all of your parents’ attention all the time.
It could get incredibly lonely, but even that had an upside. It was the catalyst for some of my best stories. Nothing broadens the walls of your imagination quite like loneliness.
So, even though I sometimes wished there was someone growing up beside me to share the uniquely traumatizing experience of growing up with my specific set of parents, I decided once and for all that night that I was glad to be an only child after all.
Family dynamics were just too complicated to add any more members to the mix.
The epiphany struck me somewhere around the time the stifling tension radiating between Will and Ava reached its limit—at least by my own personal estimate.
“Can we put on music?” I finally blurted out, sounding a bit more frantic than I’d intended. “The silence in here is driving me crazy.”
Will turned his head, cocking a brow at my outburst.
“We’ve been driving for one minute, Elsie.”
I stared at the clock on his dashboard to see he was right, though I would’ve sworn it had been at least ten hours.
Ava was staring out the window, an eerie silence that seemed less contemplative and more of a, I’m plotting your demise kind of quiet.
Which I didn’t really understand, considering I thought we’d patched up our differences over the shared trauma of babysitting and, you know, nearly burning someone’s house down.
Guess Ava would be a tougher cookie to crack.
Ooh, bad pun, Elsie.
“Why are you laughing to yourself?” Will asked.
“Sometimes I have dark humor,” I admitted, clearing my throat. “Sorry.”
“Where are you going?” Ava interrupted, turning to stare across me toward Will.
“Bringing you home?”
“You skipped Elsie’s street,” she said, visibly annoyed.
“He did?” I asked, staring lamentably at the dark streets passing by, all completely unrecognizable to me. “I mean, he did.” I nodded confidently, not wanting to prove him right about my lack of navigational skills.
His head was big enough as it was.
“Why are you going out of your way to drop me off first?” she asked, refusing to drop it.
Will’s eyes stayed glued to the road.
“It just makes more sense, so she doesn’t have to crawl over you to get out.”
That seemed valid enough to me. And it was better than my theory that he just forgot he needed to drop me off too.
He was probably on auto-pilot and navigating to Ava’s house was a lot more second nature to him than driving to mine was.
“It would’ve made more sense to have her sit at the end, if we’re being technical about it,” Ava muttered, and I couldn’t believe that the source of tension in the car right now was because of me.
These Hughes really knew how to make a girl feel welcome.
“That’s me.” I let out a nervous laugh on account of being stuck between two people who clearly had bigger issues at hand than the seating arrangement for a five-minute car ride. “Ever the inconvenience.”
No one laughed. My own faded into pathetic obscurity. The truck rolled to a stop in front of a beautiful white cape style house with blue shudders and a stone walkway leading up to the door.
A newlywed’s dream home, I thought with a pang.
And for the first time since I first found out, I saw Ava through a different lens. Not just an abrasive, somewhat uptight woman who clearly had it out for me—but someone who’d lost their husband far too early in life and had to pick up and carry on, regardless.
She was strong. Far stronger than I’d be under those circumstances. Life hadn’t dealt her a fair hand, but she somehow got out of bed each day and made it work, anyway.
I could learn a thing or two from her on that account.
“Thanks for the ride,” Ava said flatly as she climbed out of the truck.
“Bye, Ava,” I said, overcome by the newfound sympathy I had toward her. “Have a good n—”
She shut the door behind her.
I sucked in a breath, trying not to appear as visibly deflated as I felt.
“That’s Ava for you,” Will muttered. “Sorry about her.”
I said nothing, eyes still focused on the door that she’d just slammed in my face.
Heaving a sigh, I slid across the seat to the one she’d just occupied, taking the slight more personally than logic told me I should.
But I was a writer, so logic be damned. I ran on emotion and caffeine and little else.
“Oh, man.” I slapped a hand to my face. “I still need to write when I get home.”
“Are you on a deadline or something?”
“One of my own imposing, but yeah,” I told him. “If I don’t keep myself disciplined, then I lose track of it completely. Start giving myself breaks whenever I feel like it. You know how it goes.”
“Not really.”
Of course he didn’t. He checked things off his to-do list before the ink had even dried. He was a go-getter.
Well, damn it. I would be, too—even though I was so sleepy, and all I wanted to do was put on my fleece pajama pants and climb into bed, about three inches away from the heater.
I yawned, just thinking about the night ahead of me. I needed at least a thousand more words to hit my goal for the day, and the thought of doing that without a fun little drink to help me along, well, it seemed a fate too brutal to bear.
“Will,” I said sweetly, batting my eyelashes at him.
“Why do you look like you’re trying to ask me for something?”
“I was just wondering…” I started.
“Yes?”
“If you could maybe, possibly, potentially be tempted…”
“Yes?”
“Seeing as we’re out already, anyway…”
“Spit it out, Elsie.”
“If you could drive us to your café and make me one of those snazzy coffee drinks of yours for the road?” I made my eyes as wide and pleading as possible, because I had a lot riding on this request.
Once I had a thought in my head, there was little I could do to move past it until I got the thing I had set my sights on.
I was an instant gratification type of person, and at twenty-six, I figured it was too late to change my ways at this point.
“Elsie, do you realize it’s ten o’clock at night?”
“Writers know not the boundaries of mortal time, William.”
He rolled his eyes halfheartedly.
“But if you really don’t want to,” I let out the most disappointed of exhales. “I guess I’ll have to make do with the instant coffee I have in the cupboard. It’s not pumpkin or anything, and some of the grounds looked suspiciously like ants, but—”
“Fine.”
“What?” My neck snapped in his direction so quickly it almost hurt.
I really hadn’t been expecting him to actually say yes, but my motto was to always give something a try so at least you didn’t have to live with the regret of wishing you had.
Lucky for me, sometimes it paid off.
“I’ll make you a coffee,” he said, as if it were the simplest request in the world, and then turned his blinker on and banged a left where he should’ve been taking a right to deliver me home.
Something in my chest stirred, because not for the first time, Will Hughes proved himself to be a pretty decent guy.
Maybe even more than decent. But even though I was a writer, I just couldn’t figure out the word to define exactly what type of man Will Hughes was.