Chapter 37
NOTHING’S THE SAME AFTER THE RAIN
Daphne
I feel like the world’s biggest asshole.
And I don’t know why.
Pride?
Fear that if Oliver knows what I truly want, he’ll call back to the office and cancel the contract that keeps us afloat anyway?
General contrariness that I was born with and haven’t fully shaken no matter how much of a good influence Bea’s been on me for the past four years?
Or possibly I’ve convinced myself that I can still convince him to go back to M2G without having to confess why it matters.
He’s still my old world.
He’s still the people who’ll take away your toys to teach you a lesson and laugh while they do it.
Except he bought me a hermit crab to replace my lobster and this magical heating pad that made the pain in my neck feel better before it lost all of its heat.
He got me donuts for breakfast.
He stopped at the antique store and hasn’t once yelled that it put us behind schedule.
And now we’re in the middle of a downpour so thick that we’ve had to pull over to the side of the road because we can’t see the road.
Lightning flashes, and thunder booms so close that the car shakes.
“It should pass in fifteen minutes or so.” I’m muttering because I can’t bring myself to say anything nice when I know I’ve been an asshole, and I don’t want to apologize even though I need to.
I shouldn’t have yelled at him.
I shouldn’t be mad about who he used to be when it’s clear he’s someone else now, when he’s already told me he doesn’t want to get back together with Margot, when he’s been so kind.
But I cannot—cannot—handle how much I like him right now.
Knowing he definitely couldn’t ever like me back—it makes me feel like I’m the old Daphne.
Like I’m a fuckup all over again. Like I don’t fit.
And I want to fit. I do fit.
Until I start arguing with him.
“I checked the weather app myself,” he replies stiffly.
I don’t congratulate him on doing something obvious the way I would if he were one of Bea’s brothers. They’re fun to annoy on occasion, and they regularly throw the sarcasm right back at me. It makes me feel like they’re my brothers too.
But when I blow out a heavy breath and my window fogs up as another bolt of lightning hits entirely too close, the rattle of the car around us shakes me enough to prompt the regrets.
“I’m sorry I called you boring.”
He doesn’t reply.
And he shouldn’t.
I’m so confused about how much I like him right now that I can’t behave like a normal, rational, kind person would, and even if he’s boring, he doesn’t deserve to be yelled at about it.
“You’re right.”
I’d jerk my head around fast if I could move my neck that quickly without pain.
And if I wanted to see his face.
But I honestly kind of don’t.
His stubble and the scowls and the small kindnesses—the man is stupidly attractive in ways he has no right to be and in ways that I have no right to notice.
“I’m never right,” I tell him. “It’s one of the perks of being me. I’m forever wrong.”
“I’m boring.”
“So what? The world needs boring people to balance out interesting people.” Lightning tries to strike me dead in that exact moment.
No, seriously.
It hits somewhere close enough to the car that we shake and rattle while the thunder booms simultaneously around us.
My heart is permanently residing in my throat while I squeeze the ever-loving hell out of the stuffed hermit crab, waiting for the thunder-induced earthquake in the car to pass.
“You’re not boring,” I gasp. “Okay? Okay, Mother Nature? He’s not boring!”
Oliver snorts.
And it’s not a derisive snort, or a mocking snort, or a stop lying snort.
I swear on my stuffed lobster back home, it’s a completely amused snort.
The kind of snort that leads to rolling laughter.
Not necessarily funny laughter.
Possibly hyperventilating, everything’s wrong laughter, but one minute, I’m begging the universe to forgive me for being an asshole, and the next, Oliver’s laughing so hard the car’s shaking again, but this time from him.
I finally get up the guts to look at him, and find him hunched over the steering wheel, absolutely losing what might very well be the last of his sanity.
Lightning flashes and thunder cracks on top of us once again.
I squeeze the stuffed crab harder, watching while he laughs himself out, because I need to hold on to something so that I don’t reach over and touch him.
His smile.
The crinkles in his cheeks from the smile.
The lines in his forehead that are probably stress, likely from me.
Rain pelts the windows in a downfall so thick that I can’t identify individual drops of rain.
It’s a sheet of water accompanying nature’s temper tantrum.
I stare down at my lap so I stop looking at him, wincing at one more boom of blinding-white thunder.
We are in the absolute center of this storm, and there’s no separating the lightning and the thunder here. It’s all smushed together.
My Landslide has melted. It’s flavored water now.
I don’t want chips. I don’t want music. I don’t want to be in this Camry, and I don’t want to be out of it either.
I want the rain and the thunder and the lightning to stop and for Oliver to quit laughing like a madman.
In fact, I want him to be boring again.
Could use a little bit of predictability here.
Wind buffets the vehicle.
I squeeze the crab impossibly harder and bury my face in it.
Thunderstorms don’t usually rattle me.
But everything since we got back in the car after getting gas has rattled me, to include the part where this isn’t a nice distant summer thunderstorm.
It’s a squall directly on top of us while we’re huddled inside a metal frame.
Lightning crashes on top of us again.
I stifle a shriek.
Oliver twists his neck to look at me.
His smile is dopey but so happy it’s charming, showing off his white teeth against his dark stubble. His hazel eyes are flickering with warmth and something else.
Something that looks like happiness.
Like he’s thrilled that I’m freaking out over a thunderstorm.
“You look like I felt after Kurt wrecked his dad’s Maserati,” he muses, still chuckling.
“That’s not fucking funny, Oliver.”
Please note, lightning and thunder don’t attempt to murder us when he’s being an asshole, comparing our being stuck in a thunderstorm to the accident that led to him driving himself nowhere, ever, until now.
It’s probably karma.
“Hey.” He shifts in his seat, a giant mass of muscle and intelligence and boring predictability, but there’s nothing boring or predictable about him squeezing my thigh. “We’re fine. Just a storm. It’ll pass.”
I squint at him.
Is he being literal or is he talking about us fighting too?
I should call Bea and ask her to send someone to pick me up.
Not that I’m using any electronics until this storm has passed.
“Daphne.”
“What?”
His hand is still on my thigh. Bare skin to bare skin.
Check that.
His bare palm to my goosebumps.
“We’re okay,” he says.
Lightning streaks through the car again, but the thunder isn’t immediate this time.
As if Oliver’s declaration that we’re okay is enough to chase the storm away.
“Define okay,” I tell him.
The man’s still smiling.
Smiling and squeezing my thigh and brushing his thumb over my skin. “We’re not dead, and we’re almost not annoying the shit out of each other by breathing, and we have food, and our parents aren’t here.”
“Our parents aren’t here?” I repeat.
“Best part, yeah? Even better than the rain doing all the work of cleaning the bugs off the windshield.”
I don’t know this man.
He’s goofy and a little sarcastic and his hand is warm and his eyes—his eyes are lit up with what I’d call joy in any other person.
I don’t know this man, but I want to.
And I can’t.
I just can’t.
But what if I could?
Thunder rolls through the car again as the rain continues its attempt to drown us.
Oliver leans against his headrest and closes his eyes, smile still playing on his lips, hand still resting on my thigh.
It’s definitely not the thunderstorm that has my pulse trying to outrun itself.
It’s Oliver.