Chapter 23 #2
He laughed. I grinned back. I was not going to mess this up by pushing too hard, by projecting too much.
There was no question of me staying the night. Not with his mother expected back at any moment. Not with his little sister sleeping down the hall.
I looked around for my phone and underwear. “What time is it? I should go.”
He didn’t argue. “I’ll walk you home.”
I fished my panties from the floor. “You don’t have to.” I did not want to face my mother’s questions if I appeared with Joe by my side. I looked in the mirror over the dresser and suppressed a shriek. Especially not with whisker burn on my chest and throat.
I pulled the crushed flower crown from my hair. Fumbled into my clothes while he buckled his jeans.
“So, I’ll see you,” he said when I was dressed.
Not a commitment. A declaration.
“Hard to avoid it,” I joked. “Since I live down the street.”
He stood a moment, watching me, a faint crease between his brows. And then he took his hands out of his pockets and kissed me, hard and unexpected.
“Bye.” He let me go, a smile playing at the corner of his mouth. “Neighbor.”
I walked home, a foolish grin still stretching my face. Not thinking about anything at all, except when I could see him again.
—
“You and Joe Miller, together at last!” Daanis exclaimed.
I lifted Rose down from the climbing gym, grateful for an excuse to hide my hot face. “We’re not together, together, exactly.”
Daanis gave a disappointed pout. “So, it was just a onetime thing?”
“Um. Not exactly.”
In the eight days since Joe and I had sex for the first time, we’d managed to be alone together twice.
Once in his workshop late at night, where he’d laid me on a table and rocked my world.
And one afternoon while my mother was at work, when I’d smuggled him into my bedroom and then paused the action to rotate my stuffies to face the wall.
I turned to find Joe watching me with an unreadable expression.
I’d flushed, hot with embarrassment. “Sorry. I was just…” “Saving me from performance anxiety,” he’d said, and I’d melted, warmed and reassured.
Sex with Joe? Amazing.
But feeling accepted? Sharing an in-joke? That was something else. Something more.
Rose sprinted for the slide. I took off after her to spot her up the ladder. Daanis followed more slowly, pregnancy transforming her usual grace to an ungainly waddle.
“Basically, we’re sneaking around like teenagers,” I told Daanis as I took my position at the bottom of the slide.
“I’m so happy for you. Also jealous.”
“Hey, you’re the one having hormone-fueled pregnancy sex on a queen-sized mattress.”
“Not anymore. That bed isn’t big enough for me, Zack, and my pregnancy pillow. Besides, all I want to do is sleep.”
I glanced at her, taking in the purple shadows under her eyes. “Are you okay?”
“Just tired. Zack hasn’t put up the closet shelves in the nursery yet. And I still need to pack my hospital bag.”
I caught Rose at the bottom of the slide and set her on her feet again. “You’ll be fine. You’ve got four more weeks.”
“Three,” Daanis said tightly. “I’m going to be induced.”
I nodded. I didn’t know anything about having babies, except what I’d read or seen on TV. Lots of groaning and sweat and bodily fluids. Like sex without the good parts.
“Again!” Rose demanded.
I helped her up the ladder.
“It wasn’t in our birth plan,” Daanis said when I rounded the slide again, still in that tense voice. “My mom says I should let nature take its course. But Zack is worried I’ll go into labor and we won’t have time to get to the hospital.”
I’d never been pregnant. But I knew all about plans not working out. I understood how anxious, how helpless, it could make you feel when shit happened beyond your control. “It’s your baby,” I said. “Your body. You should do what you want.”
“It’s Zack’s baby, too. Besides, he’s right. My obstetrician says second babies can come earlier. Faster. I don’t want to have this baby on the ferry.” She gave me a small, strained smile. “Or worse, the flight ambulance.”
She’d made her decision, I realized. Which meant she didn’t need me to second-guess her choices. She needed my support.
Rose, bored with the slide, toddled in the direction of the swings.
“I can stay with Rose,” I said.
“Thanks, pal.” Daanis started to pick her up. “Mom’s already offered to watch her.”
“Let me.” I swung Rose into the bucket.
I hadn’t helped at all when Rose was born, because of Covid. I wanted to do better this time. I needed to do better.
“It would be wonderful if you could be our backup. But…when do you leave?”
My stomach sank. I’d been avoiding looking at the calendar, but it was getting harder and harder to stay in the moment with the return to school looming.
Beverly Powell could talk all she wanted about administrative support, but I didn’t see me lining up another teaching gig before the school year started.
I still received the school e-newsletter—at least I hadn’t been deleted from the mailing list—but I’d heard nothing from Sarah.
No requests for an apology, no demands that I resign.
But also no reassurances. Sooner or later, I had to decide: return to Ravenscrest and clean out my library, or give up my job and move out of my apartment.
“Middle of August.”
“So soon?”
Classes on Mackinac started after Labor Day, when the tourists were mostly gone. But the Chicago school year began two weeks earlier.
I winced. “I know that’s awfully close to your due date. I wish I could stay longer.” But skipping out on the required teacher workdays—or worse, taking time off once classes started—would take away any choice I had. I’d be fired.
“Don’t worry about it. We’ll be fine,” Daanis said.
Because she didn’t really need me. Not the way she once did. A lump moved into my throat.
“What about Joe?” she asked.
“He’ll be fine.” He didn’t need me, either.
“Will you still see him? After you go back?”
I swallowed. Because this wasn’t a status update. This was a question from my best friend. “I don’t know. We haven’t talked about it.” We hadn’t talked about a lot of things. “I guess we might. I’ll be home for Christmas, right? And maybe if he has another job in Chicago…”
“So, you’re not setting a date yet.”
“A date?”
“For the wedding.”
I felt myself redden. “Ha ha. I just got out of a two-year relationship. So I don’t…It’s too soon, right?”
“Have you heard from him at all?” Daanis asked.
“Joe?”
Daanis gave me an odd look. “Chris.”
“Oh. Erm. He’s texted a few times.”
Sliding into my DMs with Hope you are well and Crazy busy here and photos of his sunlit apartment.
He’d even bought a plant for one of the windows, green and thriving evidence that he had changed.
Unless it was silk. Or…could he have a new girlfriend?
Curious, I’d clicked to his Facebook profile.
He hadn’t posted since a Stop the Spread chart at the start of the pandemic.
His Instagram showed a smiling portrait in surgical scrubs, like a fake friend request from a spam account, and…
Okay, there it was. A couples pose from his graduation lunch—the one I wasn’t invited to—with Lauren, the work wife who “didn’t do long-distance relationships. ”
I took a deep breath. The photo was a reminder not to project too much. Because Chris had hijacked my dreams and crushed my hopes. But Joe could break my heart.
“The thing is…This thing with Joe…It happened so fast.”
“You’ve known him for years.”
“Yeah, but it’s different now. Obviously. Anyway, we’re taking it slow,” I said. “At least for now. Living in the moment.”
A bright kaleidoscope flashed through my mind. Joe’s eyes seeking mine first thing when he came into the shop every morning. The quick crease of crow’s-feet and the indent of his cheek. The slow, hot burn of his gaze when we made love. All the times I’d felt seen, understood, desired.
All the moments I’d be giving up when I went back to Chicago.
“I understand,” Daanis said. “I just thought…Remember how we always thought we’d be together forever?”
I nodded. “Bosom friends.”
“Kindred spirits!” she said, sounding like my old playmate again. “And what if Joe is your true soulmate, and you guys run off to Vegas—”
I winced. “Not Vegas.” His wife ran off to Vegas. Ex-wife. But still.
“Okay. But you end up here on the island.”
Looking into her shining eyes, I could see it, the future she imagined.
Living down the block from my best friend, doing things together the way we used to before I got a tattoo and she got married.
Sharing important firsts: first crushes and First Communions, first sleepovers and first days of school.
Drinking tea at her kitchen table, taking our children together to the park.
Breathing in the fresh air off the lake, the smell of horses and flowers and fudge.
Helping out at the shop. Starting a book or at least a book club for teens. Spending time with my mom.
Being with Joe.
I wasn’t ready for a life like Daanis’s. Maybe I never would be. I wasn’t looking for a serious boyfriend / potential husband to slot into Chris’s place. But…how would it feel to stay? To belong?
She touched my arm. “I don’t mean to push you. But I missed you.”
I hugged as much of her as I could get my arms around. “I missed you, too,” I choked out.
Joe was right. I wasn’t the same person who had left. Maybe I had to come home to figure that out. I was grateful for the moments, big and small, that had brought me here.
But staying had never been part of the plan.