16. ashton #3
“’Kay, Emmy. Remember this morning when we used gentle hands to pet Mayo?”
Emmy nods solemnly. She takes the piping bag, barely closing her fingers around it. I cover her hands with mine gently.
“Whatcha gonna draw, EJ?”
“A smi-yay face!”
“A smiley face? That sounds great!” I guide Emmy’s hands down to the cookie and apply the tiniest bit of pressure over her fingers to squeeze the bag.
She giggles with delight as pink icing appears.
We draw two eyes, a nose, and a big, smiling mouth.
I snap a picture before it comes to any harm—whether accidental or eaten—and text it to Harriet.
“What next?”
“Bunny!”
I pause with my hands holding Emmy’s, and Brooks must notice, because he uses his foot to nudge my leg lightly. I glance down to meet his questioning gaze and shrug. If Emmy wants to draw Bunny on a cookie, then I guess we’re drawing Bunny on a cookie.
It’s not my best work. It’s hardly even pretty, but it’s yellow and it has ears, and Emmy is absolutely thrilled.
She poses for several pictures with the Bunny cookie in one hand and Bunny himself in the other, before skipping off into my backyard to watch some butterflies.
There are always plenty of them behind my cabin.
“Did we ever have energy like that?” Brooks asks. He has one eye on Emmy through the open back door as I begin to package up the first of the cookies now that the icing has set.
“Oh yeah,” I answer. A dry laugh bubbles out of me. “I distinctly remember chasing you, Jody, and my brother for well over a mile and a half playing some kind of dumb game. And we did it at least every week.”
“Man, we really did grow up with the best life, didn’t we? All this open space. Families who let us grow up together and do dumb shit.”
“Families who love us, you mean?”
“Parents who recognize the value of good friends, and treat them good as family.”
“That too.”
Brooks holds my gaze again, and for a moment, the room seems to shrink around us.
He feels closer, somehow, although neither one of us has moved.
For a split second, I think he might be about to kiss me.
I don’t think I’d mind if he did. I’m certainly thinking about kissing him.
And then Emmy comes crashing in through the door to break the spell, an exhilarated shriek on her lips.
“Unky Book!”
Brooks intercepts the whirlwind halfway across my kitchen, scooping her into his arms and settling her on his hip.
He holds her securely, one big, inked hand dwarfing her tiny torso, and not for the first time, something feral and animalistic in me awakens suddenly at the sight of this man with a child in his arms I find myself wondering, just for the briefest of moments, if part of the reason I stopped replying to his and Jody’s texts was because thinking about them both—thinking of Brooks, specifically—hurt too much.
If the sadness of not having them right next door overwhelmed me so much that it drove me to silence instead.
“Buster-flies!”
“You saw butterflies?”
Emmy nods. “Outside! You come see!”
I throw a mesh dome over the remaining cookies to protect them as the icing sets hard, then follow Brooks and Emmy out into the yard, where they’re pointing at birds and butterflies in the trees beyond my makeshift fence line.
“Dance!”
“C’mon, devil. Dance with us.”
Two voices—voices that are quickly becoming my favorite sounds—beg me to dance in the dappled sunlight, and I can’t refuse.
There’s no music, and there’s very little rhythm, but there’s plenty of laughter as all three of us shimmy and shake, waving our arms and leaping around.
By the time we return to the kitchen, we’re all sweaty and breathless, dizzy on the thick warmth and golden light of the late summer afternoon.
My phone buzzes on the counter. I check it to find four messages from Harriet—one full of heart emojis in response to the picture of Emmy, and three more letting me know that she’s on her way home, then that she’s home, and a third to say I can bring Emmy back any time.
“Okay, let’s get these cookies bundled up and get you home to Mommy!” I clap my hands and Emmy copies the action.
“Yeah! See Mommy!”
It only takes me a couple minutes to package the rest of the cookies.
Brooks helps Emmy tuck Bunny into her backpack while I tidy the kitchen, and I grab my brother’s cookie bundle, having seen his truck drive by a little earlier.
He and Ruth must be home from Austin already.
Once all three of us have our shoes on, we leave through the front door.
Brooks makes a show of taking my key from the hook in the hallway and locking the door behind us. I roll my eyes.
“Walk? Or drive?”
“Drive. These cookies will melt if we walk at Emmy’s speed. Besides, I need to return her car seat.”
“Gotcha. You driving, or am I?” Brooks looks at me with pleading eyes. I fight back a smirk, then pull the keys from my pocket and toss them to him.
“Go on. You can drive.”
His whoops echo off the tree trunks as I buckle Emmy into her car seat.