Chapter 21
He doesn’t plan to stay the night, but it gets later and later and neither of them brings it up. Ramona plants herself in front of the drying station she has set up in her bathroom, a space-age contraption blasting warm air at her head.
Then she curls onto her bed with heavy-lidded eyes. Pats the spot next to her. “Stay here with me?” she asks in a sleepy voice that pulls tendrils of longing from his chest. “Just for a bit?”
Nothing in the world could make him say no to that.
With his heart in his throat, Nick climbs onto her bed, with its fluffy white duvet and too many pillows. “Should I take my jeans off?”
Somehow she still has the energy to smirk. “No, it’s fine.”
So he settles in next to her, trying to give her as much space as possible, even as she props her head on one elbow, watching him attempt to get comfortable. She smells like fresh peaches, and now he knows how every strand of her hair feels between his fingers.
He’s dimly aware of Janet keeping an eye on him from her bed in the corner.
Ramona stretches out her arm, grazing his elbow with a lazy finger. The soft expression on her face—completely at ease. Has she ever been like this around him?
“Thank you. Again,” she says, and the gratitude seems misplaced, because he’s not sure what he’s done to earn it. He thinks he might have crawled over broken glass to get here.
Before he can figure out how he wants to reply or if she’s even expecting him to, she’s passed out, hair spilling in every direction across the pillow, fingertip still tucked into the crook of his elbow.
He listens to her steady, only slightly congested breaths.
The force of wanting her could tear him apart. Rip him limb from limb until there’s nothing left but a bruised and bloodied heart. Take away his job, and everything he’s worked for. Splash his unidentified male face all over the internet.
For a moment, he thinks: Let it.
At first he only intends to be nearby if she needs anything. Fights to keep his eyes open, even removes his glasses just in case, and places them on her bedside table. He absolutely will not, cannot, fall asleep next to her.
So of course—he does.
—
Ramona’s still asleep when he wakes up, morning light just beginning to touch down outside. Their bodies shifted during the night, but there’s her hand, still resting on his arm while he lies on his back.
And Nick’s hand, right on top of hers.
Even his subconscious is utterly smitten. He’s relieved she looks healthier than she did yesterday, color returning to her cheeks, mouth tipped peacefully upward. His thumb twitches against her knuckles.
Fuck, it’s going to be brutal to go back to school tomorrow and pretend she doesn’t mean anything to him.
He even debates leaving right now, sending her a text or scribbling a note.
But she doesn’t have any groceries—he checked her fridge and was appalled—and he’d like a shower himself.
So he gingerly slips out of bed and out the door, locking the gate with the code she gave him after her mother left.
When he returns an hour and a half later with a canvas bag full of food, Ramona’s sitting at her dining table with a coffee mug, giving him the most curious look. She’s in a different robe from last night, mauve silk, tied loosely over her pajamas.
“Hey,” he says as he drops the bag on her kitchen counter. “How do you feel?”
“So much better. I can breathe through both nostrils, and my head no longer feels like there are a thousand tiny guys inside operating heavy machinery.” A lift of her eyebrows as she nods toward the bag. “What’s in there?”
Her hair falls softly over her shoulders, and he gets a flash of her in the bathtub, trying his absolute hardest not to stare anywhere but the back of her head. Maybe he showed too much of his hand with I think you look perfect.
Hopefully she doesn’t remember.
“Well, your fridge was practically dystopian.” He unpacks fruits and vegetables, a carton of milk. “I couldn’t let a good kitchen go to waste.”
Ramona presses her lips together as something else falls out of the bag. “Is that a cat toy?”
Okay, so there was a Petco in the same parking lot as the Whole Foods. “I wanted her to like me,” he says. “Or at the very least, be indifferent toward me.”
Nick offers the toy to Janet, who gives it a tentative sniff before dragging it into the living room.
When Ramona settles back in her chair, the robe slips off one shoulder just the tiniest bit, exposing the spray of freckles there.
God. Those freckles make him weak in the fucking knees. And if he’s this close to losing it over freckles, he’s not sure if there’s any hope for him.
The way she’s been with him, completely unguarded…he wonders how many people have seen her this way. How many she’s let in. Because it’s different from how she let him in physically, how she pressed herself to him and moaned into his ear. This feels more precious. Delicate. A privilege.
He thinks back to what Betty said at Halloween. How cruel Ramona’s mother was yesterday, the abuse that’s probably lasted a lifetime. It makes him furious, how people can manipulate her and pretend it’s out of love, revs up a protective instinct he didn’t realize he had.
He knows Ramona can handle herself, but it’s almost painful, how badly he wants to be the one who takes care of her.
She offers him some coffee, her fingers brushing his as she passes him the mug. His heart leaps in his chest.
“What now?” she asks in a low voice. Somehow the question feels much weightier than it should.
Clearing his throat, he tries to focus on the logical part of his brain that’s growing smaller and smaller, the one full of words like job and tenure. “I thought we could make some brunch. That is, if you have any cookware?”
She groans at that. “I swore this was going to be the year I learned how to cook. I fired the private chef, at least.”
“Fortunately, I’ve picked up a few tips from Audrey.” Nick sets a bag of flour on the counter, lays out a few eggs.
Ramona leans against the counter next to him, the peach scent of her shampoo still an ungodly level of strong. And beneath that, the sweetness that’s purely her. “You know…I can’t remember the last time I had a home-cooked meal.”
He tries to ignore the way that makes him ache. Resorts to humor. “I know this is kind of weird-looking. This is a spatula.”
Before he can react, she snatches the spatula from his grasp and swats his shoulder with it. Oh, he definitely doesn’t hate that, especially when their eyes catch and she does it again.
“Oh my god, I wasn’t that pampered! I know what a spatula is!”
He grabs a wooden ladle and softly swats her arm right back. “Private. Chef.”
“Fine. Proceed.” She opens one of her drawers, points to a high-end silver object. “What’s this?”
“Cheese grater.”
“And this?” She digs into his bag, finding the slim yellow item he ordered online as a joke a few weeks ago and grabbed before he left his place.
“That,” he says with a grin, “is the Slice-o-Matic 3000.”
—
After brunch, a hearty stack of fruit-topped pancakes and a basic shakshuka that she declares is the best thing ever created in this kitchen, he insists on doing the dishes again.
“You’re going to make me a better person or something, aren’t you,” she says with a good-natured grumble as she stands at the sink with him, reaching for a plate. “Fucking It’s a Wonderful Life-ing me in my own home.”
He flicks a soap bubble in her direction. “If some of my more responsible traits rub off on you, would that really be such a bad thing?”
While they ate, he filled her in on the past week—the Us Weekly reporter, the new security system now up and running at Lexi’s. Ramona was aghast, offered to pay for it, even, but he wouldn’t hear of it. “Those people are leeches,” she said, and he had to agree.
Now she disappears upstairs for a few minutes, changes into leggings and a cropped sweatshirt to give him the official tour.
The strangest thing about her house, maybe, is that it feels like a showroom.
Everything seems plucked from the kind of catalog that doesn’t have prices, from the blown-glass sculpture of a cat to the home theater to the infinity pool and Jacuzzi in the backyard, though she says the Jacuzzi has a filter issue she really needs to get someone out to fix.
“I never go in here,” she admits, pausing in front of a closed door at the end of the second-floor hallway. “Too many memories.”
And then, just before he can tell her they don’t have to go in if she doesn’t want to, she opens the door. He has to fight back a gasp.
The room practically shimmers. A trio of guitars is hung on one wall, her Grammys on a shelf with a little spotlight illuminating them.
Album covers and magazine covers take up the rest of the wall space, headlines declaring her the next big thing.
Records certifying her songs gold and platinum.
Then there are the bookshelves and storage boxes overflowing with memorabilia and merch, everything from her kids’ TV days to her final tour.
Everywhere he looks, she’s smiling back at him—at eighteen, at twenty, at twenty-five.
Behind them, Janet lets out a warning meow, as though she knows how complicated this room must be for Ramona.
“Jesus,” Nick says. “It’s like a monument to everything you accomplished.”