Chapter Seventeen
Seventeen
The next morning, Will found Emmy in the kitchen fixing breakfast. The sun shone through the windows, illuminating her beautiful face, causing her hair to shine.
He heard birds chirping. Puffy white clouds floated in a sky of crystalline blue.
Flowers waved cheerily in the breeze. God fucking damn it, he hated that he was walking into a scene from a Disney movie when his head was pounding and grief was still a gaping wound inside his chest.
“Hey,” Emmy said quietly, her expression wary.
“Hey,” Will grunted. Then he cleared his throat and tried again. “Hi. Good morning. Sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay. Here, have some coffee and painkillers.”
“You’re an angel,” he murmured, taking the mug and the two pills from her. He burned the roof of his mouth as he swallowed the pills, but he didn’t care. “Seriously, Em, you’re a rock. I shouldn’t have gone at you like that yesterday.”
“I assumed you had your reasons. All is forgiven as long as you don’t make a habit of it.” She sat down at the table with her own coffee and a couple slices of buttered toast. “Did something happen yesterday? Are you alright?”
“I’m fine. Just a crap day at work. I let it get to me.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
She was still studying him, like she knew there was plenty more that he wasn’t telling her, but she didn’t press. For that, he was extremely grateful. He sat and sipped his coffee, willing the pain to recede just a bit so he could think of what he needed to do next.
“At least you don’t have too many bad days left, right?” Emmy offered into the silence.
His head snapped up. “Why?”
“Because… your two weeks’ notice is basically up, isn’t it?”
Of course that’s what she meant. Jesus, he needed to pull it together.
She wasn’t threatening him with a shortened existence.
For a second, he thought she was going to say she’d found a way out of the book and was leaving him behind.
But that was a stupid thought. She would have been way more excited if she’d found her escape route.
“Right, yeah. Friday’s my last day. As long as nothing too catastrophic happens in the next couple days, I should be fine.”
His phone rang, shrill and insistent. Will winced and picked it up, mainly to stop the sound from driving an ice pick through his skull.
“Hello?”
“Hello, stranger!”
“Oh. Hey, Mom.”
Emmy watched his face change as he listened to whatever it was his mother had to say.
Then he got up from the table and wandered away, talking quietly.
She wanted to jump up, grab the alcohol off the top of the fridge, and dump it all down the drain while he was distracted.
But that wasn’t the right way to go about helping her new friend.
She’d never had to confront addiction before—in herself or in others—but her gut knew he would only resent her for interfering like that.
It might push him to drink more just to prove she couldn’t control him.
She sat and ate her toast as she contemplated what might have happened to push Will over the edge.
Maybe Jared would know. Would it be treacherous to go behind Will’s back and ask his best friend what was up? Probably.
“Uh, yeah… okay. Yeah, that works,” Will said, returning to the table. “No, I swear, I’m fine. I just woke up, that’s all. Yeah, love you, too. Bye.”
He hung up and then just stared at his phone as if he didn’t remember what he was supposed to do with it now. After a few seconds, he looked up at Emmy and smiled wryly.
“That was my mom.”
“Yeah, I heard. Everything okay?”
“She and my dad want to have dinner on Saturday. Here. She would like the dinner to be here.”
Emmy slowly put down her coffee mug as she took in this new development. “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you uh… did you tell her… we were…?”
“I told her about you, that you were staying here for a while. But I kept it vague. I didn’t know how you wanted to play it. Would you rather tell them we’re in a relationship or stick with being roommates? Not much danger of meet-cutes in my house.”
“True. We could probably just go the roommate route. Except…” Her eyes went wide.
“Except what?” Will prompted.
“Well, like… what if it’s a compulsion? What if your dad starts hitting on me?”
“What? No. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. Not with my mom there.”
“But that’s what I’m saying!” Emmy insisted. “What if it’s a curse and he can’t even stop himself? Remember when I fell on top of you because the book willed it? I don’t want your dad to hit on me, Will! This is going to be awkward enough!”
“Okay. Point taken. Don’t panic. We’ll tell them we’re in a relationship. It’s fine. Better safe than sorry, right?”
“Right.” Emmy let out a relieved breath. “That’s settled. Are you cooking for them? Is there something I should do or… wear?”
“Um… act normal and wear clothes.”
Emmy rolled her eyes even as she laughed lightly. “Okay, I think I can manage that. Good thing I finished your landscaping. It’ll give us something to talk about so things don’t get awkward.” She shrugged uncomfortably. “Bright seemed to think it looked good.”
“That’s right, you mentioned she was here. What did she want?”
“To hang out, apparently. I guess after she made the wind chime for me, she wanted to see it in action. She was really effusive in her praise, but that could just be because she’s Bright.”
“Why do you do that?” Will asked.
“Do what?”
“Make up reasons why your work isn’t as good as people say it is. You landscaped my yard, Emmy. By yourself. What’s wrong with being proud of that?”
“It’s no big deal,” she said quietly, her cheeks heating.
Will pinned her with a serious look. “It is a big deal.”
Emmy stared into her half-empty coffee mug.
Her light breakfast suddenly curdled in her stomach.
She’d never told her family that she’d wanted to turn gardening into a career, rather than just a hobby.
To this day, she didn’t know what had stopped her.
Sure, it had taken her some time to weave her way around to that conclusion, but that didn’t make it less.
Just because her parents had both stuck with the same career their whole lives.
Just because May started watching makeup tutorials before she was even allowed to own makeup.
Just because she couldn’t come up with any good excuses or reasons for her waffling didn’t mean she wasn’t entitled to take a little time to decide what was right for herself.
Even as she’d drifted through college, she’d clearly had it on her mind.
She’d run a few ideas by Andrew here and there during their relationship, and that had been a mistake.
She felt shame—though she couldn’t tell if it was deserved or not—for being more open with him than she was with her family.
In this regard, at least. His responses hadn’t exactly been encouraging.
He never outright said, “This is a pipe dream. Don’t pursue it.
” But whenever she tentatively brought the subject up, he asked leading questions, dropped innocent little comments.
Maybe you should look into taking a couple more classes. You’ve never pursued this seriously before, right?
It’s kind of bad timing to start up your own business, isn’t it? In this economy?
It’s more than picking out pretty flowers, Emmy. Starting your own business is a huge responsibility.
Maybe give it a year and see if you’re still interested. There’s no rush.
This last said with a patronizing smile and a pat—an actual pat—on the head.
Emmy felt a rush of emotions overcome her.
Andrew had had more to say on the matter of her “gardening habit” than she’d thought.
Each instance on its own had been annoying, but had seemed ultimately harmless.
Thinking of it all together like she was doing now, however…
it was almost sinister. Andrew wasn’t solely responsible for her self-doubt.
She wished she could put it all on him because that would be easier, but she knew she had to own her part in it.
Still, he certainly dug right into her insecurities and fed them regularly. How had she not seen that before?
The sound of the front door opening pulled her out of the sticky mire of her past. Was Will walking out on her?
Was he that upset? But no, he came back in a minute later, holding out his phone to her.
While she watched, he swiped through picture after picture of his yard.
The early morning light perfectly accented every angle, every color.
She found herself gripping her mug with white-knuckled hands.
“It looks like something from a brochure,” Will said.
Emmy stared at his face. A single tear slipped through her defenses.
Will smiled gently and reached to wipe it away.
His caress lingered for a second before she lost the warmth of his hand again.
Emmy dropped her gaze, suddenly realizing just how intimate this moment was.
But Will gently tipped her chin up so she was looking at him again.
He studied her face intently for a moment.
“Are you okay? I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
Emmy shook her head. “You didn’t make me cry. At least not in a bad way. Daijoˉbu.”
“That one I know. It means ‘I’m alright’ or something, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah. Basically. ‘I’m alright’ or ‘It’s alright.’ How’d you know?”
He gave her a sheepish look. “I may have watched some anime in the original Japanese when I was a kid. It always bothered me that their mouths didn’t move with the words when I watched the dubbed versions.”
She allowed herself a smile and the tears faded into the background in the face of a solid friendship that she was coming to treasure more and more every day. “The hidden depths of Will Barrett.”
“Let me clear these dishes. I’ve got a little time before work. Wanna watch something?”
“Oh, absolutely. I’m learning to love public television craft shows. Just let me finish my coffee.”