21. Chapter 21
Chapter twenty-one
A month later.
The pool was finished, and I hated the masterpiece. I wondered what it would take to fill it up with dirt and bury it. Actually, it came out beautifully with opalescent blue tiles winking along the waterline. But Alfred would never even see it, and I couldn’t look at it without thinking about him.
To better ignore it, I took my coffee to the front porch. The bookstore opened in an hour, but I wasn’t scheduled. I got there when I got there. So I sipped. And thought. And fuck my life. Everything about it was filled with Alfred, even drinking a fucking cup of coffee.
I’d repainted the chalkboard walls in my dining room and got rid of the café table, shoving it into the back of the shed so I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore. Fuck him.
Fuck me.
I kicked my feet up on the railing when I heard a car coming up the drive. Probably Eddy to lecture me again, but I hadn’t done anything wrong. Neither had Alfred. We just didn’t mesh. That was all. And we had to deal with it. So why the fuck did it hurt so terribly?
Dropping my feet when the car stopped, I leaned forward to see who it was. Alfred? He walked up the steps to the porch, coffee mug in hand and sat in the chair in front of me, but he didn’t say a word.
We sat there quietly for a few minutes, drinking coffee and feeling the scorching tension sizzling between us. I stared at him, but he kept his eyes on his mug. What did he want?
Then he got up and went back to his car and drove away.
What the actual fuck?