Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Lennon
The bedroom looks like a clothing apocalypse, and I’m standing in the middle of it.
Sweaters draped over furniture boxes, dresses scattered across the mattress, jeans pooled on the floor like fabric puddles.
Mr. Muffin is buried somewhere under a pile of cardigans I’ve tried on and immediately rejected.
Both suitcases are open and empty, their contents vomited across every available surface.
And yet I’m still looking for something to wear.
I’ve been at it for over an hour, which would be embarrassing under normal circumstances, but these are not normal circumstances.
Because this morning, I woke up with the ghost of someone’s hands on my face.
I should’ve marched next door and banged on Ridge’s door until he opened it and demanded an explanation about last night.
But I know what he’d say. The deal. He’d lean against the doorframe with that infuriating half smirk and remind me that I’m useful to him and he’s useful to me, and nobody should be confused about the situation.
There’s also the Tessa thing, which is its own catastrophe that I don’t have the emotional square footage to process right now.
And if I start pulling on that thread, everything else is coming down with it.
The only thing I know is that I’m going to get her out.
I just need to figure out how.
But not in the next forty-five minutes, because in the next forty-five minutes I have a date.
Maybe a date.
Paul never actually said date. He said, “I’d love to see you again, maybe without furniture this time.
” Which could mean anything. Maybe he wants help with his plants.
Maybe he’s going to present me with an itemized invoice for the bedframe, and this whole thing has been an elaborate billing strategy.
Honestly, I’d respect the commitment.
I hold up a yellow sundress and then immediately put it back down.
Too much.
I grab a soft cream blouse instead, then drop it on the catastrophe pile with everything else.
I made sandwiches this morning. I drove to the shop in town for ingredients and spent forty minutes constructing them with the focused energy of someone who needed something to do with their hands.
Now, they’re sitting on my kitchen counter in neat little triangles.
I have absolutely no idea if Paul is going to want to eat sandwiches, if he had somewhere in mind, or if I’ve just made myself look like an overeager person who brings homemade sandwiches to a maybe date.
Which I am. But still.
The pile of sweaters falls into itself, and Mr. Muffin’s foot emerges from beneath a cardigan, accusatory.
“You’re literally made of felt,” I inform him. “You don’t get to judge my life choices.”
I try on one sweater after another. One dress after another.
Different combinations that all look wrong, partly because of the clothes and partly because I don’t have much with me.
The small clothing shop in town carries sizes that stop just short of mine, which I discovered this morning and tried very hard not to feel anything about.
I grab my phone from where it’s buried under a rejected cardigan and text Nevan.
I’ll have to cancel.
A couple of minutes later, my phone rings, and Nevan’s name lights up the screen.
I pick up, and before I can even say hello, he says, “No.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. You’re not going to cancel. Why would you?”
“Because, if I try on one more piece of clothing and think it looks like shit, I’m going to burn this building down.”
“I’m coming over.”
The line goes dead before I can protest.
I sit down on the bed with a sigh, pull Mr. Muffin out from under the pile of clothes, and set him on my lap. His little embroidered smile is deeply unsympathetic.
“Don’t,” I tell him.
I’m fragile.
Less than five minutes later, there’s a knock, and I open the door to find Nevan out of breath, still in his work flannel with the sleeves pushed up. He takes in my expression, then looks past me, and his mouth does that thing where he’s trying not to smile and losing.
“That was fast,” I say, stepping back to let him in.
He ducks under the doorway because, of course, he has to duck, the giant.
He walked me home from the inn last night, but he didn’t come inside, so this is his first time seeing my apartment.
His eyes sweep over the empty space, the furniture boxes, the absolute chaos of clothes everywhere, and he lets out a low whistle.
“Living the minimalist lifestyle, I see.”
“Not funny.” I cross my arms. “I have different problems than my nonexistent furniture right now.”
“Okay. What are we working with?”
“Nothing. That’s the problem. I have nothing.”
He looks pointedly at the clothes puddled on the floor, then back at me with one eyebrow raised.
“I have nothing that works,” I correct. “I don’t even know what we’re doing, so I don’t know what to dress for. Everything either looks too much or not enough, and the shop in town only carries—” I stop, waving my hand. “Never mind.”
He doesn’t push. Instead, he dips his chin, crouching down to start sorting through the nearest pile. “Okay.” He holds up a soft green wrap dress, examines it briefly, and sets it aside in what I’m realizing is a keep pile. “What do you want him to think when he sees you?”
I open my mouth, then immediately close it before saying, “That’s a weird question.”
“It’s actually the only question.” He doesn’t look up, already reaching for the next thing. “Do you want him to think you tried? Don’t care? Tried but want him to think you didn’t try?”
“The last one,” I say. “That’s what I was going for with my makeup.”
He straightens up and looks at my face. “It worked. And your hair looks pretty too.”
“Thank you.” I reach for the next thing in the pile. “Now if only the rest of me—”
“Why don’t you wear what you have on right now?”
I look down at my yellow sweatpants covered in tiny lemons and my plain white T-shirt. Then back up at him. “Ha-ha.”
I knew I shouldn’t have let him in.
“I’m completely serious.” The corner of his mouth lifts. “This is the most you thing I’ve ever seen you wear. It’s sexy.”
“That’s it.” I pull out my phone. “I’m texting Paul to cancel.”
He takes it out of my hand with the easy reach of someone who has about twelve inches on me and simply does not have to try very hard, and pockets it. “Nope.”
“Nevan.”
“You want to go,” he says. “So you’re going.”
“Then give me my phone so I can text Jasper. Maybe he can actually help me.”
“He’s still at school.” He leans back against the wall, arms crossed, looking entirely too comfortable in the middle of my disaster zone. “Also, I’m the better option here, or you’ll walk out wearing lilac eyeshadow with crystals braided into your hair.”
“Maybe Paul likes lilac eyeshadow.”
Maybe Paul is emotionally prepared for whimsy.
“Maybe he does.” He says it with complete equanimity, which is somehow more annoying than if he’d argued. “He’ll like anything you wear.”
My chest does a small, inconvenient squeeze. “It’s not even a date,” I murmur.
Nevan opens his mouth.
“And if you say ‘if you say so,’ I will actually cancel it.”
He closes his mouth. Opens it again to say, “I wasn’t going to say that.”
“You were absolutely going to say that.”
“I was going to say…” he continues, with great patience, “… that it doesn’t matter what you call it. You like him. He likes you. You’re going somewhere together at three o’clock. Label it whatever helps you breathe.”
“That’s easy for you to say.” I start straightening things that don’t need it.
“You’re not the one who has to sit across from someone and try to be interesting and not say anything weird and remember what normal people talk about on…
” I gesture vaguely, “… whatever this is. And I don’t even know where we’re going so I don’t know if the sandwiches were a good idea or a terrible idea or if it’s going to be weird that I made food when he probably has somewhere in mind, and what if he thinks I’m presumptuous, or worse, what if he thinks I’m the kind of person who always brings homemade sandwiches everywhere like some kind of—”
“Lemon.”
“… deranged picnic person, and I haven’t done this in so long, Nev, like actually done this, because my ex and I sort of slid into each other without it ever being a thing.
There was no first date, it just happened, and now I have to remember how to be a person someone would want to take somewhere, and I genuinely cannot remember how to do that, and what if—”
His thumb finds the bridge of my nose, pressing gently until the scrunch releases.
“Hey,” he says quietly. “Have you eaten anything today?”
“I…” I blink. “I made sandwiches.”
“That’s what I’ve heard.” He smiles. “But not what I asked.”
“I had a bite of one… half a bite.”
He exhales through his nose, not quite a sigh. Then he goes to the counter, grabs a sandwich, and brings it to me.
“Eat this,” he commands. “Before the outfit, before the spiral, before whatever you were about to say about deranged picnic people.”
I take the sandwich with a frown. “Nobody has ever needed to tell me to eat in my entire life.”
He gives me an expectant look until I bite into the sourdough. Once I start chewing, he takes his own from the counter.
“You made good sandwiches,” he says around a mouthful.
“I know.”
“Little arrogant.”
“Little accurate.”
His mouth curves, and he looks sideways at me, and there’s something in his expression that isn’t the easy warmth or the dry humor, but I can’t quite place it.
He takes another bite, and his eyes actually close. “Okay, what is in this?”
“Turkey, Brie, caramelized onions, arugula, fig jam on sourdough.”
“We need to put these on the menu,” he says, turning the sandwich over as if he’s reverse engineering it. “Lunch service or to-go. People would actually come in for these.”
“You’re in inn-brain on your day off?”
“I never have a day off.” He finishes the last of it and shrugs.
“Because you don’t want to or because you can’t?”
“Because it’s my dream,” he says easily. “It’s going to be mine if I can pull it off.”