Chapter 19 Collins
Collins
I walked through the front door of Coop’s on Monday afternoon looking like a drowned rat.
Brady looked up when the door opened and the little bell rang.
“It’s really coming down out there,” I said.
For the past few days, there had been a constant sprinkle in Sweetwater Peak.
Today, though, it had turned into a torrential downpour, and it just happened to start on my walk back to Coop’s after I had picked up food for Brady and me. “Let’s hope that our lunches survived.”
“If they didn’t, I hope you won’t judge me for crying.”
I shrugged. “I like to see a grown man cry every once in a while. It’s good for the soul.” I had gotten us lunch from Sevens—a Vietnamese restaurant owned by Sadie’s family.
Sevens was definitely the best restaurant in town.
Sadie’s dad was born and raised in Vietnam, went to France for culinary school, and moved to the United States to work in the restaurant industry.
Somewhere along the way, he fell in love, opened his own restaurants, had a family, subsequently got tired of the grind, and moved his family to Sweetwater Peak, of all places, which I was personally very grateful for.
Sweetwater Peak might’ve been too small for a Dollar General, but it wasn’t too small for a decent restaurant.
I examined the plastic bag that held two containers of pho broth, and two boxes with all of the fixings. “It looks like everything held up,” I said. “But it’s a little cold. We can heat up the broth on the stove.”
“Sounds good,” Brady said. “We can be done down here anyway. I doubt anyone’s coming in with that horror happening outside, and I got ahead of schedule yesterday.”
“Brady Cooper, I love it when you talk dirty,” I purred, which caused Brady to accidentally hammer his thumb.
“Fuck,” he grunted, and put the injured thumb in his mouth. I tried not to laugh because I felt bad that he’s hurt himself, but he’d flustered me enough over the past week that it felt good to return the favor.
I set the bag on my desk and walked back to where he was working on a love seat. “Let me see,” I said, and held my hand out.
Brady gave me his hand, and I held it up to examine his thumb, which was red and already had a bruise forming under the nail. “Ouch,” I said.
“You’re telling me,” he breathed.
“Maybe you should ice it or something—at least run it under cold water.” Taking care of him was the least I could do after he’d done the same when I’d knocked my head in the darkroom, but every second that passed while I held on to his hand resulted in the air around us getting incrementally heavier.
This was what happened when we touched—in the darkroom, at the river, in the kitchen.
You’d think I’d be used to it after multiple incidents, but I didn’t know if I’d ever be used to the pull that Brady had on me.
Now the shop felt the way the stormy sky outside looked—intense and electric.
“It’s fine.” Brady’s voice was lower, and I pretended I didn’t notice.
“C’mon,” I said, pulling him toward the stairs. I swiped the take-out bag off my desk on the way. Brady didn’t protest.
Once we were up the stairs, I realized that I hadn’t thought this all the way through.
Brady and I never really went downstairs or came upstairs at the same time, or if we did, we just separated and went through our own doors.
So now that we were here, and his hand was still in mine, I didn’t know which door we should go through—his front door or mine.
I made a split-second decision to go through mine—I was leading the way, after all—even though my half of the apartment was in complete and total disarray.
“Close your eyes!” I called back to Brady, who laughed.
“Oh my god, why are there so many piles? I thought you were working with limited belongings,” he said.
“I am. I’m also a really excellent packer.” I walked faster, trying to get him and his pile judgment out of my side of the apartment.
“How do you know which clothes are clean and which are dirty?”
“Leave me alone, Brady!”
“I am genuinely curious. This place is insane.”
We made it to the hallway that led to our joined kitchen, but I kept up my pace. “You were supposed to close your eyes,” I said.
“Too much to take in,” Brady said. “Plus, I don’t trust you to not walk me straight into a wall, and then I’d have a bum thumb and forehead.”
I couldn’t really argue with him there. “Cold water,” I said, gesturing toward the sink. “Now.”
“I think I like you bossy,” Brady said as he walked past me.
“You haven’t seen anything yet,” I said.
“And this is why I hit my thumb,” Brady muttered.
“What do you mean?”
Brady turned on the sink and put his thumb under the stream of water. “We flirt, I get flustered, bad things happen.”
“You think we’re flirting?” I asked, crossing my arms over my chest. We were. We had been for a while—especially as we got more comfortable with one another.
“It’s been a while since I’ve been interested in flirting, but I’m sure I still know what it looks like.”
“How long is a while?” I asked. He was good at flirting, so if I hadn’t known that his previous relationship had lasted seven years, I would think he was a regular.
“A while.” Brady shrugged and turned off the water. He walked toward me. I took a few steps back until the back of my thighs hit the kitchen table.
When he got close enough, I held up one of my hands to his chest. I didn’t know what he was doing, but I didn’t know what I would do if he got any closer.
“What are you doing?” I asked, my voice breathy.
“Flustering you for a change,” he said.
“Well, someone thinks highly of himself, doesn’t he,” I grumbled.
“Tell me it’s one-sided, then.” He leaned down, so his head was near my ear. “Tell me it’s just me.”
I was about to tell him just that. I was fine with lying—good at it, even—but when I opened my mouth nothing came out.
“That’s what I thought.” Brady’s voice vibrated all the way through me, and I had to put my hands on the table behind me for balance.
He stepped closer to me again—so close that we were almost touching. I felt one of his hands skim my waist, and I let my eyes flutter closed. He was going to kiss me, and I was going to let him. I would’ve let him in the darkroom, and I would’ve let him a million times since then.
And I wanted to kiss him back. With vigor.
But the kiss never came. Instead, his hand left my waist and reached behind me for the take-out bag. “C’mon, trouble,” he said. “Let’s eat.”
—
Our late lunch was accompanied by thick sexual tension, relentless rain against the windows, and the occasional boom of thunder and flash of lightning.
My phone buzzed with a FaceTime call from Boone when we were almost finished. I picked it up after one ring. “Hey,” I said as Boone appeared on the screen. He held the phone at the worst possible angle, and most of my screen was his scraggly beard.
“Hey, kid,” he said. “Called your parents and your sister, so wanted to check in and make sure you weren’t doing anything stupid in the storm.”
Does flirting with my roommate-slash-boss count?
“I see where your priorities are,” I said. Boone grunted in lieu of responding to my sarcasm. I glanced up at Brady, who was watching me intently. “Why am I last?”
“Because if you were doing something stupid, I’d have to rescue you, and then I’d never get to check in with the rest of your family.”
“Well, I’m not doing anything stupid.” Currently, anyway.
“How are you? House holding up okay?” I worried about Boone when we got any kind of storm—he was so far out of town and all on his own, but unlike the rest of us, at least he was on his own power grid.
When the rest of the town blacked out, Boone’s property stayed lit.
“Got a leak in the living room that I never got around to fixin’—regrettin’ that now, but nothing I can do.
” I thought about how Boone looked dismounting his horse a few weeks ago.
I couldn’t imagine him getting on his roof to fix a leak.
“All the animals are in.” Boone turned his phone—his entire phone, of course, not just the camera.
The dogs, the cats, and the pig were all sound asleep on the rug in front of him. “Horses are good, and cows have shelter.”
“That’s good,” I said. “If I’d known the rain was going to shift to something like this, I would’ve come up there.”
“Don’t you worry about me,” he said. “Glad you’re okay.”
“Brady and I were just having lunch.” I flipped my camera to show Brady, who looked like a deer in the headlights.
“Uh, h-hi.” Brady waved.
Boone grunted.
“Be safe, kid,” Boone said when I flipped the screen back to me.
“Will do. Love you.”
“Yeah, yeah. And Collins,” Boone said. “Grow a pair and talk to your sister, soon. This standoff isn’t good for either of you.” And then he hung up. Well, if Boone knew Clarke and I were fighting, then my parents did, too. Lovely.
I put my phone back down on the table.
“That’s the most I’ve ever heard him talk,” Brady said. “He obviously likes you, but he still sounds so mean—is that his voice’s permanent setting?”
“It’s just his way,” I sighed.
“I’ll take your word for it.” Brady shook his head. “So you and Clarke are still in a stalemate?”
“I’m planning to talk to her soon,” I lied.
I wasn’t. I was hoping everything with the Cartwrights in general would just fix itself.
“I’m going to have to YouTube how to fix a roof leak,” I said, switching gears.
“There’s no way he can get on his roof by himself, but I’m confident I can figure it out. ”
“Your whole family is close with him?” Brady asked.
I nodded. “It all started with my mom. When she feels like someone doesn’t like her, she has an insatiable need to change that—Clarke is the same way—and it worked with Boone. He was part of our family before Clarke and I were even born.”
“That’s…nice,” Brady said.
“It is.” I smiled and stood up from the table to clear the dishes.
“I’ll do that,” Brady said quickly, but I shook my head.
“I owe you for breakfast,” I said. “This cleanup is on me, and you’ve seen the state of my apartment, so you know how rare that is. I’ll take this one.”
“I’m still going to help,” he said, standing up, and as he did, the lights went out.