15. Indy
FIFTEEN
INDY
Going back home is strange. It’s not like we’ve been away for years. It’s been a few days. Walking in the front door still feels like I’m an alien stepping onto a new planet though, and it’s not because of the house. It’s because of the person who comes in after me.
What now?
With everything that’s happened, will coming back home be like a reset button, and we’ll just go back to how things were? Are we going to pretend that nothing happened? I’m not sure I know how.
I take a quick glance over my shoulder at where Nick is toeing off his sneakers. It’s something he’s done thousands of times before, and it’s not the first time I’ve been nervous while he does it. I’ve been here before. Waiting for him to look up. Setting my expectations to him being a dick.
It’s like déjà vu, only not really.
I’m not nervous that he’s going to be a dick. He won’t be. I’ve seen behind the walls. I’ve been behind those walls at this point. What would be the point in him trying to hide behind them? I don’t think there is any, and I don’t think he’ll be stupid enough to try.
So the questions becomes… what happens now?
We had sex.
It’s the first time I’ve had a moment to acknowledge it. I’m suddenly all sharp corners. Where do I put my hands? Where do I look? Do not blush.
He finally looks up. Opens his mouth.
“Go. Nick.” Mom’s voice carries from the living room.
Nick clamps his mouth shut and gestures for me to go ahead of him.
I stay put. “I—”
“Go!” Dia yells.
I rub over my face, lose my determination, turn around, and stalk to the living room.
I’m so busy berating myself for being a coward, so distracted, that when I step into the living room and a bunch of people yell “Surprise!” I jump and let out a yelp.
Fucking hell, that’s a lot of people.
I stare at everyone gathered in the living room, all the friends and family, and all I really want is to turn around and run away.
“It’s a welcome home party,” Dia says as she rushes forward and hugs me. She whispers into my ear, “Mom pulled it all together last night. Just go with it. People have been going crazy these last few days.”
I breathe in and pat her on the back before I put on the widest grin I can manage. “Wow!” I say. “You guys. You shouldn’t have.”
Mom waves me off.
I smell like a hospital, and I’m still dressed in the sweats and T-shirt I slept in.
I stretch the smile a bit wider.
“Thank you,” I tell Mom. “This is… really great.”
It’s not, but the last thing I want to do is show how I really feel.
She ushers me farther into the room, and for the next few hours, I get a front-row seat to an out-of-body experience while I’m marched between relatives and friends and giving generic answers to all the questions about “your ordeal.” I wave off my grandmother’s efforts to shove plates of food into my hands, accept hugs, laugh at all the right moments, and bob my head to the music from Dia’s playlist. I do my absolute best to seem normal. And happy. And thankful.
Most of all, though, I do my best not to seem too obvious in my efforts to corner Nick.
Admittedly, this is not the best moment to have a serious conversation.
Or any conversation, honestly, especially since I’m not so sure what it is I even want to say.
All I really know is that being so far away from him feels wrong.
It makes me restless, so I keep obsessively checking that he’s still there. Like a lunatic.
I turn my back once, and he’s gone anyway.
I look for him, but he’s nowhere to be found.
“Hey.” I grab Dia’s arm and pull her away from the crowd of aunts and uncles as I circle the first floor. “Have you seen Nick?”
“He was headed upstairs a little while ago.” She shrugs before she goes back to her conversation.
I slip out of the room and start up the stairs, and then I stand in front of Nick’s firmly closed door, hand hovering in the air. I don’t know if I should knock. I want to, but what if he isn’t interested? And what would I even say? How would I explain why I’m here?
In the end, I turn around and go back downstairs.
Like a coward.
I rub my palm over my face and blow out a breath.
A glance at my phone tells me it’s almost one a.m. I’ve been trying to fall asleep for a while, and it’s just not happening.
My thoughts won’t quiet and my body won’t settle.
At this point, the idea of lying in bed is more exhausting than not sleeping.
I head downstairs to grab a glass of water and watch the weather channel, or whatever it is people do when they’re dealing with insomnia.
As soon as I push the kitchen door open, I stop dead in my tracks.
I’m not alone.
Nick snaps his head up, and for a bit, we just stare at each other.
I step closer, drawn to him like a magnet but also cautious, because that dangerous territory I didn’t care about before? I’m less flippant now. I can’t do the smart thing and walk away, though.
“What are you doing?”
He looks down at the counter and then at me. “It’s called a sandwich.”
I wasn’t hungry before. I haven’t been properly hungry for a while. But suddenly I am.
I pick up one of the bottles he has out and peer at some of the containers on the counter before I look at him again. “Are you sure? White wine vinegar? Who puts vinegar on a sandwich.”
“People who are smart enough to know what dressing is?” he says.
I put the bottle back down. “If you say so.”
He crosses his arms over his chest and gives me a pointed look. “For the record, I’m a fucking awesome cook.”
“Good for you,” I say dismissively. I pick up another container and scrunch my nose. “Kimchi?” I make a whole production of sliding it back onto the counter and shake my head skeptically, just shy of tutting for the extra touch.
“Since when—” he starts, but then he huffs, grabs two more slices of sourdough and slaps them onto the cutting board before him.
I grin and rest my chin on my hand as I sit down at the counter.
I watch him assemble the sandwiches. The only source of light is the one above the kitchen island, so it’s just Nick and me in the circle of light with everything else around us encased in darkness, almost like we’re the only two people in the world right now.
He slides a plate in front of me with a mocking flourish.
We eat in silence. When I’m done, I push the plate away and lean back.
Nick’s lips press into a tight line.
I fight back a smile. “It was good.”
He rolls his eyes in return. “Fucking whatever. You and I both know it was the best you’ve ever had.”
“I read somewhere that an excessive need for external validation is a sign of a fragile ego. Do you want to talk about it? Because I’m here if you do.”
He flips me off.
I laugh.
And he looks startled that I laughed.
“It really was good.” I tilt my head to the side. “Where did you learn to cook?” I hesitate. “Your mom?”
His shoulders tense for a moment. He barely ever talks about her, and I fully expect the squirrel story to remain a onetime exception, but then he sends me a long look.
“She liked to experiment a lot. She was very young when she had me.” His eyes flash to me. Is he trying to gauge whether I’m judging his mother for it?
I’m not, but there’s no way to tell whether I’ve passed his test or not.
He starts to speak again, so maybe I didn’t fail.
“She was kicked out by her parents and all that cliché shit. Her parents are well off.” He thinks about it for a moment.
“Well, no. That’s underselling it. They’re fucking rich as hell.
” He looks around the, admittedly, very nice kitchen we’re currently sitting in.
“My point is, she didn’t know how to be all independent and do stuff normal people can because obviously she was never going to need to know how, because they had, like, servants and stuff, so nobody taught her those things.
Like laundry and cooking and budgeting and all that.
She learned from all those how-to guides online.
And then she made sure to teach me everything she knew. Cooking was a tough one, though.”
“How come?”
He slides his thumb over the plate, gathering up the crumbs. “She got bored following a recipe. And then she’d add things based on some kind of hunch that they’d go together.”
“Like what?”
The usual harshness isn’t there in his face. In its place is the softness of remembering.
“Scrambled eggs with orange zest and soy sauce.”
I make a face, and he smirks.
“Yeah,” he says. “She always figured that if something tasted good on its own, it had to also taste good when combined with some other good thing. It’s not like she experimented all the time, but even if she didn’t, it was still a disaster more often than not.
She’d boil things for too long and bake with the temperature too high.
She’d fry everything on high heat, flip things too early, or too late.
She would eyeball most measurements. A lot of stuff was burned on the outside and raw on the inside.
” He looks deeply lost in memories before he shakes his head and blinks out of it. “I had to take over.”
“She sounds like a great Mom.”
His jaw tightens, but then he simply nods.
“What about your dad?” I wouldn’t have had the nerve to ask before, but we’ve already established that I can see through his walls by now.
“I don’t remember anything about him. He left when I was barely three.”
“His loss,” I say.
He raises his brow at me. I look at him, not turning away. For a change, he’s the one who looks puzzled.
“Why are you up?” he asks.
There’s a sarcastic answer to that and a normal answer, which would imply considerably less hostility. For some reason, tonight, I go with the latter.
I shrug. “Couldn’t fall asleep. You?”
“Too busy hiding in my room during the party, so I was hungry.”
This feels normal. And weird. But mostly normal. We’re having a normal conversation. No hidden meaning. No jabs.
“It’s late,” he says.
Neither of us moves. I slide my empty plate toward him. “Can I have another one?”
He stares at me for a bit, but when I just eye him back, he takes the plate, gets up, and makes me another sandwich.
“It really is good,” I say through a mouthful.
There’s a flash in his eyes that, I swear, makes him look pleased. He erases that look with a scowl a second later, but I already saw it. And having that look in my mind makes all the antagonism he usually aims my way feel somehow like playacting.
I forget myself. Forget to look away.
His scowl deepens.
“What?” he demands.
I tilt my head to the side.
“I think you might not hate me any longer,” I say.
He stares back, our gazes locked over the kitchen island, his eyes the color of storm clouds.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he says. The reply is flippant, but then he looks at me like… Almost like he’s the one who maybe, just maybe, would like that.
He goes to the sink and busies himself cleaning up.
“Let me,” I say.
He ignores me.
“You cooked.” I hip check him out of the way. “I clean. It’s the law.”
We’re both silent while I finish doing the dishes and put everything back in its place. When I turn around, Nick is leaning against the kitchen island across from me, arms loosely folded over his chest, watching me in that quiet way he has.
I stretch out my leg and tap his foot with my toes. He looks down. Then up. Then down again. His toes curl for a moment. I slide my foot a little farther, brushing along the side of his. He’s very quiet and very still.
He doesn’t pull away.
I drag my toes lightly over his foot. The side of my foot settles against the side of his foot. They fit perfectly.
“Isn’t there enough room in the kitchen anymore or something?” he asks.
I tilt my head to the side. “Am I invading your personal space?”
He huffs something that might be a laugh. He tips his head back for a second before he looks back at me. Still not moving his foot.
“Yeah,” he says. “You are.”
“Do you want me to stop?”
I slide my foot a fraction closer, pressing it just a little more firmly against his.
There’s another pause.
Then…
His foot shifts just the tiniest bit. Just enough to press back.
The inside of my chest goes warm. My heart doesn’t pick up speed. Instead, this time, it beats strong and steady, almost as if all of this? It’s meant to be.
His big toe drags over the arch of my foot.
A current travels down my spine.
I push myself off the counter, flinging myself across the space between us. My hands grab the edge of the island as I lean over him. My forehead touches his. Noses brush.
I close my eyes.
I breathe him in.
Wait with bated breath.
“It’s getting late,” he whispers.
“Is it?”
He nods, forehead moving against mine.
He presses his lips together.
His breathing is so loud this close.
I watch him fight himself.
I watch him fight against what he wants to do.
He fights so hard it’s visible and audible. He might as well punch himself—it’d be less effort at this point.
I don’t know why he does.
I don’t understand.
He turns his head. Now my forehead is against his temple.
“You should go to bed,” he says.
It’s a bit like being dunked in ice water.
“Oh,” I say.
I stay for a moment longer, pressed against him. Maybe he’ll change his mind.
He stays so still that he doesn’t even seem to be breathing anymore.
I close my eyes and nod.
Then I force myself to pull back.
This is rejection.
I’ve practically thrown myself at him.
Not practically. I threw myself at him pretty fucking literally.
I pick up what’s left of my pride and head out of the kitchen.
“Night,” he says softly when I’m in the doorway.
I fight the urge to turn around and look at him. Instead I nod once, then retreat to my room.
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