She twists her lips as I step onto the porch. “Have a good night, Boone.”
“You, too.”
I turn around to face her. Every fiber in my body screams at me to go back inside. It takes every bit of restraint I can gather to override the instinct.
“I’ll leave the door unlocked in case you need inside so you don’t have to go through the window,” I tease, hoping for one more smile.
She sticks her tongue out and closes the door instead.
I laugh to myself as I head across the lawn.
I wonder just how this is going to play out. While it might seem like Jaxi is a woman who will be in and out of my life in a matter of days, something in the bottom of my gut tells me it’s not going to be that easy.
Maybe it’s because I already feel like I know her. Elementally. Although it’s possibly also because I’m so intrigued by her. It’s as if she’s hiding, and strangely, I want to know her more. I want to put in the effort.
I need to get back here as soon as I can. This I know with certainty.
Eight
Jaxi
“And have a curve at your hip that’s hot as hell.”
My face feels hot and practically aches from the stupid, silly grin splitting my cheeks.
I’m sure he didn’t mean it—not like my brain wants to take it, anyway. He was probably being kind and gratuitous. I did make him dinner. It was probably just a reaction to that.
Still …
I feel like I’m walking on air as I make my way back to the kitchen. One glance around the room, and reality hits me like a lead balloon.
Crap!
I pick up my phone and find Libby’s number.
Me: Best place in town to get delicious (and cheap) spaghetti?
I wait for a long minute, but there’s no response.
“I bet they’re out doing some fun,” I say.
After sitting my phone next to the sink, I start cleaning up the mess. Boxes and paper towels go in the garbage, and spoons and pans go into the sink. I imagine Libby and Ted in San Diego, hanging out on the beach. Before I know it, I’m thinking about being in Hawaii … with Boone.
I imagine him in a pair of pineapple-print swim trunks. Warmth spreads through me as if the Hawaiian sun itself was shining from above.
He would be a lot of fun, I think.
I turn on the water and begin to rinse the tomato sauce off the cookware.
My brain wanders to what it would really be like to have a man like Boone—someone who’s calm and funny and seems to be inherently kind.
“If something seems to be too good to be true, it usually is,” I remind myself.
Just as I start to overthink everything, my phone buzzes.
Libby: Try Hillary’s House. Not sure if they’re open or not.
Libby: Didn’t you just make spaghetti?
I fire back my response.
Me: I did, and thank God Boone had to leave and didn’t eat any of it.
Libby: It was that bad?
Me: Yup. I took a bite and almost threw up. <vomit emoji>
I wait for her reply. It takes a couple of minutes for it to come.
Libby: I’ll call you later. Okay?
I furrow my brow. Weird.
Me: Sure.
Libby: xo
Me: <heart emoji>
My stomach tightens as I re-read her text. It could be read so many different ways, and without context, it’s impossible to know how she meant it.
“You can’t overanalyze this,” I tell myself.
Instead, I blow out a breath and find the delivery app. The icon for Hillary’s House is beyond adorable with a pink and white double-h logo. In a few quick presses of a button, spaghetti and garlic bread are on their way to me.
I stand in the middle of the kitchen and look around. “I should get busy on the dishes.”
But I don’t.
The house is so quiet. The only sound is the hum of the freezer as it kicks on to fill the ice maker. Despite the chaos surrounding me, I feel at ease.
I can’t remember the last time I felt like this.
I make an effort to search my memories to recall the most recent moment of feeling completely at peace … and come up empty.
Every memory of my childhood seems tainted with the scent of alcohol. Even the Christmas that I got the pink and purple scooter that I had begged Santa for has a cloud over it thanks to Pete’s drinking problem and Mom’s quick defense of her husband.
My sister and I would huddle in our room. Jeanette would try to distract me with games of Riddle Riddle Ree and knock-knock jokes. She’d capture my attention with stories about middle school or high school—stories that I thought made my ten-year younger self cool by osmosis. Jeanette was my savior until she left on her eighteenth birthday. She said it was to find her father, which was a man our mom met in a bar in her “wild years,” as she called them. But I think she was just getting away from Pete and Mom’s co-dependency.
I couldn’t blame her.
I left on my birthday eight years later.
My heart drops at the thought of Jeanette and twists into an almost unbearable knot.
“What happened to you, Nettie?” I ask.
I mosey through the house, my mind still on my sister and how different my life might’ve gone had she not abandoned me. Would I have the scar on my sternum from the railing that Pete pushed me into? Would I still run my hand over the top of my head and feel the raised skin from the broken vodka bottle? Would I have left town with Shawn a month short of my high school graduation?
Would I have this sense of not belonging anywhere, to anyone, that I have now? That I’ve had all of my life?
I stop at the window in the living room and look outside.
The yard is the perfect shade of green, even in the almost-dark sky. Solar lamps give the white paint on Libby’s garage and Boone’s house a honeyed glow and the flowers in the beds lining the front walkways and window boxes scream less house and more home.
Even though I know what a bachelor pad Boone’s house is, I can still see the makings of a home there too. It’s easy to imagine little kids running through the grass, their voices shrieking through the moss-laden oak trees. The tall windows should have fingerprints marring the glass from sticky hands after a snack stolen from the pantry. I close my eyes and can imagine music playing in the living room and scents of roast beef coming from the kitchen.
He’s built for that kind of life. The way he talks about his family, how he ran out of here to help his brother, the way he is with Leo and me—he’s a people person. It’s not hard to imagine him with a wife and kids someday. Actually, it’s impossible to envision him without a host of people surrounding him.
It makes sense. It’s the natural order of things.
For most people.
I used to think I would be a wife too. I had daydreams as a little girl that I would be the mother to a little girl who looked just like me. We would play dolls, have tea parties, and bake cookies together just like the families in the movies I loved so much. My husband would come home and kiss us both on the forehead.
“It could be worse,” I say, tearing my eyes from the house next door. “At least I get Hawaii as a consolation prize.” And you never know. I might find my own Jason Momoa in Hawaii too.