Mom turns to face me. “Go put on some clothes, Jolene.” Her eyes flit meaningfully to my chest.
What’s so embarrassing about free-boobing it in front of one of the most famous humans on the planet, and a man I recently proposed to on a global social media platform?
What’s that you say? Everything?
Oh, right.
I sneak a glance at him, and then turn and head back up to my room. Change into jeans and a T-shirt, with a bra, this time. I don’t really wear makeup, and it would be weird if I went to that extent when I don’t normally, so I compromise with myself and put on some lip gloss. My hair is still short enough that all I have to do is mess it up a little more, and I’m good to go. Some deodorant. Mouthwash. I draw the line at perfume.
I pause, in my bathroom. Westley Britton is here. In my house.
He didn’t respond on social media—he came to my house.
I let myself feel giddy, for a moment. Squeal—albeit silently. Jump and flap my hands and do the whole girly freak-out thing.
Just…get it out of my system.
Thusly expressed, my need to freak out and embarrass myself subsides. Hopefully I can interact with him like a normal person, now.
Mom is on the other side of my bedroom door when I open it, about to knock. “Jo. Why is Westley Britton at our house? Why does he need to meet you in person?”
“Um.” I wince. “I may have done something. On, um…TikTok.”
“That’s the one with all the short videos? Where people do the weird dances?”
I roll my eyes. “Yeah.”
“Explain for me how that leads to him showing up at our house at eight thirty in the morning.”
I didn’t think my parents would ever see it.
My dad still carries the same Nokia he’s had for twenty-some years—carried, as aforementioned, in a clip on his belt. He uses T9 for texting. Enough said.
Mom has a smartphone and Facebook and IG, but the former is mainly for keeping track of old high school friends and exchanging, like, casserole recipes, and the latter one is primarily the digital equivalent of motivational cat posters, except instead of cute little kittens in, like, flowerpots, it’s flexible girls a quarter of her age doing impossible yoga poses with pithy captions about seizing the day and living your best life and no filter and I just woke up like this.
I follow her, and I like her posts, because I’m a good daughter.
But the point here is that I assumed they would never catch wind of what I’d posted. Obviously, I had no way of knowing it would go viral the way it has, much less that Westley himself would show up at my freaking house because of it.
“Just a…um. Just a TikTok thing, Mom. I didn’t know he’d show up.”
She doesn’t buy it. “Show me.”
“No! He’s out there in the kitchen waiting.” I shake her by the arms. “Mom—Westley Britton is in our kitchen. Alone. Waiting for our four-thousand-year-old coffee maker to slowly percolate freaking Maxwell House coffee. It sounds like a steam engine having a seizure.”
“Jolene Park. What did you do?” She’s wise to my topic-changing ways, blast her.
I huff. Whisper to her. “I may or may not have sung a song to him…and…um…askedhimtomarrymeokaybye.”
I push past her and trot down the stairs before she can call me back.
He’s at our kitchen table.
The same table we’ve eaten every meal at my whole life. There are scratches from when I would bang my fork on the table as a baby. Crayon and permanent marker from preschool and elementary art projects. Places where some kind of paper stuck to the table and never got cleaned off properly. It’s a round table, a few shades lighter than his eyes. It has a gap down the middle where a leaf would go, but we’ve never put the leaf in, and I don’t even know if we even have the leaf anymore.
The coffee maker is slowly and noisily chugging away—half pot done. I pour two mugs and sit down with them, hand him one. He wraps both hands around the small white diner-style mug.
I take a sip. Gag. Spit it back. “I hate coffee.”
He snorts a laugh. “Then why are you drinking it?”
I shake my head, shrug. “I don’t know. I still haven’t quite normalized from the fact that you’re here in my house.”
He rolls his eyes. “Well, don’t drink coffee if you don’t like it.”
I gesture at the mug in his hands. “I’m sorry for that. I don’t drink coffee, but everyone I know who does says that stuff is…not the best.”
He laughs. “Hey, coffee is coffee, you know? Maybe you don’t. But…I’ve been driving for like…” He checks the clock on our stove. “God, I don’t even know. Thirty hours? Is it eastern time here?” He puts down the coffee and rubs his eyes. “I slept a few hours in Lincoln, Nebraska, and had some coffee at a roadside diner, and let me tell you…this?” He lifts the mug. “It’s way better.”
“You…drove all the way here? From LA? By yourself?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?” I suddenly remember putting my tea down on the side table near the door where Dad and Mom keep their keys. Wait—Dad and Mom is the wrong order. It just sounds weird in my own head. Mom and Dad. There, that’s better. I bolt up to my feet. “Hold on, I have to get my tea.”
His mouth was open to answer but closes it as I go retrieve my tea from the foyer. It’s still warm, so I’m fine.
I sit back down. He’s looking at me. Studying me. Examining my hair—ginger, short and spiky, messy. My freckles—plentiful, and everywhere. My eyes—green, somewhere between jade and grass, depending on my mood and what I’m wearing.
He’s not just looking—he’s…memorizing, almost. Studying.
Is he looking for signs of illness?
“You can’t see it,” I say, abruptly.
His brow wrinkles. “See what?”
I snort. “Leukemia.”
He shakes his head. “Not…no. I wasn’t looking at you for…” His eyes close, his head drops, and then lifts again. A sigh. “You’re beautiful, Jolene.”
My heart flips, and I look away. “You don’t have to say that.”
He shrugs. “Why not? It’s true.”
“So that’s why you were looking at me like that?”
He nods. “Yeah.”
No one’s ever accused me of being a knockout. But the compliment, as unlikely as it is, still feels genuine. He is an actor, but I want to believe him. It feels nice.
Weird, and alien, but nice.
“Why are you here, Wes?” I whisper it. “My TikTok?”
He nods. Glances over my shoulder—we have eavesdroppers on the stairs.
He shifts uncomfortably.
“Do you…you want to go for a walk?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I, um. I’m worried I’d attract attention. Having your hood up over a hat isn’t exactly the most inconspicuous thing you can do, especially in the middle of June.”
“Oh, right.” Because, if he walked openly down the street, we’d have a mob of suburban moms and hormonal teenage girls trailing us.
And that’s not a joke. This is a neighborhood where people are always looking out their front windows for something interesting.