“Yeah, Beckett. That is an excellent point,” she drawled.
We settled into the car in silence but I was immediately and uncomfortably aware of her mellow, earthy scent. It was green and organic, like a garden or a bunch of fresh herbs, and it wrapped around my throat and clouded my vision. I gripped the wheel hard and my fingers squeaked against the leather.
When I turned onto Market Street, I knew I’d die if we didn’t break this silence soon. This was what Sunny did to me. Whenever she was around, she generated all this energy inside me and it grew and grew until we found something new to argue about—or I lost my mind and almost kissed her.
I didn’t have enough steam in me to fight tonight and it didn’t matter whether I wanted to—I couldn’t kiss her. Or even come close. “What’s with the basket?”
“The—what?”
I poked a finger toward the basket on her lap, the one holding a water bottle, several zip pouches, one of Naked’s bakery bags, and a few other things I couldn’t identify. “The basket.”
“It’s a palm leaf tote. I bought it from an incredibly talented collective of weavers in Dhaka.”
“You—you’ve been to Bangladesh?”
“I have.”
When she didn’t elaborate, I asked, “When? And what were you doing there? And how—”
She glanced at me, her eyes narrowed and her expression tight. “I’ve been to a lot of places, Beckett. I enjoy traveling. Many people do.”
I stopped at a light. “Lance didn’t mention that.”
“And he didn’t tell me you lived in Singapore. Let’s accept that my brother is not the best source of information on anyone other than himself. Even that could use some improvement.”
“No shit.” I laughed as the light turned. “I only knew he’d moved in with Chantal because she answered his phone once when he was in the shower.”
“He moved in with Chantal?” she cried. “When?”
“End of last year? I don’t know. He’s shit with specifics. I don’t know how he holds down a job.”
“Believe me, I have the same questions. I was heading up to Alaska and Canada last summer, and planned two days in San Francisco to visit him. When I asked for his address, he just said the Mission District. Like it was self-explanatory or I should have some internal navigation system to deliver me to his front door.”
“Sounds like Lance.” I passed the high school, a shiny new multilevel structure in place of the low-ceilinged relic we’d attended. “May I ask—without you unhinging your jaw and biting my entire head off—why you don’t bring the dogs with you every day?”
Because it was stressing me the fuck out.
She fiddled with the items in her basket for a moment. I didn’t care what she called the thing, it was a basket. “Do you remember when you and Lance teased me about not being able to do anything alone and how I couldn’t even go to the bathroom without a dog watching me?”
I stifled a groan. “I remember being an asshole and I’ll apologize again for that.”
“Past tense?”
“I-I’d like to think so.”
“What about all the times when I was on a highly restricted diet and you guys would gorge on candy? Do you have any idea how much worse that made it for me?”
“To be fair, that one was mostly Lance—”
“You were there too!”
“Okay, yes, you’re right,” I said. “I was there. I gorged on the candy. I didn’t tell him to stop terrorizing you. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let him be such a fool.”
“The problem with your apologies is that I have to accept them and that’s kind of a bummer because I’ve built up a nice little iceberg of resentment toward you.”
“Yeah, that must be terrible.” I turned into her neighborhood. “Do you have an iceberg of resentment for Lance?”
She tapped at the smartwatch on her wrist. After a moment, she said, “I’ve had a long time to work through Lance’s iceberg. You scowled your way back into my life last month. There’s a difference.”
