"There area few things you should know before we go in there," I said, turning off the main road through Sedona to the neighborhood where my mother lived.
"This is going to be good," Audrey said under her breath.
I ignored the bite behind her words the same as I'd ignored her pointed silence for the past few hours. I got it. I'd crossed a lot of lines last night and she was pissed. It wasn't the direction she wanted this to go and that was fine. Finding her asleep in a bunker of pillows made it clear enough. Understood. Life liked to fuck up my hopes and dreams anyway. Not sure why I was wasting my time being disappointed.
I cleared my throat and focused on the issues at hand. "My mother lives in a small house that she shares with her friend Marguerite. It's just enough for the two of them but nowhere near enough for another person, let alone two. Regardless, she's going to insist we stay there."
Audrey kept her gaze on the road ahead, her chin tipped up like it helped her pretend I wasn't sitting beside her. "Please tell me that will not occur."
"It won't, we have rooms at one of the resorts in town," I said. "But she willinsist."
"And you're expecting me to defuse that situation?"
"It would help." She clasped her hands in her lap and I took that as agreement. "Don't eat any of the candy they have around the house unless you're up for a strange trip."
"I believe I'm already on a strange trip."
"The kind that'll have you freaking out over the texture of a rug and talking to doorknobs. I speak from experience." I rubbed the back of my neck as Mom's little terra cotta-colored house came into view. "She's going to want you to nail down plans. For the wedding."
"And I'm defusing that one too?"
She flexed her left hand, the light purple gem on her finger catching the sunlight as she moved. I'd known the moment she realized it wasthe ring. The one she'd dreamed up years ago. I knew the universe was made of cold, cruel irony but finally giving her the ring she'd always wanted and getting lashed with silence drove the point home harder than necessary.
My chest tightened, that unrelenting band that made me worry about heart attacks and living wills back in place. "Handle it however the hell you want," I snapped. "I'm just telling you what's going to happen in there."
"Thanks so much," she bit back.
"Anytime," I yelled.
"Have you considered that we're doing all of this because you won't have an honest conversation with your mother?"
I leveled a stare in her direction. "I guess you'd know all about that, wouldn't you?"
She returned the stare, a wall of ice behind those hazel eyes. "It's good that you got my punishment out of the way for today. It would've been so uncomfortable to do it in front of Janet."
"Just trying to be efficient," I replied.
I pulled in front of my mother's house and shoved both hands through my hair. I didn't see how we were going to make this work. Not with last night still a raw, open wound between us and our story held together by threads. I'd be stunned if we lasted thirty minutes without throttling each other.
"Give me a minute," she said, pulling a small zip-up bag from inside her tote. "I'd rather not start this off looking like roadkill."
"You don't look like roadkill." I kept my gaze on my phone as I said this. I didn't want to watch while she fussed with her hair and dabbed makeup on her face. I didn't want to know her small, private moments. I couldn't. "She just wants to see you. She won't care how you look."
"I care," Audrey replied as she swiped a rosy-colored wand over her lips.
Okay, yes, I watched.
It was fucking ridiculous how something as irrelevant as lip color could hollow me out. One minute she was pressing her lips together and inspecting her work in the mirror, the next she was the only thing in the world worth seeing. Everything about her just made me want to lean closer.
The part that really killed me was that she didn't need me. She said she'd needed me back then, when it all fell apart, but not anymore. It was masochism at its finest but I wanted to know when that'd changed. What was the series of events that led her to surgically remove me from her life and just…move on without ever looking back? Maybe she could teach me how to do it because I still hadn't figured it out.
"Well." She snapped one of her products shut. "I'm still roadkill but now it's more like recent roadkill. Fresh. Not much of an improvement but it's something."
"Shut up, you're beautiful." The words were out before I could claw them back inside my head. Because being a jackass came naturally to me, I added, "And you don't need me telling you that because you know it."
She layered both hands over her chest and dropped a wistful sigh. "You really know how to make me feel special."
All I could see was my ring on her finger. Right where it belonged. I hated that I thought it and I hated that it was true.
