I stop and see her holding the car keys I left on the counter for her on a piece of paper with her name on it.
“Those are keys to my other car. It’s your car now.”
Her eyes are big as she looks up at me.
“I know you’ve had issues with your car, so I want you to drive the SUV from now on. It’s safer.”
She starts to shake her head.
“It’s just been sitting in my garage. I hardly drive it, but it runs well, is reliable, and handles easily when the weather is bad. I want you to drive that from now on. It’s safer than your car,” I say again.
She blinks and the look in her eyes softens. “You want me to have your car? Even though we argued?”
I frown. Does she think I’d withhold stuff from her just because we fought?
A sick feeling rumbles in my stomach.
“I’ll always care about you, Ellie. I’ll always want you safe. Always. No matter what.”
For a long moment, she just looks at me. Emotion flashes in her pretty blue eyes. “Thank you.”
I tug a hand through my hair and nod. “I’ll head out,” I say without looking at her and start to walk off.
“Camden, wait.”
I stop at the sound of her voice. It’s soft and pained, and I hate it. I hate hearing her voice like this.
When I look up at her, my chest aches. She looks like she’s on the verge of crying.
“I’m sorry for getting upset earlier and for what I said. That was out of line.”
“It’s okay.”
She steps toward me, shaking her head. She crosses her arms over her chest.
“It’s not okay,” she says softly. She bites her lip. “It’s just…it makes me really uncomfortable to go to places like sex toy shops. That’s a really private thing for me, so for everyone to focus on it made me kind of embarrassed, and I reacted poorly.”
She’s quiet for a moment and plays with the end of her ponytail, like she’s working up the nerve to tell me all this.
“Throwing those toys away was a pretty rash thing to do. I feel bad about it,” she says.
“It’s okay. They’re your toys. You can do whatever you want with them. I shouldn’t have told you what to do. I’m sorry.”
Her mouth curves up in a small smile. “You don’t have to apologize, Camden. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
I shove my hands in my pockets. “I, um, left the bag in the garage. You can do whatever you’d like with them.”
She nods, then looks off to the side. “Are things between us gonna be weird now because I freaked out about this?”
I smile and shake my head. “Not at all.”
She lets out a breath. “So we can just forget about it? Go back to normal?”
I nod. “Of course we can.”
An even bigger grin spreads across Ellie’s face. Something in my chest blooms. Relief that she feels better. And happy to see her happy now too.
She glances down at Gus. “Gus rolled around in the dirt during our walk, so I should give him a bath.”
