Brett grunted. “You’re always welcome, buddy.” Penny stretched tall then dropped to the ground and out of his sight.
“Excellent. I’ll let you go. Date is June twenty-second.”
“Mmhmm, see you then.”
Tony ended the call, and Brett realized he was standing next to the sink still gripping an empty glass. What had they just talked about? Tony coming to visit . . . June something. Twenty-second. Brett set the glass on the counter and opened the calendar on his phone.June twenty-second. Tony staying over.
Tony staying over where? Penny was in the second bedroom now. He had the air mattress for camping, but he wasn’t going to make his friends sleep on that. He exhaled and filled his glass with water, then took it back to the table and opened his project management dashboard.
When the front door opened, he leaned in closer to his screen. Watching her through the window had already sent his pulse skittering. He didn’t need to see her two feet in front of his face.
He didn't say anything as she closed the door behind her, not sure whether she wanted him to or not. Penny set her rolled-up yoga mat next to the door and padded into the kitchen, then pulled a bag from the cupboard, scooped something into the coffee maker, and turned it on.
He'd seen that bag in her cart and thought it was coffee grounds, but it wasn’t a brand he recognized. He’d meant to ask her about it.
Penny pulled an English muffin from the Lazy Susan, split it, and popped it in the toaster. Then she filled a glass with water, squeezed in lemon juice from slices she'd cut and stored in the fridge, and gulped it down.
Brett kept typing and watched all of this in his peripheral vision. She could pretend he wasn't there all she wanted. Fine by him. He felt her moving closer to the table before he saw her round the island. Her bare stomach flexed as she pulled out a chair and sat down.
She clasped her hands on the table and waited. Brett's pulse raced, but he didn’t look up. If she was sitting there, she wanted to talk. While he wasn't angry about the night before, he was feeling a tad stubborn. Especially since he was still struggling to make his tongue work correctly.
“Am I interrupting?” Penny asked.
Brett drew a breath and glanced up. He hadn’t decided whether he wanted to say yes or no, but when he looked at her face and saw those same puffy red-rimmed eyes from the first day she'd moved in, his heart dropped to the floor.
“Good morning.”
“Good morning.” Penny's lips twitched. “I just wanted to say I'm sorry."
With those words, Brett felt like he’d just scored on his own net. “No, I'm sorry.”
Penny shook her head and flattened her hands on the table. “You have nothing to be sorry about. You asked a question, and my reaction was juvenile.”
“I shouldn't have pushed you.”
“You didn't push.” Penny stared at her hands. “I didn't realize . . . I didn’t expect to see him, and I think it's still so fresh. I'm not quite ready to talk about it.”
Brett resisted the urge to reach out and hold her hand like she'd done for him during PT the other night. “I shouldn't have expected you to share something like that with a stranger.”
Penny’s brows pinched together. “You’re not a stranger, Brett.”
Brett locked onto her warm brown eyes. He thought back through the past forty-eight hours questioning why he'd ever thought he could ask Penny about Daniel in the first place. That answer was simple. Since getting sober, his whole life had to be built on openness and vulnerability. He walked into meetings all the time and told complete strangers intimate details about his life. That was the way he stayed healthy. That was how it worked.
But Penny wasn't used to that life. She didn’t have the same demons, and she didn't have to break down those barriers to be safe. To survive. He didn’t resent his experience—he was better for breaking down those walls. But not everybody was ready to do it, and he shouldn't have expected Penny to.
Penny dropped her eyes. “I'm sorry I reacted that way. It wasn't fair, and I appreciate you checking in on me.” She tapped the tips of her beige fingernails on the tabletop. “The red sauce was delicious.”
Brett breathed a laugh. “Isn’t it bolognese?”
Penny shrugged, then walked back to the counter. The coffee maker was hissing now.
“I'm glad you liked it. What are you making, by the way?” That was a safe question, wasn’t it?
“It's ground cocoa beans. Has a more sustainable form of energy than the caffeine in coffee. Do you want some?”
Brett’s eyes trailed down the line of her back, resting briefly on the crease in her skin barely visible past the fabric of her shorts before he forced them back up. “Sure.” Brett wasn't a huge coffee drinker, but he loved hot chocolate.
“It's nothing like hot chocolate if that's what you're thinking.”
