“You hiding some stuffed animals, champ?”
Darcy was going to be disappointed if he didn’t make even a tiny pass at her while they talked about sleeping arrangements.
“That’s what the second bed is for,” he said, dimple not quite popping out.
She edged close enough to wrap her hand around the inside of his arm and slide her bag onto her own shoulder. She could feel the tension vibrating through his body. His mind was still somewhere else.
“I’m not picky,” Darcy said. “My first deployment, I had to hot rack on a stack of Tomahawk missiles.”
“You’re welcome to whichever one you like best,” Teagan said, still not picking up what she was laying down. “I think all the sheets are clean.”
Coming home from rehab was supposed to be very hard. One of the most fraught events in recovery, according to the podcasts she’d been listening to all day. The temptation to fall back into bad habits would be overwhelming. Darcyset her shoulders back, shaking off her amusement at how oblivious he was. She was here to work, after all.
Well, time to start earning her keep.
“I’ll take the guest bedroom, then,” she said, releasing his arm. “Then I’ll get started on the bar.”
sixteen
After four weeks off the grid, Teagan seemed to have already lost his ability to concentrate on his laptop screen. He’d been up most of the previous night packing and finishing Darcy’s job applications, but he’d slept all day. So he ought to feel more rested.
It was the Xanax, or the Lexapro. They made him tired, and he needed to be able to think.
There were 8,573 new email messages that had accrued in Teagan’s inbox since the previous evening, when he’d left a message for Rose that promised that if he still had a job at the foundation past the next week, she wouldnotunless she released her hold on his emails. Her written reply, if any, was lost in the vast sea of fundraising pleas from other charities, spam, and routine office correspondence, but he supposed she’d blinked first.
Teagan sat down at the tulip-shaped breakfast table, intending to drill into the most recent weekly reports, but it was hard to concentrate past Darcy’s flurry of activity in his peripheral vision. She’d satisfied herself that the fridge and freezer contained no controlled substances, pronounced his bedroom clear in the style of a bomb disposal technician, and then moved on to the bar.
Unlike Teagan, she shone with the righteous energy of the productively engaged.
Teagan tried to force his eyes to remain on his inbox. But they kept drifting over to the woman who made up most of the color and movement in his life. She’d hopped up on the counter at the other end of the living room, and she was systematically emptying the contents of the liquor cabinets into the wet bar sink.
Darcy made occasional judgmental comments as she worked.
“Peach schnapps, Teagan,really?”
“What do you even make with spiced rum?”
“Why do you have three different types of orange-flavored stuff?”
It was all untouched since his mother’s death. Teagan wouldn’t be surprised if some of it was decades old, moved from their house in Greenwich after his parents’ divorce. His mother had preferred the elegant simplicity of vodka on the rocks, and there was no vodka left in the house now. Teagan had never been able to stand the smell of it.
He stared blankly at his laptop screen. He ought to be working. He ought to be doing something. But his mind steadfastly refused to absorb any information as he clicked through four weeks of messages.
He wished he had even half the determination Darcy exuded as she finished dragging trash sacks of empty liquor bottles out to the curb and started removing the wine collection.
Stop, he wanted to tell her.
You don’t have to do all this.
Open one up and come sit with me instead.
But that would only lead to Darcy clocking him over thehead with one of those pretentious bottles of Montrachet before taking a taxi back to the airport.
Her expression was solemn with purpose as she marched in and out of the house, her ponytail flying behind her like a flag. However misplaced that purpose was, Teagan keenly missed the feeling that he was in the right place, doing the right thing, which had slowly dwindled to a trickle over the past two years.
Lying to her wasn’t going to help with that. It seemed pretty likely to make him feel like shit, in fact. And once she rendered his home alcohol free, what was he even supposed to do with her? Was he going to have to invent relapse crises? Pretend an urgent need to hit up bars? God, what was he even going to feed her? He and Sloane usually just ordered sushi or ate frozen Trader Joe’s entrees cooked in the toaster oven.
With that thought, Teagan found his priorities clear. He had to provision the house, because Darcy needed to eat. He could accomplish that much, at least.
