Instead, I order myself to not wonder how my makeup is faring this morning or how much it’ll cost in dry cleaning to get this gown back to its original shape and try to channel Baseball Coach Addie and all of her badass attitude.
“What do you want?”
There was a time when he’d knock on my door and I’d grab him by the collar and haul him inside so we could strip each other out of our clothes and let off steam and justbe.
With no expectations.
Or so I thought.
I wonder if that’s what he’s thinking about now too.
“Just checking in to see how you’re doing,” he says.
“Not much different than when I saw you last night.”
He stares briefly at my face before his gaze drops to my dress—to my cleavage?—then lifts to meet my eyes again.
“I can see that. Can I come in?”
Most things about last night after me being on stage are hazy. And that means my priority needs to be getting cleaned up, texting Waverly to ask if I embarrassed myself and need to apologize to anyone, and then doing whatever she tells me I should do.
The idea of getting cleaned up makes my eyes water though.
In the bad way.
It’s fucking hard with my left shoulder immobilized.
Duncan takes advantage of my silence to slip past me and into my apartment.
He glances around, and I stiffen, which annoys both the crick in my neck that I’m starting to feel from sleeping in the recliner and also my shoulder.
Time for pain meds.
And coffee.
Three or four vats of it.
“Take it you haven’t seen the news,” he says as he casually strides through my living room toward my small kitchen. Dishes litter the counters and sink. I live alone, so I don’t go through a lot of trash. Usually, anyway. Since I got hurt, I’ve been living off of takeout and prepackaged meals, so my garbage can is overflowing.
Cooking one-handed is a pain in the ass.
So is taking out the trash.
And then my sloth brain catches up to what he just said. “What news?”
He lifts an empty to-go cup from a café down the street and waves it at me before putting it back on the counter. “You still drink coffee?”
I don’t answer so much as I whimper inyes, please.
He opens the white cabinet door next to the sink and pulls out my coffee beans, then digs my coffee maker out from the lower cabinet under the row of cabinets separating the kitchen from the living room.
And then he does something even worse than starting my coffee for me.
He searches the back of the freezer for my stash of premade egg muffin sandwiches.
I whimper again. “Why are you doing this?”
“You need coffee and food before I piss you off.” He pops a single sandwich into my microwave. The beeping pierces my skull and makes the very center of my brain ache.
