“I like stretching out and keeping the room at whatever temperature I want it, and I like no one else complaining about my cat being on the bed or that my décor is too feminine, but sometimes when I’m hanging out with Tillie Jean and Max, or with Annika and Grady, or with Ray and Jacob, or with Georgia and Francisco, or take your pick of any of the rest of the Fireballs and their significant others, I wonder if I’ll ever have enough therapy and life experience to want to take a chance at dating again. I like kissing. I miss it.”
I didn’t.
Not until she kissed me on Saturday.
“I’m not asking you to—” she starts in a rush, cutting herself off when her cat meows loudly.
Like the cat’s sayingyou don’t have to explain yourself to that dumbass.
“Sorry. Right. Sorry. I’ll go to sleep. We should both go to sleep.All. We should all go to sleep. You too, Peggy.”
Neither one of us is sleeping tonight.
For all that I don’t know Sloane well, I canfeelit.
She’s hyped up now.
Peggy meows again, rises, climbs over me, and settles in the crook behind my knees.
Like the cat’s sayingleave me out of this, I’m not interested in being your barrier.
Sloane stares at me.
I stare back.
Had a staring contest like this once with Tripp’s oldest kid. I’d crashed at his place and woke up to James standing six inches from my nose. He was probably three.
I don’t startle easily, but I was so startled that I almost fell out of the bed.
And while I was telling myself to breathe, that it was a kid standing there, he leaned into my face, whisperedooga-booga, turned, and left the room.
Definitely not the right tactic here.
“You’re not closing your eyes,” she whispers.
I inch closer to her to give the cat more room, and our legs touch.
Her bare skin against mine.
I swallow again. “Peggy needed more room.”
“She’s a crotch sleeper. If you lay on your back, she’ll curl up on your crotch. Or more likely mine. She likes my—I’m going to stop talking now.”
“I’m making you nervous.”
“Life makes me nervous today.”
“I’ll go?—”
“No.”
She sucks in an audible breath, and I hear her teeth chatter again.
My heart squeezes.
I hate that she’s afraid.
I hate that it’s my fault she’s afraid.
