I bite my lip, nodding. “And she bought me stuff.”
“Stuff.”
“Yeah. She got me tons of yarn and…”
Something flashes through his eyes then and I realize what I said. What it means.
I made him a sweater once. Took me weeks to work on that intarsia for him. I worked late into the night, trying to get it finished for his championship game.
My fingers hurt with the phantom pain now.
The pain over the fact that he must’ve thrown it away.
Because it didn’t mean anything to him.
But more than that, there’s pain in my hands from holding on to the past so tightly.
“To knit,” he says in a low voice, his gaze piercing into mine.
“Yeah. I wanna make her socks. And hats.”
“Sweaters.”
I swallow, still cradling my belly. “I wanna make her those too. But I’m afraid.”
“Of what?”
“What if… What if she doesn’t like them? My sweaters.”
A muscle on his cheek pulses. “She’d love them.”
My heart jumps. “You think so?”
“I fucking know so.”
I like it…
That’s what he said back when I gave him the sweater and I was so happy that he did. But he was lying. I know.
I also know that he isn’t lying now.
And his next fiercely-spoken words prove it. “Because you’ll make it. And for once you’ll make it for someone who actually deserves your perfectly made things and your first attempts at intarsia.”
“Reed, I…”
I trail off because I don’t know what I was going to say. I don’t know what I wanted to say.
What did I want to say to him?
It doesn’t matter anyway because Tempest decides to tell us both, from where she’s still standing by Reed’s Mustang, thatshe’s hungry and that we should finish making googly eyes at each other later.
And then I’m so embarrassed that I was, in fact, making googly eyes at him, I don’t even look at Reed all throughout dinner. Although I can feel his eyes on me and also on Tempest, whom I think he’s glaring at.
After we’re done, we have a debate on who’s going to do what in terms of cleaning up. Reed wants to do everything himself but I tell him no. I tell him that I’m fine now and I can do stuff. Plus he’s tired from work anyway. So I clean up the table, put away all the food, and Reed does the dishes.
Tempest watches it all with her gray eyes that never ever seem to stop laughing.
When we’re done, she pulls me out of the kitchen without even a word to Reed and drags me to my room, closing the door.
