“A decent guy who picks up a beautiful hitchhiking girl and takes her to Vegas, marries her, accepts a divorce, and gets to keep all the money? That’s a very unique story.”
“We’ll go with unique,” I say, making my way into the kitchen.
“Shit, we didn’t eat dinner, and I’m supposed to be your support system,” he says as I open the fridge.
“Yeah, you kind of failed your job there.”
“You were the one who was supposed to cook,” he reminds me.
“You were the one who was too comfortable and made me fall asleep.”
Brody pulls himself from the couch and stretches his arms over his head, still wearing a towel around his waist. He’s hot. There’s no denying it. He meets me at the fridge and nudges me out of the way. “Allow me not to forget this time.”
“I don’t have a lot.”
Brody rummages through the pantry on the other side of the fridge and pulls out the new box of cereal I hadn’t opened. The milk is next to follow, and then he snags two bowls from the cabinet he remembered my dishes being in.
I’m in a daze as he pours two bowls of cereal then places them down on the table. I grab a couple of spoons and take a seat, ready to face-plant into the bowl. “It’s so early,” I tell him.
“We’ll get a head start on the day,” he says.
“Seriously. You have a daughter and need to work, right?”
“I got this,” he says.
“Do you?” I question with a raised brow.
“Yes, Hannah is going to her mother’s this weekend. My dad has a shipment of barrels to deliver to Connecticut and offered to handle it and bring Hannah along to save me a trip. They’re leaving in a couple hours. I hate pulling her from school, but her mother likes to make everything hard, and if I can get help with that six-hour trip, both ways sometimes, I’ll take what I can get.”
“That’s why she stayed at my parents’ last night,” I figure out, speaking my thoughts out loud.
“Yeah, I don’t just ditch her all the time, but thanks for assuming.”
“I didn’t assume,” I argue.
“Well, you like to make an ass out of you and me, so … it’s hard to avoid the thought.”
I dig my spoon into the cereal and take a small bite, enjoying the sensation of the cold milk traveling down my parched throat. “What about work?”
“Let me worry about that, okay?” His response is snippy, and I feel like I crossed a line, an odd line I wouldn’t have thought would be a line, but it’s also three o’clock in the morning.
“Whatever,” I groan.
Brody watches me taking bites of the cereal, and I can only imagine what thoughts are going through his head. I assume he’s wondering if I’ll want to vomit after this, or if this is a safe food, or if I’ll stop eating after three bites. The amount of misconceptions that come along with the illness is never-ending. “What makes you tick?”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Is it a certain food, or is it a stress-factor?”
I appreciate the question rather than the assumption. “It’s usually stress. I like food. I could eat all day, in fact, but when I’m anxious or upset, the food in my stomach feels like it’s suffocating every free inch within my body, and I can’t breathe or move. It’s like I need the empty feeling, the pain behind my ribs to make the other pain go away. I don’t know if that makes sense, though.”
Brody takes a few more bites of his cereal before responding. “It makes perfect sense. It sucks, but I understand.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah, why? Some people drink, some smoke, some do drugs, others work out like crazy, everyone handles stress and pain in a way that works for them. Going through crap in life sucks as it is, but humans aren’t built to take on never-ending pain, which leads to other methods of medicating. It’s human nature.”
“You just made yourself sound a lot smarter than I’ve given you credit for,” I say.
