“What do you want to watch first?” she asks, swallowing hard.
“It’s your night. Your choice.”
“Ok. Efron it is,” she says, looking down at her fuzzy pink socks.
“It’s a shame I didn’t bring anything with Henry Cavill. You know you thought I was him the first night that we met?”
She makes a disbelieving noise and moves toward the pizza boxes. “You didn’t actually let my hallucinations go to your head, did you? Awww. You did. That’s sooo—cute?” She tilts her head and gives me an overstated pitying look as she lifts the lid.
This—the teasing and banter—feels too damn good.
“Not everything patients say when the anesthesia wears off is nonsense. In fact, I’ve heard patients profess their love for people who they never had the guts to tell because of those pesky inhibitions,” I tell her. Really, I heard a girl tell a pack of saltines she’d love them forever. But still.
“Mistaking you for Henry Cavill is hardly a declaration of love,” she says.
“I didn’t say that it was. But it’s a declaration of something.”
She pulls a slice of pizza onto each plate, narrows one eye at me as she licks the cheese from her fingers.
“You know you are barking up a dead tree?—”
“The wrong tree,” I correct.
“Yeah, a dead tree is the wrong tree.” She takes a bite of pizza, chews slowly, and keeps her eyes on me. “See this shirt.” She points to her chest. “It says ‘damaged goods’.”
It doesn’t. It says ‘Beer me, bitch.’
“We’re all damaged, Devon. Stop trying to push me away and go feed your mom and meet me on the couch.”
To my surprise, she doesn’t argue. Just lets out a long, uneven breath and picks up a plate, then heads out of the kitchen and up the steps.
I grab the other two slices and a couple of beers from the fridge, and head to the living room, setting it all down on the coffee table in front of the couch. I don’t know what I expected to find here, but a laughing, joking Devon was not it. If it weren’t for the fact that I’ve been infatuated with the dancing light in her eyes since that night in recovery, I would never have noticed its absence tonight. But infatuated I am. And so I recognize herhumor for what it is. Another coping mechanism—a tool to cover and avoid. She’s a world class illusionist.
Confirming my thought, Devon appears from nowhere with a cupcake in one hand and a beer in the other.
“It’s Efron time, baby!” she yells in an NFL coach’s voice. She lets out a whoop-whoop and does a little fist pump with the cupcake hand, then grabs the DVD and pops it into the player. When she turns and straightens, all of her focus lowers to her cupcake. She rolls her tongue around the top of the icing, and shuts her eyes.
A low sound escapes me before I can swallow it.
“What?” she asks.
Damn it. She hears everything. Teacher senses.
“Nothing,” I say.
“That dramatic teenage girl exhale was not nothing. That’s the sound Syd makes when I make her focus on pre-calc.” She takes another swig of her beer and watches me. I was not thinking of pre-calc.
“Really it was just—it was a cleansing breath.”
She takes a step forward, pulls one side of her mouth upward. The white bulbs in the recessed lighting above are sending streaks of copper through her thick hair and I can’t stop imagining the way it might feel wrapped around my fingers. Devon seems to see into my mind because a dusting of red spreads across her cheek bones. She lowers her eyes and lets out a breath.
“What?” I ask.
My heart is stuck in this frantic rhythm, the too fast tempo of a song your feet can’t keep up with.
“Nothing,” she says, but her voice is thicker—warmer. “Just a cleansing breath.”
She swallows, the freckle just above her clavicle jumps and settles, then she turns away and plops into the center of the couch.
