She wasn’tjustgetting out of Wyatt to be with me. She was getting away from her mom at the same time… andIkept her here.
“Just take care of her, okay?” I ask as I finally pull away, my voice still throaty with tears.
“I will. I promise.” Ryan steps back too, his shirt damp now. “But I have to be at work tomorrow at eleven.”
“Okay. I’ll be here by then,” I tell him.
He opens the front door for me, but it’s still raining cats and dogs.
“Hang on.” He quickly slips on a pair of slides and grabs an umbrella from a tall vase on the floor. “Okay, come on,” he says, putting his arm around me and walking me all the way out to my car.
I don’t stop crying the whole way home. Between the storm and my tears clouding my vision, I’m beyond lucky there are virtually no other vehicles on the roads right now.
I sit in my car out in the driveway for a few minutes, forcing myself to slow my breathing as I wipe my face and blow my nose using a stack of napkins from the glove box. After I get myself together enough, I head inside, the rain soaking clean through me once again.
“It’s a little late there, kiddo.” My mom’s voice startles me as I head in through the door.
“Sorry,” I say as I step to the edge of the entryway. She’s sitting on the couch in the family room reading another romance novel.
“It’s almost midnight. Curfew was at eleven thirty.” She makes a big show of checking her watch.
Could therebeanything more trivial right now? Nora just got the shit beat out of her by her own mom, and kicked out of her home forever with no place to go, and my mom is worried about mycurfew? But of course I can’t say any of that.
“I lost track of time. Won’t happen again.”
“If I’m going to trust you to be out late with your friends, you need to respect the rules.”
Trust.
Kind of like how I trusted her when she told me she had no idea what happened between us? Kind of like how I trusted her when she let me believe it was all my fault? When she made me feelsorryfor her?
As much as I’mdyingto call her out on her bullshit, I bite my tongue. I need to get my head on straight and figure this out with Nora. The last thing I need right now is to risk being kicked out too. I can’t believe just over an hour ago I wasactuallygoing to trust her, to ask her to help me.
“Sorry, Mom,” I repeat, then clench my jaw shut.
“Oh my God, you’re dripping wet, sweetie,” she replies as she gets up off the couch and comes closer to me. “Go on. Get dried off and get to bed,” she says.
I try my best not to lean away from her as she plants a kiss on my cheek, but honestly, I can barely bring myself to look at her right now.
“You okay?” she asks, planting her hands on my arms and holding me out to look at.
“Just tired and cold,” I reply, shivering under her grip.
“Okay, well, let’s both head up.”
I follow her upstairs and watch her blow me a kiss from her bedroom before closing her door behind her.
I lock mine behind me and let my wet clothes fall onto the wood. Then I pull on a clean pair of sweat pants and a soccer hoodie from my closet before collapsing facedown onto my bed.
I turn my head to the side to look at the heap of clothes on the floor, and despite all the terrible shit that happened today, for just a moment, I relive the earlier part of our night, together in Nora’s bed.
The feeling of her body underneath mine as she unbuttoned my white shirt. Her hands sliding over the backs of my thighs. Her adorable little embarrassed giggle when I complimented her arms.
I look down and realize I’ve been playing with the yellow hair tie on my wrist. The one that Nora told me she gave me the first time we had sex, and I remember that I have the shoe box back in my vent now. I don’t have to sit here and imagine things. I can actually look through all our old memories, all our photographs.
I hop out of bed to retrieve it from the vent and flip it open on my bed. I haven’t looked at any of this since we went through it together in the woods, but when I dump it out, I realize there are a couple of new items. The first is the California travel guide with all its Post-it Notes, and the second is a small black-and-white composition notebook.
I pick it up and sit back against my headboard as I open up the cover to the first page.
