“I looked at the listing with you,” she reminds me, but her face shows up in my screen moments later.
“It isn’t cold.” I give her a wry smile.
“Maybe not now, but any place that gets over seventy inches of snow on averagea yearis cold.”
“You don’t complain about the amount of snow in Aspen.”
“Because I only go there once a year, or every other year, and it’s with a purpose.” She waves her hand dismissively.
I chuckle softly. “Yeah, to drink spiked hot cocoa and look cute sitting beside the fire. Besides, Aspen doesn’t have this.” I hit the button to swap cameras, allowing her to see the view from the third floor loft.
“A blue sky?” Her clear voice comes from the phone.
“It’s not just the sky, that’s the water. I swear it looks just like the ocean. It goes on forever.”
“What about the condo?” She doesn’t seem impressed, but I’m not surprised. Livy didn’t want me coming to Michigan at all. When she learns I’m not in any rush to return home, she’s going to be even more pissed. I should tell her. Guilt washes over me, but I still don’t mutter a word about my plans.
“It’s really nice.” I flip the camera and take her with me on the rest of the short search of the upper floor, secretly hoping she will love the place as much as I do. Keeping that in mind, I show her some of the highpoints of the rest of the house. She eventually admits to liking the floor plan and even the beachy furnishings.
We spend a good while on the phone, chatting until my stomach grumbles for the tenth time, and I decide I can nolonger ignore my gut. “As much as I wish I could stay on here all day, I need to go. I’m starving, and I still have a bunch of stuff to do.”
“Like what? Did you reschedule the interview so you could come home early?” She sounds too hopeful.
“No, but I need to line up a few other things,” I hedge. I don’t have the guts to tell her I have several boxes being delivered tomorrow for my extended stay, along with a rental car. She thinks I’m only going to be here a week, two tops, but I booked the place for the entire summer with the option to extend as long as no one books it before I decide what the hell I’m going to do.
She’ll warm up to the idea. She has to understand why I can’t stay in Texas anymore. Everything is just too raw. Plus, I’m hoping to convince her to come stay with me, at least for a little while when her internship is over in a couple weeks.
“I wish you would have waited for me,” she complains.
“I couldn’t, Livy. You understand, right? I couldn’t miss this opportunity.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry.” We both sound sad, but it’s because we are. It might be a good thing for us to spend a little time apart. We’re dangerously close to being codependent, and maybe we already are.
“Listen, I will call you later, after I get something to eat, yeah?”
“Okay, talk to you soon, Har. Love you.”
The phone goes dead before I have a chance to respond, but I do it anyway. “Love you too.” I try not to leave anything left unsaid anymore.
As I pull the phone from my ear, I see an alert from the ride share app with a fee of six dollars, which is much less than I expected, prompting me to look a little closer and realize the fee is for a cancelation.
“What the hell?” I hit the notification, and it opens the app where I see the six-dollar fee charged with a warning that excessive cancelations will risk my account being banned. Confused, I poke around, looking for how I might have accidently booked another ride since arriving at the condo. Considering I barely have a history, it’s easy to see the cancelation isn’t from a new ride. It says it was my ride here from the tiny airport twenty minutes away that was cancelled.
I examine the screen again, thinking I’m missing something, but I come to the same conclusion. There’s an alert that the driver canceled the ride forty-five minutes ago when I failed to show up. I look at the time stamp at the top of my phone, noting the fact that forty-five minutes ago, I was probably still in his car.
“What’s the point?” I question, wondering if this is some kind of scam. “Shit!” It’s then I realize I never tipped the driver. I was too preoccupied with looking at the property and the lake to even remember to check the app after getting out of the car.
A flush steals its way over my cheeks from embarrassment. Unbidden, the image of his face—well, as much of his cheek and jaw I could see—pops up in my head.
A groan slips from my lips as I sink back onto the chair and cover my eyes. I thought he was kind of cute. I even forced myself to make small talk and asked him about places to eat. He probably felt sorry for me since I’m clearly clueless, but why cancel the ride and lose out on money?
After a few more seconds of mortification. I finally look at my phone again, noting the icon at the bottom of the screen to report an issue with the ride. I hover my finger over the oval for several heartbeats before deciding to just let it go. I don’t want to report him and possibly cause him an issue when he did me a favor.
I flick the app away and pull up my search engine to look for pizza near me.Delivery will have to do. I think I’m done with ride shares for the time being.
CHAPTER 3
Harlyn
