That’s the part that still catches me sometimes, just how natural this all is.
The room has that easy, settled quality it gets when nothing is on fire. And I mean that in the real sense and the metaphorical one, because this club has had enough of both kinds of fire in the past year to earn a quiet Sunday.
Millie is at the bar with Anchor’s hand resting at the small of her back, and she is laughing at something Deek has said, properly laughing, head tipped back, the laugh of someone who has cried a lot recently and is rediscovering that the other thingis still possible. It’s just over a month since Jonas passed. She is not okay, not fully, but she is upright, she is here, and Anchor hasn’t left her side in weeks. He is strong and steady, as if staying had never been a question for him.
I watch them for a moment and feel something warm and uncomplicated move through my chest.
He’s going to take care of her.
I knew it before I could have told you why.
I’m certain of it now.
Victoria is camped out in the armchair by the window—the good one, the one closest to the air conditioner. She claimed it about six weeks ago, and nobody in this clubhouse is stupid enough to challenge her ownership at this point.
She’s massively pregnant, completely over it, and has spent the last month delivering increasingly aggressive opinions about chairs, body temperature, swollen feet, and the general betrayal that is the third trimester.
Sin doesn’t even wait for her to ask for things anymore. Drinks appear, snacks appear, blankets appear. Half the time he’s already moving before she opens her mouth.
This is the ONLY correct response.
She catches my eye from across the room and raises her glass of sparkling water at me. I raise my wine back. This is our version of a conversation, and it contains everything it needs to.
Marley is beside me at the table, close enough that our shoulders nearly touch, on her third glass of wine and talking me through the wedding venue situation with the kind of energy that says she loves planning things and is also slightly losing her mind over them. I am listening with genuine attention because I love her, and also because the story involves Nitro attempting to form an opinion on floral arrangements, and the results are genuinely extraordinary.
I am also aware, without making a production of being aware, that Ghost is at the table in the corner.
He isalwaysat the table in the corner.
This is one of the reliable constants of my life, up there with Marley crying at commercials, Deek finding everything funnier than it is, and the fact that I will never,not once,be able to find my keys when I actually need them.
Ghost’s laptop is open, and the toothpick is in. A few weeks ago, he moved his laptop bag approximately four inches to the left without being asked, and it happened to create exactly enough space for me to put my bag down when I arrived. He has not commented on this. I have not commented on this, and the whole arrangement has the charged casualness of two people pretending something isn’t exactly what it is.
We are not defining things.
Not that there is anything to define exactly.
This was an unspoken agreement we reached sometime around month two, when I began claiming the chair beside him. It has served us well in the sense that neither of us has had to say anything terrifying out loud. It has not served us well in the sense that I am increasingly aware that‘not defining things’is simply a more comfortable name for‘something I am running out of reasons to keep not defining.’But I guess just sitting next to someone while they effectively ignore you for their laptop is about as much definition as I’m going to get.
There has been no dating.
No flirting.
Absolutely no physical contact.
The guy is making me work for it.
But even if he lets me sit next to him, and that is all I get, I will take it. Because there is something about Ghost that draws me in. A motherfucking pathetic moth to the proverbial flame.
Marley knows.Of course, Marley knows.She has the knowing expression of someone who found her own love story in the back of a black Honda and recognizes the shape of the beginning of one from fifty feet.
Suddenly, my phone buzzes on the table, jerking my eyes away from staring at Ghost.
I do that way too much.
Glancing down at my screen, I see a text from my baby sister.
Piper.
