Page 110 of How To Not Need You

The microwave hums. The smell of butter and salt starts to fill the apartment, cutting through the stale pizza air. Elsie leans her head against my shoulder. Harper presses play on the remote she found without being told where it was. Luca abandons the popcorn to throw himself into the nest beside us, landing half on my legs and half on a cushion that immediately collapses beneath him.

I tip my head back against what used to be my couch and is now just fabric strewn across the floor, and I look at the three of them. These people. These absolute, impossible, infuriating people.

I am, without question, the luckiest person in the world to have them in my life. I don’t say it out loud. I don’t need to. They already know.

My phone buzzes one more time on the cushion beside me.

The screen lights up against the fabric. Jake’s name. A message I can’t read from here and won’t try to.

For now, there is popcorn and terrible movies and the weight of three people who love me enough to break into my apartment and force me back into the world.

The rest can wait for tomorrow.

Chapter

Nineteen

Jake

The house feels empty.

Not literally. The scent of Liv’s goulash still lingers in the kitchen, Tilly’s room carries the faint sweetness of whatever she sprayed herself with before Megan picked her up, and Hades has spent years ensuring the whole place has a permanent undertone of cat.

But it feels empty. Like someone is missing who should be here.

I stand in the hallway and the silence has a weight to it that wasn’t here before Liv started showing up on my doorstep with her leather jacket and her take-no-prisoners attitude and her stupid, impossible laugh.

My hair is still damp. I towelled it off, but not well enough, and now water drips down the back of my neck in a slow, cold trickle that I don’t have the energy to do anything about. I’m wearing a T-shirt that’s seen better days and a pair of track pants with a hole in one knee. Comfort clothes. The uniform of a man whose only remaining criteria for what he puts on his body is that it shouldn’t feel uncomfortable.

I walk through to the kitchen.

Her mug sits on the shelf.

Just an ordinary mug. Black, with a chip on the handle that she chooses to ignore as the mug is ‘irreplaceable’. She used it the night she made goulash. I remember when she originally brought it over after her first sleepover.

“Don’t make a thing of it, I NEED my mug.” I had smiled and tried to suppress the joy that had risen, then I washed it and put it on the shelf with my mugs because it felt right. It still feels right. It also feels like being punched in the gut.

On the couch, there’s a dent in the cushion she always claims. Right side, corner, where she tucks her feet underneath herself and leans into the armrest with whatever book she’s pretending not to be completely absorbed in. I haven’t sat there since she started coming over. Don’t ask me why. I just haven’t. Its unofficially become her spot.

The fridge hums. I open it out of habit rather than hunger and have to take a deep breath as I spot the goulash container on the top shelf. With her beautiful handwriting in black marker across the top. One word: REHEAT. No smiley face. No instructions. Just REHEAT, in capital letters, like she’s issuing a direct order to the universe. I close the fridge without taking it out as the sight of it alone causes another pang of longing to fill my chest.

Her charger is still on the kitchen bench where she left it. The white cord curled beside the toaster where she plugged it in before I left for my shift. I pick it up. The plastic is cool against my palm. I should text her about it. I should say something about coming to get it, or offer to drop it off, or find any reason at all to put myself in the same room as her and try to explain.

I don’t text her again though. I may have gone overboard and sent her another four since leaving Page & Grounds only an hour ago.

Luca told me to give her space. Luca, who currently holds the record for most interventions in Seabrook history, looked me in the eye and told me to back off. So I’m trying to back off and give her the space she needs. Starting in the last 10 minutes anyway. It might be already killing me, but I’m doing it.

I set the charger back down.

The house still feels too empty and for the first time since I bought the damn thing, it doesn’t feel like home. Hades is nowhere to be seen, which means he’s either asleep in Tilly’s room or plotting world domination from the top of the bookshelf. Either way, he’s keeping to himself for once.

I am pulled from my musings by the sound of tyres on the gravel.

I force away the seed of hope that springs, as I know the sound of Megan’s car. Years of hearing it pull into this driveway means I could identify it blindfolded. What I don’t expect is for her to be here at all. She usually gives me eight hours post-shift. Minimum. A full night’s sleep, a shower that lasts longer than three minutes, time to remember that I’m a person and not just a firefighter.

I’ve been home like ten minutes, I haven’t even spoken to her since our phone call at the station.

Fantastic.