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“Oh, you are hungover!”

Henry rolls his eyes at me but steps aside and lets me into the house. I go to the kitchen and start setting up a pot of coffee to brew. Henry slowly follows me.

“Go shower.” I turn around to fill up the water basin, and feel his eyes on me. “You smell like a distillery rotted,” I say without even turning around.

I hear him sigh, and that one step that Kristine always refused to fix creaks as he concedes and heads upstairs. I don’t turn around until I know he’s gone.

Once the coffee is brewed, I find two mugs and fill them to the brim. I carefully go up the stairs, pausing when I reach his room, the door still halfway open. Panic washes over me as the memory of the last time I was up here assaults my brain and my heart. But there’s no time for that. I take a deep breath, then knock on the frame with my elbow.

“Hey, Henry? Are you decent? I brought you some coffee.” The shower is running in the adjoining bathroom. I peer around and see that luckily, that door is shut. I place his coffee mug on the nightstand and take a sip of my own, mostly as an excuse to drink in this space that was once so familiar.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see an old bulletin board full of pictures. I remember this. I start to move toward it, drawn to a photo in the corner, partially obscured by others placed on top of it. That unmistakable purple satin. One hand too high on my waist.

It’s us.

The same photo I saw in my bat mitzvah album.

Before I can look any closer, I hear the shower turn off and quickly announce myself again. “I’m in here. I brought coffee. I can step out if you need a minute.”

“It’s fine,” he mutters through the door.

“You really need to pack,” I call back, spotting his suitcase. I put down my mug and heave the suitcase onto the bed with a thud.

“Don’t go through my stuff,” he orders from the bathroom, but I disregard it.

“I’m helping,” I say. “I’m the queen of a quick turnaround.” I unzip the suitcase and throw it open. It’s already packed in a perfectly Type A fashion, soft clothing rolled up and organized in even columns. This shouldn’t surprise me but somehow it does.

“I told you not to go through my stuff,” he says, coming up behind me, and the gruffness in his voice makes me jump.

I spin around and feel my whole body flush, not just from the steam coming out of the now open bathroom, but because Henry Cole is standing inches away from me in nothing but a towel wrapped low around his waist. And he looks better than I even assumed from that fitted white button-down on the plane, all lean muscle and olive skin.

“Eyes up here,” he says, and my gaze flits up to meet his, gold flecks dancing almost playfully in a sea of blue. He cocks an eyebrow at me, and I swivel back to the suitcase, unable to stand to look at him for another second.

“Looks like you’re good to go!” Shit. “I mean, as far as packing is concerned.”

“Sure, Gold.” I detect a hint of a smile as he says my last name, though I don’t dare look back to see.

“Ugh, just get dressed already. Coffee’s on the nightstand. I’ll grab my bag and meet you back here in ten.” I shuffle out, continuing to avoid eye contact.

The bite of cold air is a welcome relief as I rush out of Henry’s house and back to my own. What the hell was that?

* * *

As if I hadn’t had a difficult enough time so far escaping the nostalgia of home, Kristine still has the same old CR-V from when we were teenagers, and that’s what Henry is currently driving. When I first got into the car, I had to physically fight the urge to kick off my shoes and put my feet up on the dash like I used to do. Before. When we had that kind of familiarity and I knew I was well within my rights because this was my seat. Permanent shotgun.

The last time I was in this car was the worst day of my entire life.

We spend the first two hours of the drive mostly in silence. He keeps glancing over at me, so I throw all of my focus into the liner notes of an old Ed Sheeran CD that I remember he bought in high school because he couldn’t connect his phone to the CR-V’s speakers.

“We can play the album if you want,” he says finally. “You can stop pretending to read the whole damn thing.”

My eyes meet his, just briefly, and I tense. Whether it’s from being called out or from the way he’s looking at me, I’m not sure.

When I don’t respond, he shakes his head and slaps on the radio, scrolling with a dial until he hears music. Anything to end the silence, I guess. We come into the middle of the bridge of “Drops of Jupiter.”

I can’t help but laugh. “Oh my God. I can’t hear this song without thinking about junior year homecoming.”

This song played at every school dance, despite being basically as old as we were, until the student government finally voted to ban it after homecoming our junior year. The vote made the local paper.