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“Avery?”
“Avery would just look at me and I’d tell her everything voluntarily because she has that power and I hate it.”
“So no one?”
“No one.” Her tone is firm.
“Understood.” I pause. “Can I tell the dog?”
“We don’t have a dog.”
“When we get one. Can I tell it?”
“You want to tell a dog about our sex life?” She lifts one eyebrow as she glances over at me.
“Dogs are nonjudgmental.”
She puts her hand over her mouth. Her shoulders are shaking. She’s laughing—or trying not to, and failing, the sound leaking through her fingers in bursts she can’t control. It’s the real laugh, the unguarded one, the one I’ve ranked first among everything I’ve ever heard.
I watch her laugh and my entire system goes quiet the way it does when something matters too much to process and too much to miss.
“Sure,” she chuckles. “You can tell our hypothetical dog.”
“One more question,” I say, when she’s recovered enough to breathe.
“Absolutely not.”
“It’s not about last night.”
She glances at me. Suspicious. “What is it then?”
“Can we get a dog?”
She stares at the road. Her mouth twitches. She’s fighting it—the smile, the softness, the giving in. “We’ll see,” she says.
“That means no.”
“That means we’ll see.”
“Ruby.”
“Aiden.”
We look at each other. She’s smiling—the real one, the one I’d do anything for—and I’m smiling too, and I’m not monitoring it, not adjusting it by millimeters in a mirror, not performing it from a tutorial. It’s just happening. Because she’s here and I’m here and last night was real and there might be a dog and the sun is coming through the windshield and landing on her face and I don’t need to catalog this moment because I already know I’ll remember it forever.
Some things don’t need to be filed.
They just stay.
Chapter Eighteen
Ruby
Loose Lips
“Start from the beginning. Don’t skip anything. I want every detail.”
Liv is leaning across the table like she’s watching the series finale of a show she’s been bingeing for weeks. She’s got a margarita in one hand and her sunglasses pushed up on her head. She’s been waiting for this debrief since we got back yesterday, and her patience—which was never her strong suit—has officially expired.
