Yours Truly (Part of Your World, #2)(77)

“Wow, that bad, huh?”

She came back to her side and looked up at me with a sniff. “So when I was in college, I used to work at Starbucks, right? And when I’d get a rude customer, I’d make their drink extra good. Like, I’d use cold-pressed coffee in their Frappuccino instead of the coffee concentrate, that kind of thing? And I wouldn’t tell them what I did so they could never re-create it. That way for the rest of their life their drink would never be as good again and they’d always be chasing that one time and they’d never enjoy it the way they did that day.”

“Okaaaaay…”

“This isn’t the part,” she said. “This is so you can get it, okay? So you can see how diabolical I am.”

I chuckled. “All right…”

She looked at me bleakly.

I arched an eyebrow. “What’d you do?”

She drew in a long breath. Then she mumbled something too low for me to hear.

I dipped my head. “What? I couldn’t hear you.”

“I said I poured glitter all over the house.”

I choked on my laugh. “What?”

“Five gallons of it. I put it on the blades of the ceiling fans too. For later. I got a ladder and I took so much of it and I poured it up there so when they turned on the fan—”

I descended into a fit of laughter.

“It’s not funny, Jacob! I’m not proud of this, this isn’t how rational people behave!”

“No, you’re right,” I said, wiping at my eyes. “You should be in jail. I’m calling the police.”

“Jacob!”

I had to put a hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t wake up Alexis and Daniel, I was cracking up so hard.

Part of this was the bourbon making me loopy, part of it was the story, but most of it was the morose, serious way she was telling it. Like she was confessing to a murder.

“That’s not all.” She swallowed hard. “I stole the microwave plate. And the lightbulb out of the fridge. I took the lid for the blender and the oven mitts and the garage door opener and I untuned his guitar and I tore out the last five pages of the book he was reading. I put red Kool-Aid in the shower head and peeled the labels off all the canned food and I put raw shrimp into the curtain rod on the window next to the bed—stop laughing!”

I was practically crying.

“They call it Pulling a Briana Ortiz at work,” she said miserably. “It’s so embarrassing. I think the nurses tell it to their boyfriends to scare them straight or—”

I had to pull her in and kiss the top of her head. I couldn’t help it. She looked so despondent.

“They had to replace the carpet,” she whispered. “They couldn’t get the sparkles out.”

“Well, in your defense, I think he deserved it,” I said, chuckling into her hair.

She nodded into my chest. “He did. He really did.”

“Where do you get five gallons of glitter?”

“Amazon.” Sniff. “Prime.”

“Of course. Do you regret it?”

“No.”

I let a laugh out through my nose.

She stayed there for a second, sniffling against my shirt. Then she sat up and wiped her hair off her face. “Tell me something nobody knows about you.”

“What?”

“I told you this. It’s my most embarrassing thing. So you tell me something now.”

I sat back against the hope chest and gave it some thought.

“Okay,” I looked back at her. “When I came into Benny’s hospital room, I froze up because you were so beautiful.”

Her jaw dropped. “What?”

“I couldn’t even talk.”

She giggled. “Stop!” She pushed my knee. “You’re just saying that to make me feel better about the glitter.”

I looked at her steadily. “I’m serious.”

She gawked and I smiled.

“Well, I can’t stop staring at your collarbone,” she said.

I looked at her amused. “My collarbone?”

“I think it’s so sexy.” She lisped on sexy. “And your forearms. I love them.”

Well. I was never wearing long sleeves again. Winter was going to be rough.

“When I was sitting at the restaurant talking to you that day, it rained,” I said. “I was on the patio. I got drenched.”

Her mouth fell open. “You sat in the rain just to talk to me?”

I looked at my lap for a long moment before looking back up at her. “I’d do a lot more than that for you.”

She raised her eyes to mine and we peered at each other in the silence.

The fire crackled and warmed the side of my face and the flames danced across her irises and I wanted to kiss her so badly every inch of my body screamed.

And that was the moment.

The first time my brain consciously registered what my heart had been telling me for the last few weeks.

I wasn’t falling in love with her.

I already was.

It’s funny how similar longing feels to grief. Even though she was right here, all I could think about was the part that was missing. The part I’d never get.

I was destined to love her up close and then eventually from a distance, and she’d never know it or love me back.