Coming Home(69)

He brought his fist to his mouth. “S’good,” he mumbled.

Leah chuckled as she pushed off the counter and reached above the refrigerator for the bread, and Danny slid his plate away with a sigh. “Alright. You can say it.”

Her smile broadened as she turned and took the dish from him. “Say what? I told you so?” she asked, dumping the contents in the trash. “I would never.”

He brought his fist back to his mouth and closed his eyes, and she laughed again, giving him a gentle nudge. “Go lie down. Give me five minutes to work my magic,” she said, coming back to the counter and pulling a slice of bread from the bag.

Danny stood quickly and walked toward his bedroom, thankful to get away from the smell of his attempted breakfast. It had been a tried and true hangover cure that he and Bryan accidentally discovered when they were teenagers after drinking themselves sick off a bottle of rum they’d found in the back of Gram’s cabinet. The following morning, Bryan made them each a bacon, egg, and cheese Hot Pocket, figuring if they could get themselves to vomit, they would feel better. Instead, they were miraculously cured after eating them. It was a trick they’d used for years after that.

Danny crawled into his bed and dropped onto his stomach with a huff. He knew it wasn’t going to work, even before he pulled one out of the freezer and Leah looked at him like he’d lost his mind. He’d barely even touched alcohol in the past twelve months, and it had been years since he’d been as drunk as he was last night, so he knew it was going to take more than a Hot Pocket to get him straight again. But he was really hoping it might work. And not just because he felt like shit.

He just wanted that memory to be real.

Bryan was disappearing. Every day he slipped a little further away. He was there in pictures and in stories, but he wasn’t real anymore.

Danny just wanted something tangible. Something that would prove Bryan had actually existed.

He rolled over and flung his forearm over his eyes as another wave of nausea swept over him. He could hear her in the kitchen, the clinking of silverware and the opening and closing of cabinets as she busied herself, and he wished for the hundredth time that he hadn’t consumed his body weight in liquor last night, because he wanted to be enjoying this.

Leah, in his apartment. In his kitchen, making him breakfast like it was the most natural thing in the world.

She told him he could have whatever time he needed to get his thoughts together, but Danny knew she wasn’t going to wait forever. He also knew that as soon as he explained everything to her, whatever this was would be over. His window of time with her was closing, and he wanted to soak up every second of it before she walked away for good.

And when she left him, he was going to feel it. There was no doubt about that now. In the past few hours, she had managed to slip through the last of his defenses and stake her claim on a piece of his heart. Not because she had helped him get home last night, or because she granted him the extra time he needed to explain himself. Not even because she had stayed to help nurse his hangover.

No, what had completely won him over was the way she tried to absolve him of whatever sin he’d committed by offering up her own transgressions. She laid her shame down at his feet without a second thought—for the sole purpose of easing his suffering.

It had been a long time since he’d seen that level of bravery and selflessness in anyone.

And just like that, his world shifted. It had been such a quiet moment of transformation, nothing like the earth-shattering explosions that had changed the course of his life over the past year, but in its tranquility, it was just as powerful. With that one altruistic move, she had managed to become the measure of what a person should be in his eyes, the standard any woman would have to meet if she had even the slightest chance of winning his heart.