In the Weeds (Lovelight #2)(80)

“Hold on a second. I brought you coffee.”

“I don’t want coffee,” I say, contradicting myself by immediately grabbing the mug out of his hands. Luka’s mom always makes sure Stella has the good stuff stocked for when she and all of Luka’s aunts randomly descend upon her cottage. Last time they brought biscotti, too.

I collapse back on my ass in the dirt and take a sip out of the mug. It has a tiny fox on it, a chip on the handle. Luka stares at me with one hand on his hip. For the first time, I notice he’s wearing one of Stella’s old sweatshirts, the sleeves too short on his long arms.

“What’s going on with you?” he asks.

“What do you mean?”

He makes an exasperated sound in the back of his throat, the hair on the left side of his head sticking straight up in a riot of curls. Stella must have kicked him out of bed to come out here to check on me. The thought lifts my spirits, oddly enough. “Oh, my bad. You’re right. This is totally normal. We always have conversations before the sun is up.” He rolls his eyes and kicks at my boot with his. “Why are you out here planting trees? Where is Evelyn?”

Probably in some boutique hotel in a bright and shiny city, charming everyone she meets. Glowing like the fucking sun.

She’s not here. That’s the only part that matters.

“I don’t know.”

I hate that I don’t know.

Luka eyebrows flatten into a line of confusion. “Isn’t she staying with you?”

“She was,” I say. “Now she’s not.”

I avert my eyes to the line of trees I’ve managed to plant this morning—a somewhat chaotic row of small green bundles. In five to seven years, this whole field will be filled with whispering branches and thick evergreen.

I wonder if I’ll still be sitting here.

“What do you mean she’s not?”

“I mean her rental car isn’t in the driveway and her stuff isn’t in my house.” Maybe. I think. There’s a part of me that’s rolling my eyes at my assumptions, but the much bigger part of me is just trying to protect what I can. “She left.”

I don’t know if Luka wants me to draw him a map or what, but it feels pretty straightforward. I can see her reasoning. She was staying with me while she figured her stuff out. She figured it out. She left.

That’s it.

Luka makes another small sound under his breath, his eyes squinted in concentration. I want to roll into the hole I dug until he decides to leave me alone.

“You know how I met Stella, right?”

I roll my eyes to the sky and drape my arms over my knees. I guess he’s staying.

“I know how you met Stella.” I’ve heard the story enough over the past couple years. She fell down the steps of a hardware store and smacked right into Luka. They then proceeded to pretend they weren’t hopelessly in love with each other for close to a decade. I fix my gaze on the trees swaying in the distance and clench my jaw. “You can skip this whole thing.”

“Skip what?”

“Whatever hopeful platitudes are about to spill out of your mouth.” Luka loves a good motivational speech. “I don’t want to hear it.”

Luka huffs a laugh and goes quiet. Another gust of wind rolls over the field and all the branches lift and dance. It’ll be harder not to think of Evie this time, but it’ll pass. Maybe in a month or two I won’t see her in every damn corner of this place. I just need—I need to remember how to be on my own, I think. Me and the cats.

And that damn duck I said I wasn’t going to adopt.

“I almost told her.” Luka considers the ground with a frown, relenting after a lengthy pause and sitting in the dirt across from me. He rummages around in his sweatshirt pocket and emerges with his fist clenched around a roll of cookies. He opens it with his teeth and offers me one. “Way back,” he explains. “At the start. I almost told her how I felt.”

I begrudgingly take a cookie. Another when I realize they’re chocolate hazelnut and Luka intends to launch into his best encouraging speech despite my protest. “Could have saved yourself about seven years, I bet.”

“Could have,” Luka agrees. “She was getting out of a cab in the city. I was waiting for her on the curb and she sort of—she got stuck, I think. Getting out of the car. Her bag or something was twisted around the seat belt. She tried to step out of the cab and her bag yanked her right back in. She laughed so hard she snorted.” He smiles at the memory, his eyes a little bit glassy. “She was so beautiful I couldn’t stand it. My heart felt like it was right here.” He taps his throat and then between his eyes. Pops out a cookie and shoves it in his mouth.

“Why didn’t you? Say anything?” I’m annoyed with myself for asking.

He shrugs. “Because we had a good thing going and I didn’t want to rock the boat with a difficult conversation.” His brown eyes narrow on me and he bites into a cookie so hard it snaps in two. “Does that sound familiar?” he asks around a mouthful.

It does. I’m not going to argue with him about the particulars. I’ve actively avoided having a conversation with Evelyn. Absolutely. Sure, some of it has been fear. But a big part—the biggest part—has been—

“I don’t want to tie her here,” I confess with a deep, heaving sigh. “I don’t want her to feel obligated.” To my feelings. To me.