Lizzie Blake's Best Mistake (A Brush with Love, #2)(44)
“Shut up,” she said, landing another punch on his shoulder. He grabbed her hand and pulled her into a hug. A super quick one, though. Like, less than a millisecond of contact because he absolutely did not do stuff like hugging. Or whatever.
“They’re cute,” he said, taking a step away from her. “And you could use them as a plate if you were ever in a tight meal situation,” he added, following her through the apartment. But instead of heading toward the closed doors on the left, she veered off to the living room and kitchen area on the right.
“Or I can use them as a shovel to bury you alive, maybe get you to shut up?” she said over her shoulder. Rake laughed again.
But the laugh died in his throat as he stopped dead in his tracks and absorbed the indescribable chaos that surrounded them.
Chapter 23
“OKAY, so I’m sensing a bit of an energy shift from you,” Lizzie said, maneuvering around stacks of books and piles of pans in the living room to take her spot in front of the stove and stir the compote she was working on. “And I don’t want to, like, project feelings onto you or whatever, but I promise there’s no need to freak out,” she said calmly while she internally continued to freak out.
“I have it all under control … Well, Indira does, at least,” she added, sneaking a peek at Rake over her shoulder and pointing her wooden spoon toward her bedroom door.
Rake stood like a stunned statue in the center of her living room, surrounded by boxes and bins stacked like a topsy-turvy city.
“I will admit it looks a little … disorganized,” Lizzie said, stirring her compote even harder, leaning down to huff in the tart sweetness of the berries like the scent could calm the energy buzzing through her brain. She took it off the heat to cool.
Rake’s head turned slowly around the room, taking in the tumbleweed of cheap jewelry on the coffee table, the littering of cards and receipts and balls of yarn on the couch, the mountain range of clothes scattered throughout.
His horrified eyes finally turned back to Lizzie.
“Try this. It will help,” Lizzie said, grabbing a lemon-bread biscuit from the nearby tray and advancing on him, popping the whole thing in his slack-jawed mouth. She pressed his chin up with her hand, encouraging him to chew.
After a moment’s hesitation, his horror-stricken eyes still on her, he abided. Lizzie gobbled down her own biscuit, her muscles relaxing as she tasted the tart zest of the treat, the piped icing that offered just enough sweetness.
Rake blinked a few times then cleared his throat. “Lizzie … You knew we were moving today, right? What … what happened?” He glanced again around the room.
Lizzie sighed, scrubbing her hands down her face. “It turns out I am physically incapable of packing,” she said, moving back to her creation on the counter. “But it also turns out I’m incapable of admitting that fact until the last possible moment,” she added, picking up a few fresh berries from the bowl and sticking them into the soft icing.
“And right as I finally resigned myself to slowly suffocating under a pile of my clothes, Indira, sweet gorgeous angel of light and goodness that she is, offered to help,” Lizzie added, pointing to Indira, who emerged from Lizzie’s room with armfuls of clothes. She gave Rake a big smile before dumping the massive heap of items onto the ground and heading back into the room for more.
Lizzie was doing better with her baby steps of ADHD management—taking her medication every day, drawing to-do lists with bite-sized tasks and actually using them, creating a pattern for when to leave for work—and she felt small whispers of pride at her accomplishments.
But packing was a different story. Lizzie had intended to be on top of her shit and get it done early. But every time she started to load up a box, she’d get distracted, wanting to see if a shirt still fit, wondering what had happened to an old favorite skirt. Which would cause her to then hunt down something else, until the next thing she knew, she’d fallen into a brain trap and was lying on a pile of foam fingers and sweaters, flipping through her favorite scenes of Lisa Kleypas novels.
This cycle repeated on a loop daily, all while she assured Indira she had everything totally under control, too overwhelmed and embarrassed to ask for help.
Then last night, after puking her brains out for a good two hours, she’d finally taken in the absolute shit show that was “packing.” She tried moving things out of her room into the living room to see if that offered a clearer picture to the puzzle of where she was supposed to start, but that only made it worse, sending her into a spiral over the sheer impossibility of it all.
So, Lizzie did what she did best. She went to the kitchen to think.
And ended up baking lemon-bread cookies, her summer take on gingerbread, and crafting them into tiny cottages with a thick raspberry icing acting as the cement. Some of the houses were short and squat with intricate piping of green ivy covering the sides, others tall with widow’s walks and crystalline sugar dyed to imitate a mosaic of stained glass.
She’d just started piping on shingles and creating manicured lawns from mixed berries when Indira found her that morning. After a minor bit of dramatics on both their parts, and a lot of bribery with personalized lemon-bread cottages and IOUs of pies and cakes, Indira had taken charge and left Lizzie to cope.
“And it’s all working out perfectly,” Indira said, depositing another load. “I’m making progress, Lizzie’s almost built an entire lemon-bread city, and now you’re here, Rake, so the three of us will get this done in no time,” Indira said, turning kind eyes on Lizzie. “We all hit roadblocks sometimes, but we’ve got this.”