“I’m going to just . . . go in the other room,” I say, creeping away.
“No, don’t,” Julia says cheerily, already backing toward the front door. “Ashleigh’s actually double-parked downstairs waiting for me, so I have to run!”
She whirls out the same way she whirled in.
After a beat of silence, Miles and I look at each other.
“I’ll get her a hotel,” he says. “Or I’ll get you a hotel.”
“First of all, any hotel that will have a summer vacancy this last minute is not one I’m going to stay in,” I say. “And second of all, I can handle one more week of flat irons in the sink and bronzer on the floor.”
His brow lifts. “You sure?”
“Positive,” I say. “But how do you feel?”
He clears his throat and turns back to the noodles, scooping one out with a fork to test it before carrying the pot to the strainer in the sink. “I don’t know,” he says. “She’s still acting like everything’s normal, but I know my sister. She’s hiding from something, and she doesn’t usually hide.”
“Maybe she really is just worried about you,” I tell him.
He dumps the noodles back into the pot. “Why should she be worried about me?”
I stare at him.
“It was three and a half months ago,” he points out. “What does she need me to do to prove I’m okay? Get a tattoo that says HAPPILY SINGLE on my forehead?”
“That would scream ‘I’m okay,’ ” I say.
“You know what I mean.” He dumps the pesto in with the noodles and swirls the pot around. “I’m thirteen years older than her. I’ve been on my own since she was a kid. I don’t need my barely grown sister worrying about me. Especially when worrying about me mostly just consists of leaving her dirty clothes on the hallway floor, and setting her phone alarm to top volume, then snoozing it five hundred times.”
I get down a couple of bowls and some forks, and pass them to him to start dishing it up. “Do you want me to kick her out?”
He eyes me briefly, then goes back to scooping pasta into the bowls. “I can’t,” he says. “Not when I don’t know what’s going on.”
He adds a couple whole basil leaves to each bowl and passes me one.
I set mine aside and touch his shoulders, ease them down. “If you ever need to vent,” I say, “text me. You know I love complaining, and it’s no fun to be the only one.”
His jaw softens. He sets his pasta aside too and pulls me into a hug that makes my bones liquefy, his breath warm against my neck. I close my eyes and breathe him in, and it’s not complicated: I want him, I like him, and I care about him enough to push those first two thoughts aside.
The front door flings open, Ashleigh’s and Julia’s laughs competing for Most Likely to Piss Off Mr. Dorner, and we peel apart as they bound inside, loaded with Target totes.
“Smells like heaven,” Ashleigh says, whizzing past. Miles and I exchange a look, both apparently sensing some kind of mischief afoot.
We pick up our bowls and follow them to the living room, where they empty their totes onto the rug. An air mattress, a pump, a couple of vacuum-sealed pillows, a blue blazer, a gold chenille blanket, and two mini desktop fans fall out, followed by some toiletries and a belt.
“Are you planning a very specific heist?” I ask.
“I thought about buying a pullout to replace this garbage sofa,” Julia says, “but I didn’t want to be presumptuous.”
“Oh, yeah. You wouldn’t want to be presumptuous,” Miles deadpans.
“Hey, be nice,” Julia says. “It’s temporary. As soon as I get a job, I’ll start apartment hunting.”
He rubs his brow. “I have to get to work. We’ll talk later.”
“You know where to find me,” she says, leaning over the couch to gather her laundry.
Miles turns, shaking his head and still forking pesto into his mouth as he heads toward the front door.
I set my own bowl down on the coffee table. “Do you need help with that?”
“Nope,” Julia says. “Just looking for somewhere else to put this stuff. The living room’s getting a bit unwieldy.”
Ashleigh snorts. “A bit.”
Julia’s moving toward the closet. The closet. Where I keep the dress.
My heart rattles against my rib cage like one of those New Year’s Eve clappers. She reaches for the pocket doors, seemingly in slow motion.
“No, wait—” I lunge for her.
I don’t make it in time.
Not even close.
For the first time since the day Miles helped me haul my stuff over here, the closet door slides all the way open—from the wrong side. The side packed so Tetris-tight that the absence of the door triggers an avalanche of white, cream, ivory, blush.
Gift bags. Boxes of taper candles. Tea lights. A crate of biodegradable cutlery. Palm leaf plates. Organza, an ungodly amount of organza. The amount you’d need to film a monster movie where the town predator was a sentient wedding dress, hell-bent on swallowing women whole.
