Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 108862 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 544(@200wpm)___ 435(@250wpm)___ 363(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 108862 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 544(@200wpm)___ 435(@250wpm)___ 363(@300wpm)
Each card looks like Diego’s face.
Each time I stamp, a kiss.
I shut my eyes. Maybe I’m the one who needs a therapy couch. “So, um … this Nico guy. He’s being a dick ... how?”
Cash sounds grateful for me initiating the chat. “Keeps acting like I’m embarrassing him in front of Savannah.”
“Are you?”
“Obviously. But that isn’t the point.”
“Of course it isn’t,” I mutter, trying to follow along.
“The guy’s cool when it’s just us. Then other people show up, and he becomes this … this whole other weird person.” He plucks a bruised petal and lets it drop into the trash bin, fluttering in the air for a second like it’s about to take flight. “Like, okay, congrats, bro, you got yourself an audience. But why be such a clown?”
My mind wanders inexplicably to Diego last night.
Stamp.
Then to him pressing my wrists to the wall.
Stamp.
Diving onto my mouth with his own.
Stamp, stamp.
His body against mine.
And then suddenly I stamp a card too hard, blotting the ink.
Ugh, crap.
“You good?” asks Cash over his shoulder.
“Super.”
“Your eyes are so baggy. You should do, like, a skin regimen, or something.”
“A skin what …?”
“Nico brought these skin masks over once, and we did them, and it was so funny.” Cash chuckles to himself, then goes gloomily quiet. “Now he does them with Savannah.”
“My eyes are always baggy when I don’t sleep well. I … I don’t need a regimen.”
“Something keep you up last night?”
A flash of Diego again.
His furious eyes opening, then closing as he goes for my lips.
And the whimper I let out into the night when he kissed me.
Wait. Did I whimper?
Am I misremembering that?
“What keeps me up or doesn’t ain’t your concern,” I say in as polite a tone as I can manage.
Cash shrugs. “Fair.” Then he sighs. “I guess I just keep thinkin’ maybe one day Nico will stop being weird. Just be himself. Just be the guy that I know and … and …” He grips a rose and goes silent.
I look down at the ruined delivery card.
There’s nothing wrong with hoping someone becomes kinder.
Even if it seems utterly hopeless.
But that feels a bit heavy for a Thursday afternoon chat, and I’m not about to pretend like we’re still talking about only Nico if I were to say that out loud, so instead I tell Cash: “Maybe give him a little less access to you for a while. Might make him think.”
Cash still clutches the rose for a moment, as if in thought. He turns to me and points at a petal. “This one okay?”
I come around the counter to check.
The petal he’s pointing at is soft at the edge, a little off, not a lost cause. Salvageable if handled carefully.
Aren’t we all?
“Let that one be,” I tell him.
He nods and moves on.
I stand there a second longer than I need to, staring at it.
Totally not thinking of someone else.
It’s hours later that I’m home outside my car, and all I can do is stand here staring at the house next door with a mouthful of unasked questions. What’s he doing? How’s he feeling?
No response. Closed garage. Closed blinds.
Not a sign of life whatsoever.
Even the hood of that clunker in his driveway is shut.
For a man who spent his first few weeks here making himself impossible to ignore, Diego Valdez’s absence is amazingly loud.
I notice something else:
No tools out.
Did he actually put that toolbox I gave him to use? Is this his way of communicating to me that he’s okay?
No. I won’t read into it. All I’ve done today is read imaginary writing on every wall I walk past. This is just how he says he needs space: by removing nearly all evidence that he exists.
I can accept that.
Maybe he’s moved all his car work to the middle of the night, not wanting a chance of running into me too soon.
I’ll have to accept that, too.
But even a quarter past midnight when I wake up with a start, sweaty from head to toe, and drag myself into the kitchen for a glass of water, I don’t see him in the driveway. Hood still closed. Garage, too. It’s like he’s gone.
Except he isn’t. He’s still very, very much here in my head.
I stand here in the dark and all I can do is think of Diego’s lips as I lift the glass to my own, sipping slowly, distractedly.
How much I could see him holding back in his tortured eyes.
Then giving in.
I’m standing here reinterpreting every single interaction we have had since the moment he first arrived to town. His coldness. How he reacted to mowing over the flowerbed. When he showed up to my shop to buy flowers and walked away with an orchid. I’m trying to piece together the story he wasn’t telling me all this time.
A story I’m certain even Lottie and Marcos don’t know.