His comment made my skin crawl with pure disgust. I didn’t want, or need, that mental image. I got out of the house as quickly as I could without breaking into a full on run.
“What’s up, buttercup?” Brooks said as I crossed the street. He was holding his arms out to me and I couldn’t imagine a better image to wipe my mind clean with.
“God, you’re old,” I told him as I jumped in.
“Visiting your friends?” He kissed me hard on the lips like he was making sure we were still all right.
“Kind of.”
When I looked over my shoulder, I could see Aaron, who had managed to get off the couch and walk down the steps, watching us from the door. Wishing he lived anywhere else, I took Brooks’s hand as we walked into the house.
“You’ve been picking your scabs,” he said as he rubbed his palm on mine.
I had been picking them, purely out of absentminded habit, and it was kind of hard to deny, so I just said, “I’ll stop.”
Brooks had this quirk where he had to take a shower as soon as he got home from the hospital. I guess making sure he washed all the animal smell, and worse, off of him wasn’t a bad quirk to have, really.
I missed him so much during the day, as dopey as that sounds, that it became part of my routine to sit on the sink while he was showering.
It was pathetic and on the verge of being insanely needy but I didn’t care at all. We’d tell each other about our days, which led to plenty of time for other things later.
The way he smelled right after a shower was intoxicating. If they really wanted to make a cologne that would drive women crazy, Giorgio Armani should start bottling William Brooks’s bathwater.
“Are you going to tell me about Sadie and Aaron?” he asked while wrapping one of his oversized bath towels around his defined waist.
I considered telling him everything. I wanted to tell him everything—it had been a lot to carry by myself—but then it hit me. After all the things we’d already gone through in our short little relationship, there was so much more I was keeping to myself.
I could’ve told him all about Aaron, but I made the executive decision in that moment not to. I’d do what I was always unable to do on my own and keep my past where it belonged.
“Just wedding stuff. We’re really getting down to the wire here. What is it? Like, one more month?”
The thought rolling around in his head was practically visible. I’d gotten very good at reading him. He took his towel off, which was enough to distract even the most devout nun, and rubbed it through his blond curls a few times, then snapped it at me before he set off to find some clothes.
I followed him out of the bathroom, taking the same path through the maze of all my crap on the floor as he did.
“Are you taking a date to their wedding?” He was pulling on blue boxer-briefs that made his eyes look heartbreakingly handsome.
I sat on my legs on the bed. “No.”
He frowned. “I can’t go too?”
“What?”
“As your date.”
“Wait, what?” My short little legs shot out from under me and I had to brace myself with my hands.
“Can you not hear me or am I way off base here?” Wearing nothing but underwear, he knelt down beside me and kissed both of my hands. “I assume you got a plus one to this shit show and I want that spot.”
Brooks didn’t swear too often, but when he did I always found it adorable.
“You want to come to the wedding? With me? Aaron and Sadie’s shit-show?”
“Well, yeah.”
I would never get over how vulnerable he could still be with me. He honestly believed there would be a possibility I wouldn’t want him. “I never asked you because I never imagined you’d want to come.”
He pulled himself up on the bed to sit next to me. “Free food, alcohol, you in a dress, cake…why wouldn’t I want to be there?”
Ugh, the dress.
Despite the fact that each of us maids was given her choice of dress, I still somehow managed to get the strapless one that could hardly contain my tits and made me look as if I was being squeezed from a tube of human toothpaste. Sadie insisted I looked great in it when we picked it out together and that the cleavage was hot. I, of course, agreed. Anything to keep the peace.
“So, you’re coming?” I asked with optimism.
“It’s decided.”