Page 21 of Something Like Sunflowers

I scrub my hand down my face. “For Christ’s sake, Devyn, you don’t know where the muffler is, do you?”

She scrunches her nose, and it’s annoying how cute it looks. “Um, no?”

“Fuck…all right, let me just—” I’m halfway through taking my shirt off when her sass stops me in my tracks.

“Um, excuse you! We are not messing around, if that’s what you think’s gonna happen while I’m in town. I hope you’re aware of this.”

“Are you kidding me?” I peer at her through the neck hole. “I’m gonna get under your car, baby, not attack you with my glorious muscles. Don’t get your panties all twisted. Unless you like that sorta thing.”

“Ew! Glorious muscles? I can’t even with you.”

“No, I guess you can’t, can you?”

Well, shit. I don’t know why the hell I said that to her. Fuckin’ stupid.

She backs away, and she has every right to. It was a dick thing to say to her, considering everything between us.

“I’m sorry.”

She nods, casting her gaze away from mine and slicing little cuts in my heart.

That’s my own damn fault.

I move past her to get the ramps from the back of my truck. I don’t normally have these in here, but I feel a smile tug at my mouth thinking about how Aunt Sarah used to say, God knows when you need intervening.

Last week, my pal Bobby’s car needed some work, and I loaned him these ramps. I picked ‘em back up a few days ago, just hadn’t gotten ‘em back out of the truck yet.

Aunt Sarah would say it was divine intervention, God putting us back in the same place together like this. To face our issues and…then what? Come together again?

I’m a God-fearin’ man and all, but I’m not like…I don’t believe he’s got an individual plan for each of us like some do. What about choice? Devyn didn’t choose me. She couldn’t choose me.

But she could now.

If she wanted.

We’re not the same people we were as kids. Could it be that simple?

I wish Aunt Sarah were here to answer that for me, and I feel that painful tug in my chest being reminded that she isn’t. Even if she were, she’d give me some rhetorical or metaphorical bullshit, anyway.

You’ll know what’s in your heart when you start paying more mind to it, that’s what she’d say.

Right now, my heart’s outside of my chest, Aunt Sarah. It’s five-foot-seven with blonde hair, a spattering of pink everything, and eyes that shine like emeralds when she’s mad.

Yeah, she’s what’s in my heart, all right. I just need to unfreeze hers. And who better to unfreeze it than the asshole who put the ice there in the first place? If I can just convince her to give us another chance.

I toss the shirt at Devyn, and she catches it. A smile pulls across my lips and warmth floods me with that one action of hers. She doesn’t totally hate me. She watches my body while I get down under the Jeep and check why the muffler’s come detached. I wouldn’t exactly say that I’m making a show of working just for her, but I might flex my arms more than necessary. Just a little.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing down there?”

“Do you?” I ask from under the Barbie-mobile. Seriously, even the metal on the undercarriage is rose gold. I smirk at how simultaneously stupid and cute that is, but I give her shit all the same because I can. “For a girl who spends money on a ride to be custom made just to match her life aesthetic, you sure don’t take very good care of it.”

“First of all, not a girl. I’m a woman, as we’ve already established on more than one occasion. I’d prefer not to see you regress, thank you very much. And okay, so I didn’t know about mufflers. Most people don’t! How do you even know? Is that something else you film in your undies for your little page?”

She might think it stings, but it doesn’t.

She’s always been a tease, and I’ve always liked it.

I roll out from the Jeep and meet her stare with a lick of my lips and a onceover of her sassy little body just to make her squirm like I know it does.

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