Page 4 of The Sweetest Chirp

“Okay, Owen. We all know you’re in love and happy. Stop trying to domesticate us,” Telly accuses. “I am a feral tomcat—let me roam.”

“More a feral raccoon,” I add despite my nerves, though my lips even curve up of their own accord. I’m glad the guys came, but I’m not ready for them to know why we’re here. Owen knows Audrina, and while Telly knows of her, only our families knowshe has run away, cutting off all of us. Everyone knows we had a falling-out, some witnessed it, so it’s easy to explain her absence.

But I’m done explaining it. I want her home.

I swallow hard as I keep my gaze on the door and along the back counter, where I notice a stairwell leading up. I have the urge to go up it, to see if that’s where she is hiding.

But I don’t have to.

The revolving door at the entrance flies open, and there she is.

My whole body goes on alert. My armpits sting, my stomach drops, and breathing…fuck, it’s not an option. All I can do is stare at her.

Audrina Maria Hawkins.

Her hair is almost black, unlike the strawberry-blond she’s had since birth, but still, she’s put it in her “get shit done” style. It’s up in a wild bun of wavy locks with a pencil in the knot. She always wore her contacts before, but from the photo, I know she is wearing glasses now. Thick ones that I’m sure she hopes hide those hazel eyes of hers and her lush lashes. Audrina has always been a natural kind of girl, but no matter the amount of makeup she’s used to cover every inch of her freckles, I know it’s her. I have spent years memorizing everything about her. The plumpness of her lips, the curve of her Cupid’s bow. The little turn up of her dainty nose. How her left eye slants more than her right. How she has the most perfect beauty mark right where a nose ring could be. She has freckles over her brows, along the top of her lip, hell everywhere.

At one time, I had counted over one hundred and twenty-three freckles on her sweet face. My biggest regret besides the one about her running off is that I never counted the ones along her shoulders, her chest, her stomach. No. Instead, I acted a fucking fool, and she took off.

Damn it.

It’s her.

I can’t move.

Or even speak.

All I can do is stare and wonder how the hell I’m going to convince her to come home.

To her family.

To me.

CHAPTER TWO

Reading Audrina’s letter feels like accidentally grabbing the curling iron she left on and discarded on my sink. Unlike I usually do when I grab the hot iron, I can’t throw it to the floor and scream in agony. Instead, I have to stare at the thirteen words in her handwriting thathave my gut churning. She left. Poof. Gone. Nothing more than three letters that don’t explain anything. I don’t understand. We fight all the time. Why was this time so different?

You know why.

I ignore my inner voice even though I can still taste her on my lips.

Feel her body beneath mine, see the desire swirling in her hazel depths. Her face when she came is seared in my brain. Her breathy moans, the way my name was on repeat from her sweet lips…all of it, on a constant playback in my mind. I have wanted her for so long, craved her, and then I went and ruined it.

Ruined us.

And above all, chased her off.

Around me is pure chaos, our parents yelling and crying, while Ingrid just stares at me with pure disdain in her greenish-blue gaze. She hasn’t signed a word to me—or to anyone, for that matter. She shifts from looking at the letter Audrina left for her to glaring at me.

Just like everyone else

I went from being the golden boy of the family to the family pariah in the time it took for everyone to read the letter Audrina wrote to her parents. No one has to say I’m at fault; Audrina made sure everyone knew that in a matter of words. It all just seems so drastic. I don’t know where her head is, but fuck, I wish she had spoken to me first before she just took off. She knows how I get when I’m upset. I run my mouth, and I get petty as fuck. I realize that we didn’t part with the kindest words, but we could have talked this through once both of us calmed down. She just ran, and it pisses me the fuck off.

“Thatcher, what the hell happened?” William demands. Audrina’s father towers over me, his eyes wild, his lips pressed tightly together as he glares down at me.

I look down at the letter, unsure what to say. What happened is private. What was said in anger was just that—anger. Along with a bit of pain. I was on my way to get pain meds when I found her, and I lost my goddamn mind.

I slowly shake my head, and while I don’t want to look up, I know it wouldn’t be fair to my father and sister if they weren’t able to read my lips. While they both wear hearing aids, it’s still hard for them to hear everything. If a person isn’t signing as they speak, then they read lips.

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