Page 24 of Promise Me Sunshine

“I’ll figure something out…It’s fine.”

“It’s not. Look, I have an extra apartment; it’s shitty but no one else is there right now. You can crash. At least for tonight.”

He’s already walking toward the train and I have to scramble to catch up. “Wait! What do you mean you have an extra apartment? Who can afford an extra apartment in New York City?”

He shrugs. “My current apartment was…a gift? It’s hard to explain. I still pay rent on this other place just in case everything falls apart and I have to go back. I’m warning you. It’s really tiny.”

We take the train back uptown to a neighborhood about ten minutes’ walk from Reese and Ainsley’s place. The sun will be up in just a few hours. The building is a little brownstone with a beautiful front door and a crumbling cement porch.

“Third floor,” he says, jingling keys in front of me. “Use whatever you want.”

“Are you kidding me? I can’t just go into some strange apartment that you claim is yours! I don’t even know your last name!”

He sighs and digs in his pocket, coming up with his wallet, and then his license.

I eagerly study it, suddenly insatiably curious. “Hmmm. Brown eyes and six foot two, huh?”

He quirks his face at me. “Obviously?”

I survey his grumpy little picture, doing a double take at his last name. “Honey?” I ask, one eyebrow hiking up my forehead. “Such a sweet name for someone so…you.”

“It’s not pronounced likehoney.It’sHo-nee.Rhymes with—”

“Baloney.”

“I usually saypony,but sure. Whatever.” He sighs, like he’s tired, which he probably is. “Should we…” He holds out his phone to me and motions to trade numbers. I swipe it and call myself. “Okay.” Now that he’s said all he came to say he’s suddenly looking awkward. He clears his throat. “Well. Go to bed.”

He puts the keys in my hand and leaves while I laugh at being told to go to bed even though I’m pushing thirty. As I watch him go, one thought fills my head.That man just crossed something off Lou’s list for me.

After he’s gone I tiptoe up to the third floor.

Miles’s apartment was almost certainly a closet in another life. It’s mildly furnished, and clearly he never moved out completely. I reverently place the sandwich in the empty fridge.

A scalding hot shower with Ivory soap, a ridiculously oversized T-shirt I find in a dresser drawer, and clean cotton sheets on a twin-sized bed I simply cannot imagine Miles fitting in: it’s all awfully close to wonderful.

I sleep for six deep hours, then three more fitful ones, and when I wake up at noon, I feel almost like a member of society.

I almost feel a little bit…good? I hate it.

I eat the other half of my sandwich as I take out my phone and compose a text.

Okay. You got yourself a deal.

Chapter Six

“Are you fantasizing about the one in the hat or the one in the glasses?” Miles asks me three hours later while we sit on a bench in Riverside Park.

“Huh?” I jolt upright. “Neither!” (Both.)

He gives me a look likeCome on,but I definitely don’t explain that Glasses was going to propose to me on a Jumbotron (I’d decline, most likely) and Hat doesn’t believe in marriage but would eventually agree to a courthouse ceremony after he accidentally read a page from my diary and realized how important it was to me.

“All right,” I say with a clap. “How is this going to work?”

“I mean…should we make a plan for how to get Ainsley to like me?…I guess you just start spending time with her and I tag along?”

I’m unimpressed. “I already reached out to Reese to get some regular hours with Ainsley. But don’t you think she’ll be weirded out if you’realwaystagging along? I mean, I kind of understood when I didn’t know them at all and Reese was out of town, and not to be rude, but if she wanted you to be with her kid every day, wouldn’t she have just asked you to do it instead of paying me?”

“Oh.” He leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees, watching two novice rollerbladers hold hands and clop their way toward certain injury. “I didn’t think of that. I guess…I’ll have to ask her if it’s okay.”

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