Page 80 of Promise Me Sunshine

The spell is broken and I look away, my eyes tracking down to where Hakim is working on Miles. “We’re not,” I explain.

My words seem to awkwardly echo and I can almost feel the question that no one is asking.Why not?

To dispel the awkwardness, I roll my head to look at Iris. “You must hear all sorts of wild stuff from people who walk in for tattoos.”

She raises her eyebrows. “I honestly don’t think I’m capable of being surprised anymore.”

Iris and I start chatting and don’t stop until the tattoo is done. Hakim is faster than Iris, so Miles is all bandaged up and clothed, standing next to my head, when Iris finally turns off the tattoo gun. They take us through the aftercare instructions and send us on our way, and I elbow Miles away from the register to pay.

“You should’ve let me pay for mine,” Miles grumbles aswe emerge back onto the street into the afternoon sunlight. “That was expensive.”

“Miles, you just involuntarily got a tattoo of a wolf howling at the moon. There’s no way in hell I would have let you pay for it.”

“I need lunch,” he says. “A lot of it. Let’s find a buffet.”

We stroll, apparently in the direction of a buffet, and I glance up at him. “I would have thought you’d have called me out on the tattoo choice,” I say, attempting casual.

His eyebrows furrow. “Why?”

“Well, you know, lone wolf howling at the moon? Pretty lonely. I thought you’d make me go for something happier.”

He frowns. “They’re not lonely.” He gestures between our two bandages. “There’s two of them.”

My throat instantly clogs up and I sniffle. I’ve cried from grief so much over the last few months that it’s disorienting and startling to cryhappytears.

He glances down at me and then pushes at the heavy bun that’s begun sliding sideways down my head. It mushes back down as soon as he takes his hand away. “You know, Lenny,” he says. “When a wolf is howling at the moon, it’s not actually because it’s lonely.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.” He nods. “It’s sort of a location technique, for when members of the pack get separated and they need to find one another.”

“Oh.” I brush the happy tears away.

“So when you hear a wolf call, and then in the distance, you hear another wolf call back, do you know what that can be roughly translated as?”

“What’s that?”

“The first one saying,I’m here! I’m here!And then the other one says,Me too! Me too!”

I reach up and pull the ponytail holder out of my hair, let it all tumble, still damp, all around. Then I begin the process of packing it all away into my hood as I tuck myself into my hoodie. The scent of Miles’s shampoo surrounds me and our tattoo stings at my side.

“Thanks,” I whisper to him. “Thank you.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

“Hmmm hm hmmm,” I hum to myself as I hold up a T-shirt from the dollar bin and discard it due to collar stretching.

“Hmmmmmm hmm,” Ainsley chimes in, resolving the melody of the decade-old pop song that’s been stuck in my head. She tosses aside a purple T-shirt in lieu of a yellow one.

“I really didn’t think you were going to be so picky,” Miles says with a frown. He’s been standing with his hands in his pockets for twenty minutes while Ainsley and I make a determined effort to visually scan every single T-shirt in this resale shop.

“Rude! I am extremely picky about what I wear,” I lie.

His brow furrows. “You have a T-shirt that claims you’re a part of a Frisbee golf league in St. Paul.”

“You need a hobby,” I decide, turning around to scan him from head to toe. “You pay too much attention to me.”

“I think I’m ready to try on,” Ainsley says from behind a pile of T-shirts so tall I can only see the static’d pieces of her hair.

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