Page 52 of Perfect on Paper

All right. Okay. Window back up.

I pulled the hood of my jacket over my head, got out of the car, and hurried down the driveway, ducking to avoid the rain.

Brougham sure as hell noticed me then. “What are you doing here?”

Well, it suddenly seemed a bit rude to say I’d heard his parents screaming at each other from my car and wanted to rescue him. “Ice cream,” I said instead, raising my voice sohe could hear me over his father asking his mother exactlyhow muchshe’d had to drink.

“Pardon?” Brougham asked.

“Do you want to go grab some ice cream?Sorry, it’s a bit loud.”

He looked at me like I’d sprouted three noses without noticing. “I heard you fine. What I’m not getting is why you’ve randomly appeared on my doorstep during the pouring rain wanting to get ice cream?”

Now that he mentioned it, it probably wasn’t the weather for it. “Coffee?” I suggested weakly.

He looked at me. I looked at him.

Another crash inside, followed by two voices swearing over each other. We both looked at the house-mansion.

Brougham sighed, got to his feet, and pushed past me to walk into the storm. “Fuck it, whatever,” he muttered.

Hey, “Fuck it, whatever” was only a few degrees off of “Hell yeah, let’s do it!” Unless I was mistaken, I was starting to grow on him.

Once we ordered and sat down in the café, a small place with only a few tables, exposed brick walls, and suspended maidenhair ferns spilling foliage, I was overcome by a horrible feeling the roof was about to cave in on us.

The rain had started pelting with even more ferocity than earlier, and honestly, this place didn’t exactly look structurally sound. By the doorway, the ceiling was dripping brown water onto the floor, and the two waitstaff were eyeing it nervously. One of them put aWET FLOORsign up. A bucket would’ve been better, I felt, but hey, what did I know.

“So, was Finn okay?” I asked, the same moment Brougham burst out with, “I’m sorry you had to hear all that.”

We paused, and Brougham took the reins. “Yeah, Finn’s fine. He didn’t even have a hangover, just popped up out of bed like nothing went down last night. I was surprised—I figured he’d be stuffed after the way he was carrying on.”

“Oh, good, great.” The silence returned. It was broken by a low growl of thunder in the distance. Brougham became inexplicably interested in the salt and pepper shakers—little ornate ones carved from chestnut—and I tried to figure out if he’d prefer me to pretend the whole scene with his parents hadn’t happened, or if he’d rather talk about it.

Well,I figured finally.Hedidbring it up.“You don’t have to apologize for your parents. It’s fine.”

Brougham spun the salt shaker around between two fingers. “It’s embarrassing.”

“What is there to be embarrassed about?Youhaven’t done anything wrong.”

“Doesn’t matter. It still sucks. That’s exactly why I don’t let people meet them.”

I leaned back in my chair. “You letmemeet them.”

“Yeah, that was urgent, though. And I felt weird about going to your house when your mum’s one of my teachers.”

“Couldn’t have beenthaturgent,” I said lightly.

“What?”

“You kicked me out after, like, five minutes! You barely even gave me a chance to get it right first.” I raised my eyebrows at him. Checkmate. “Not that it made much of a difference in the end, but you get my point.”

Brougham pushed the salt shaker away and straightened to look me in the eye. “That wasn’t about you.”

“Then what was it about?”

Brougham’s sharp, fine-boned face was perfectly still, and his eyes locked intensely on a spot near my shoulder. Then the corner of his mouth twitched almost imperceptibly, and he took out his phone and started using it in his lap, the table blocking it from my sight.

Outside, the rain picked up, smashing against the ceiling in a flat roar. It sounded less like individual raindrops, and more like the ocean had been tipped over our heads. It drowned out even the conversation in the room, and the couple at the table beside us started shouting to each other to be heard.

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