Page 65 of Home Sweet Home

Evie smiled behind her Solo cup. “How dare Kayla? Such a bad mom.”

“The worst.” West leaned in close, close enough that she could feel his breath on her neck. “I tell you yet how much I enjoyed waking up next to you?” His words sent an electric shiver up her back, and her whole body shook. “Did you just…” West trailed a finger down her spine, so light, she wondered if she’d imagined it. “Shudder?”

Evie rolled her eyes and tried to play it off, because he looked so pleased with himself, a cocky glint in his eye. “It’s cold.”

West raised an eyebrow. If the salon had AC, Kayla hadn’t blasted it, and the red wine that had once been room temperature was now warm, but Evie drank it anyway. She let him wonder as she wandered over to the cash register. It was a fancy one, the kind with a touchscreen, and Kayla’s was probably the only business in town that had one. Joe’s still used a register with a drawer. It was so old that sometimes, it got stuck, and Evie had learned the exact spot to hit with the palm of her hand to unjam it.

She ran her hand along the top, careful not to touch the screen.

“You could do it too,” West said. “Open a business. A bakery.” Evie’s hand froze as she tried to figure out why West was bringing this up. She didn’t say anything, and it must have been too long, because he added, “Don’t you want to? Have your own place?”

“I don’t know,” Evie said, the wine turning over in her stomach. “I haven’t really thought about it.”

“Well, Josh is graduating next year. You don’t have to be a waitress. You could do anything you wanted.”

The wordwaitressdidn’t come out of his mouth the same way it had Rich’s, like it was a bad word, but it still made her chest tighten. It was one thing for her to think of waitressing as just something to pay the bills, but quite another to hear that West thought of it the same way.

Evie trailed her hand over the top of the counter. “Joe wants to retire. He offered me a job managing the place.”

Though Evie couldn’t see West, she knew he was looking at her when he said, “Is that what you want to do, though? If you could do anything?”

She turned to face him. “I can’t just do anything, though. I have Josh.”

“Not for much longer, though,” West said. “Weren’t you going to go to college? You could reapply.”

It was an innocent question, but it set Evie on edge, and she tried to dull it by downing the rest of the wine in her glass. “College costs money.”

“I’m just saying you could do anything you want when Josh is off on his own. Backpack around Europe. Open a bakery.”

“Kayla’s been saving for years,” Evie said, hoping to shut down the subject. “And people need their hair cut. They don’t need pie.”

“The people of Creek Water may not need pie, but they sure as hell want it.” He opened his mouth then closed it again. “I could help, you know.”

Until he said that, it had been easy to pretend that West was a normal person, cut from the same cloth as her, but their lives had taken them to opposite ends of a spectrum. She couldn’t buy gas without having a panic attack. He was talking casually about investing thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dollars, like it was nothing. Her face was hot—whether it was from the wine or the temperature inside, she didn’t know. What she did know was that she was desperate to open a window.

There was a slight shake of West’s head as his eyebrows sank in, his lips parting as his shoulders hunched forward. “I invest in businesses all the time. There’s this restaurant in LA—”

“Okay,” Kayla said, coming up next to Evie. “Bug is the penguin. Cuddles is the giraffe.” She looked from Evie to West. “Shit. Am I interrupting something?”

Evie put on a smile, tamping down the tension, and fingered one of the blond waves poking out from underneath West’s baseball cap. “How soon can you fit this one in for a haircut?”

Kayla’s jaw dropped. “Are you serious?”

“Sure,” West said, a strained smile on his face. “Sign me up.”

CHAPTERNINETEEN

When Evie got homefrom Kayla’s salon, something uncomfortable was still tangled up in knots in the pit of her stomach. The rest of the night had been pleasant. Either West had noticed that she wasn’t too pleased with the subject of what she would do that was more than just waitressing, or he hadn’t realized the weight of what he was saying in the first place, but he hadn’t brought it up again. Evie had put on a smile while they all chatted. By the end of the night, when he’d kissed her before he got into his Jeep to go home, she had almost forgotten about it.

When Evie walked up to her front door, the TV flickered in the front window, and her dad’s van was still tucked into the driveway. She was genuinely surprised, and she realized it was because she’d been half expecting for him to already be gone, on his way to North Carolina.

When Evie opened the door, she wondered if she hadn’t entered a portal that warped the space-time continuum. Her dad and Josh sat on the couch, each holding an Xbox controller.

“Is that Halo?” Evie asked, hanging her keys on the wall hook.

“Call of Duty,” Josh said, his unblinking eyes fixed on the screen, his fingers moving so fast, she wondered just what it took to get carpal tunnel.

Evie sank into a chair. “Who’s winning?”

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