Page 9 of Home Sweet Home

As Rich stirred his drink, the ice clinked against the glass. “Fascinating.”

“Lives.” Evie took a generous swig of beer, gulping it down greedily despite the fact that it was now room temperature. “Present tense. And I’ll assume that means you still have shitty taste in music.”

“How’s it go again? You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.” His attention turned to the ceiling, eyes narrowing, and when Evie looked up out of curiosity, she wasn’t sure what had caught his attention. There was nothing there but the ceiling fan, on its last legs and struggling to rotate. “You bribe the DJ, Peach?”

The nickname slipped out of his mouth as though he’d just said it yesterday. Evie was so thrown off, it took her a second to process what he’d been talking about in the first place, but then she heard “Waterloo” playing over the speaker. It was faint under the sound of the TV and the rowdy group’s interjections, but unmistakably ABBA. She’d always hated country music, and they used to argue about what to play. Evie always advocated for the seventies channel and sang along—very badly—to every ABBA song. She was surprised he’d remembered, and for a moment, Evie was fifteen again, sitting in the passenger seat of West’s Jeep. Then movement from the table with the men watching the game snapped her out of it.

Travis was walking up to the bar, and Evie’s stomach tightened. She wondered if he was back to take another shot, except he wasn’t looking at Evie. He was looking at West.

“Sorry to bother you, man,” Travis said. “Me and my buddies are huge fans.”

A smile stretched across West’s face, all charm, and Evie rolled her eyes as she drained the last of her glass of wine.

West tilted his head toward the TV. “How’s the game?”

“Not the same without you,” Travis said. “Diaz is slow as fuck.”

West laughed, clapping his hand on Travis’s back. “How about I buy you all a drink?”

As she watched West, unease roiled her stomach. Seeing him felt like she’d traveled back in time—to a place that she wasn’t particularly thrilled to revisit. Desperate to get away and with West’s attention occupied by his fans, she saw her opportunity. Evie placed a twenty under the bottle, slipped off her stool, and started toward the door. The basket with Evie’s burger and fries was still untouched and her beer was full above the label, but none of that mattered. All that mattered was putting as much distance as possible between herself and West Hawthorne, as much as she could manage in this stupid small town.

Before she could open the door, West swiveled toward her. “Stay. Have a drink with us, Peach.”

The earnest eagerness on his face was almost enough to get her to sit back down and slip into the way it used to be between them. But that was a long time ago, ancient history, and she’d already decided to leave it buried in the dirt rather than dig it back up.

“Cupcakes won’t bake themselves,” Evie said, pressing the door open. “Good luck, West.”

And as she walked out the door into the warm summer evening, she felt West’s eyes on her back, watching her leave.

* * *

Through the windowof the bar, Evie saw West, surrounded by the men who had been at Travis’s table. The game forgotten, they were rapt, laughing at all his stupid jokes, overinflating his ego to the point that it was truly miraculous it didn’t pop and blow the top off Mel’s Bar.

Evie sat in the passenger seat of Kayla’s powder-blue Beetle. Her plan hadn’t been very well-thought-out, and two steps outside the bar, she remembered her own car was still sitting in her driveway because Kayla had driven them. Evie resigned herself to waiting in silence. Each laugh that pierced the bar walls stoked her anger, but then the door swung open, and Kayla emerged, tugging at her purse zipper.

“What the hell?” Kayla asked, sliding into the driver’s seat. “I know you don’t have cupcakes to bake, because you already baked them.”

“I wasn’t hungry.”

“Well, Iamhungry, and I abandoned a perfectly good burger in there. Not to mention an extremely hot baseball player.”

“Sorry. It’s just…” Evie searched for the words to explain how she’d felt when she saw West walk through that door. “It was just weird. Seeing him.”

“Why was it weird?” Kayla raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t he just live next door to you?”

Evie told Kayla most of her secrets, mostly because Kayla had a way of pulling them out of Evie before she even realized what she’d revealed. “Friends need to know shit about each other,” Kayla had said, waving Evie off anytime she got embarrassed from something she said. “Mutually assured destruction and all.” But Evie had never told her about West. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe because it was hard. Maybe because in the grand scheme of things, it hadn’t really been anything at all. Or maybe because it was ridiculous that an event from when she was fifteen still weighed on her.

“He drove me to school,” Evie said. “Until he graduated.”

“Still doesn’t explain your Irish goodbye back there.”

Evie closed her eyes, and in her mind, she was sitting on the step of her front porch, frayed strings from her denim cutoffs tickling her thighs, waiting for West to come out of his house. When he did, Jeep keys jangling around his finger as he twirled them, his face lit up when he saw her. As they drove the five miles to the school, the wind rustled through the open window, streaming through his hair, and she couldn’t help but notice how his T-shirt clung to the hard line of his bicep as he turned the steering wheel.

“Fine,” Evie said, crossing her arms over her chest. “I had a huge crush on him.”

She’d never admitted it to anyone but her mom, who’d stitched Evie back together after her heart ripped in two. Even before West made it big, the idea of West being interested in her was ridiculous. Evie had watched enough eighties movies to know that boys like him—popular, hot, and good at sports—didn’t end up with girls like her, whose idea of fun was doing a puzzle while she waited for her cake to cool.

For a while, though, she’d wondered if he might like her back. The signs were small. He was always teasing her when she hijacked his radio and turned on ABBA or when she yelled at him for taking turns so fast she worried she was experiencing her last moments on earth or when he stole and devoured the baked goods she brought along. And when she got in the Jeep, she always reached for the volume dial, which was necessary if she wanted to keep her ear drums intact, and sometimes he reached at the same time. When their fingers brushed, it was like lightning had sparked between them. But she’d merely seen what she wanted, not what was really there.

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