Page 31 of Home Sweet Home

He exhaled, looking at her for what felt like the first time since practice started. “Those ten minutes in the car were the best part of my day. I think I just wanted to keep them to myself.”

Her eyes watered, but she blinked the tears away, biting her lip. “They were the best part of my day too.”

“Well,” he said with a soft laugh. “Ever wish you had a time machine?”

“I don’t think things would be so different,” Evie said, and she knew it was true.

He’d been three weeks away from getting out of Creek Water. He still would have gone to Purdue. He still would have been drafted and moved to LA. Her mom still would have died, and Evie still would have stayed.

“Maybe you’re right.” He held out his hand like they’d just finished a business meeting. “Truce?”

When she took his hand, his calluses on his palms and on the spots below his fingers scratched lightly against her skin. She liked the feeling of his hand, rough and warm, against her own. When he finally let go, she could still feel the spot where his hand had been, a phantom limb.

“Truce,” Evie said. Silence filled the dugout, and her brain swirled with so many thoughts begging her to pay attention to them. She asked the first question that popped into her head. “What are you up to after practice?”

The corner of West’s eyebrow tilted up. “You asking me out?”

There was a pull in her stomach like the gentle tug of reeling up a small fish. “I was just curious what you’ve been getting up to since you’ve been back in town. That’s all.”

“Well, I’ve got a hot date with a no-knead loaf. She’s sitting on my counter right now, doubling up before I stick her in the oven and eat her.”

“Charming. And I still can’t believe you make bread.”

“I contain multitudes, Peach.” On the field, some of the boys had started walking. West walked out to the grass, and yelled, “I said five laps, Freddy. That was only four.”

Evie thought of West alone in his kitchen, waiting for his bread to bake, so far from his normal life in LA, his team, and all the people in his life who had cared for him for the last ten years. “Kayla’s turning that abandoned shop on Main Street into a salon. I’m helping her paint tonight. If you want to come.” It suddenly sounded like the last thing West would ever want to do for fun. “It’ll probably be horrible. She said something about ants—”

“Count me in.” A smile stretched across his face.

CHAPTERELEVEN

“I let Ryleigh pick the colors,”Kayla said, explaining the lime green, highlighter pink, and cyan, bright and blinding. “She also tried to convince me to name the salon Ryleigh’s Rainbow, but I gave that a hard pass. I have some fucking boundaries.”

“I think they’re pretty,” Ryleigh said, dipping her paintbrush into the lime green and smoothing it across a wall in one long stroke.

Kayla poured the paint into a tray. “Well. Guess this wall is lime green. Joe tell you he’s retiring?”

Evie nodded. She still owed him an answer. “He wants me to manage.”

“You’d be the best manager,” Kayla said with a grin. “Bossing people around? One of your best skills.”

“Hey!” Evie said.

“In a good way. You get shit done. You taking it?”

“I don’t know. Probably.” Out of the corner of Evie’s eye, there was a flash of yellow. At first, she wondered if she’d missed a color and Ryleigh had gone rogue, but when she turned, she saw West’s Jeep parked on the street behind Kayla’s Beetle. West was just a few feet away from the glass door. “By the way, I invited—”

“Hi there,” West said. “Hope I didn’t miss too much fun.”

The look Kayla gave Evie made her wish there were ants, so that she could shrink down to their size, join their colony, and wedge herself into a floor crack. “What a treat. Evie told me so much about you.”

“She has?” A smirk tugged at West’s lips. She’d seen it so many times the past few weeks, she could sense it coming on like the first tremors of an earthquake, starting with the slight pull at one side of his mouth, followed by the crinkle in the corner of his eye. Smiling like that was so stupid, like he was too lazy to bother with the whole thing. And, she realized with a sinking feeling in her stomach, it was also adorable.

Evie shook her head. “I said literally zero things.”

“You’re tall,” Ryleigh said, looking up at West, lime-green paint dripping from her brush onto the floor like slime.

“Hey. Remember what I said the other day? About commenting on people’s physical appearances?” Kayla said. “Sorry. Last week, she very loudly asked a pregnant lady at Walmart if she swallowed a watermelon.”

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