Page 128 of Only in Your Dreams

“What makes sense?” I ask quietly. Terrified to hear what she’ll say next, yet completely riveted.

“Why he refused to leave Oakwood Bay after my mother passed,” Zac’s mom says. “Why he built himself a beautiful home and left it almost completely blank on the inside, like it wasn’t his to finish.”

“Mom,” Zac says softly. It sounds like he wants to warn her to stop speaking, but doesn’t have the heart to do it.

I stare up at the house. It’s the first time I’m really looking at it from a distance. The stone façade, the wrap-around porch. The porch swing facing the bay. The patch of daisies we’re sitting by.

He has a yellow front door.

It looked so familiar my first morning here, but I hadn’t been able to figure out why.

Now, I place it almost clearly. It’s the house I’d pinned to my vision board before moving away for college. The one Zac had stared at the last night I saw him. The picture that went missing sometime over the years.

But that’s crazy. Right?

Because like it or not, hedidleave me that night. He didn’t speak to me for a decade after. Men don’t go and build the dream home of a childhood barely-friend they no longer speak to. They don’t wait for her to move back and fill it the way she wants, paint the walls to her heart’s content. They don’t. Nobody does that.

Except…

“I’m going to go ahead and take this from you,” Zac mutters, stealing his phone back. “Alright, Mom. You’ve done enough for one day. I’ll talk to you later.”

I can’t see the screen anymore, but I don’t miss Andrea’s satisfied laugh. “Take care of those bruises, honey. I love you.”

I’m on my feet and picking up the daisies Zac had clipped by the time he hangs up the phone.

“So—”

Zac lifts me before I get the words out, squeezing me to him. “Thanks for meeting my mom.”

He breaks the awkward tension so easily. I adore that about him.

“She’s very interesting,” I tell him when I’m back on my feet. I tickle his nose with one of the daisies I’m holding.

“What makes you say that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because she made you seem obsessed with me.”

“I am obsessed with you. I’m not sure how to make that any more obvious.”

I bite down on a smile. As I stare up at him, I realize something: I have no real idea how he felt about me then. But I’m dying to hear that he loves me now.

What a liberating thought.

After months of agonizing over my breakup and the disastrous six years that preceded it, feeling down to my bones that I’d be ready to hear those words from Zac is shedding a hundred and something pounds of brown-haired, blue-eyed toxicity.

I don’t say a word. Don’t do anything other than stare up at Zac, willing him to say it.

“I fly out with the team in two hours,” he says, without taking his eyes off me. He looks at me like he knows exactly what I’m thinking. “Wait until I come back. Don’t make me say it just to leave you.”

I have grass under my toes, but in my head I’m levitating.

* * *

MELODY:Safe flight, Z. Bring me home another win, okay?

ZAC:Anything for you, Clo. Miss you already.

I’m a pessimist.

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