“Please think about what I said about the wedding,” Dad says to me.

“Okay,” I say, and I really mean it. Probably tomorrow I’ll be angry again, but right now my tummy is full of delicious food and my face is still smiling at his bad jokes and he feels just like he used to feel, like my very first best friend forever. He pulls me in for a hug and squeezes me tight and I squeeze him right back, wishing in that same small stubborn place that this feeling would last forever.

CHAPTER 33

The Time We Get

X AND I stand on the sidewalk and watch Dad drive away. Once his car disappears around a bend, I turn to X.

“Aren’t you guys supposed to be rehearsing tonight?” I ask.

“We did, but we stopped early.” He tugs on his guitar strap. There’s something sad in his voice that makes me look at him more closely, but he doesn’t say anything else about why they stopped. “We finished up the music for ‘Black Box.’ Thought I’d come by and surprise you with it. That okay?”

I nod. I know we’re supposed to be taking it slow, but it’s more than okay with me that he spontaneously showed up at my door.

Once he’s inside, I offer him some water, which he drinks down in one gulp. I give him another, and he gulps that one too. The third one he just sips. We leave the kitchen and hover in the area between the dining and living rooms. He unstraps his guitar and leans it against the wall next to the sliding glass doors.

“So you and your dad went out?”

I explain to him about our Taco Night tradition, and how Dad surprised me.

“How was it?” he asks.

“It was…nice, actually,” I say.

“Kind of pissed you had a good time, right?”

“How’d you know that?”

“For a while after Clay died, I used to get mad at myself for having fun playing music without him.”

“When did you stop?”

“Haven’t yet,” he says.

I ask him if he wants a tour of the apartment, before realizing that a tour will include my room. Does showing him my bedroom count as taking it slow? It does not.

He follows me upstairs. I point out our lone bathroom and both Mom’s and Danica’s rooms.

“When do I get to meet your sister?” he asks.

“She has a boyfriend,” I blurt out, answering a question he didn’t ask. Why did I do that?

He watches me for a second. “And I can’t meet her because he keeps her locked up in a fairy-tale tower?” The small smile at the corner of his lips says he’s teasing me.

“No, I just mean she’s out tonight. With her boyfriend. So you can’t meet her.”

He nods, but his smile stays where it is. “Your mom?”

“Also on a date. And this is my room,” I say when we get to the end of the hallway. The door is closed. I stop a couple of feet away and stare at it.

He looks back and forth between the door and me. “You going to open it with your mind, or…?”

“What? No. Telekinesis isn’t my superpower. I was just thinking about something else.”

“Okay,” he says. We go back to door-staring.

“Lemme just check there’s nothing weird in there,” I say. I open the door just enough to squeeze my body through and then close it in his face.

By “nothing weird,” I mean no errant underwear or anything else embarrassing. I shove two bras into my chest of drawers.

I make my bed.

Finally, I open the door. “Come on in,” I say, trying for blasé, but it’s hard to be blasé when you’ve just been hiding your underwear.

He stops inside the threshold and does a slow perusal of my room. He starts on the left with my closet, travels past that to my desk under the window, then to my bookshelf and chest of drawers before winding up on my bed.

I feel (metaphorically) naked.

He heads for my bookshelf. I can’t blame him. It’s what I would do too. He scans my books, and I try to guess what he’s learning about me.

“You label your shelves,” he says, turning to look at me.

“Is that good or bad?”

“Not sure yet,” he says with a laugh. “What happened to all these books, though?” he asks, waving his hand over the Contemporary Romance section.

“Just not into them anymore.”

He nods like he understands, because he does understand. He knows what it’s like to have a “before” and “after” period in your life. There’s a pre-divorce Evie and a post-divorce Evie. They look the same but aren’t.

He touches the empty shelf. “Did you have a favorite?”

I don’t even have to think about it. “Cupcakes and Kisses,” I say. The scene with the two chefs making out while making dessert flashes in my head. I decide it’s time to leave my bedroom. X is starting to look edible.

“Okay, well, that’s my room,” I say. “There’s nothing else to see here. Why don’t we go back downstairs now?” That sounded much more casual in my head.

“Yes, indeed, shall we?” he says, mock-formal, totally making fun of me.

We go downstairs and he grabs his guitar before we head out to the patio.

It’s late, almost nine. Lights are on in most of the other apartments. Everyone’s patios are splashed with little pools of orange-yellow light. Someone, probably Mrs. Chabra, is cooking. The night air smells delicious, like turmeric and onions.

We both sit, me in the armchair and him across from me on the sofa. He gives me a small smile and stares off into the courtyard.

Something’s definitely bothering him. “Are you okay?” I ask.

He covers his eyes with his hands. “It’s the anniversary of when Clay…I mean, it was a year ago today. I didn’t think it would be so hard. Tonight at practice we were all trying to act like everything was normal.” He stares up at the sky for a few seconds.

“Want to talk about it?” I say after a little while.

At first, I’m not sure he’s going to answer. He strums his guitar, changes chords a couple of times and strums some more.

“The thing that gets me is how stupid it was. He was crossing the street. Some guy was driving and sending a text. It’s just so fucking preventable. It’s the law. Don’t text and drive.”