Page 72 of Like First Love, Again

“What?”

Mia rolled her eyes, but her smile was too bright to sell it. “Victoria Cruz, I’m asking you to be my girlfriend.”

“At a Chevron?” Tori screeched.

Mia’s laughter rang against Tori’s ribcage. She squeezed her tighter. “Are you being a princess about this?”

Whiplashed, Tori struggled to find her words. “We can’t do this here! You deserve— I mean, Jesus, anything better than a freaking propane cage! I had been waiting for the right time. It felt kind of weird to ask you when you were still technically married, and then I didn’t want to spring it on you right when you came back, and?—”

Mia cut off Tori’s spiraling with a kiss, warm and trembling, lips swollen and salty from crying. Tori’s frantic energy dissolved. Her pulse slowed. The suboptimal surroundings shrank to Mia’s mouth, her hands, her certainty.

“What an adorably neurotic side of you,” Mia said when she pulled away, leaving her arms around Tori’s neck.

Holding on to Mia’s waist for dear life, Tori was barely aware of being stared at by randos pumping gas. “At least a nice restaurant,” she mumbled, trying to hang on to her disapproval but focus shifting to the truth of Mia’s body in her arms. Of her heart, already living in Mia’s chest.

“This moment is perfect, Tori. You are all I need.” Grinning up at her, Mia sighed as if overcome by a revelation. “You are all I’ve ever needed.”

A car honked a moment before an old man cursed at a soda delivery truck for having the audacity of existing.

Tori laughed. “Oh, yeah. Perfect.”

Mia pulled Tori down to her lips again. “Absolutely perfect.”

Thirty-Seven

Therapy over video chat wasn’t as good as in-person, but it was a decent alternative after Mia flat-out rejected finding someone in Miami. Marigold had gotten her to admit that shemighthave been avoiding entering her mother’s room, and that if she was going to stay in the house, she should work on occupying the whole thing. That she had to find a way to honor what had once been by making space for the truth of now.

Friday morning bled into afternoon before Mia gathered the nerve to step into the room that held the lingering scent of her mother’s perfume—faint but impossible to ignore. The room, only slightly larger than one of the standard bedrooms, had an attached bathroom. After the kitchen, it was the only other thing her mother had remodeled.

Mia drifted into the bathroom and sat at the small chair tucked under the vanity built into the counter. The bathroom wasn’t huge, and her mom had gotten rid of one of the double sinks to make room for the vanity.

Looking at herself in the mirror, sitting where her mother sat every morning to put on her makeup—and returned to every night to take it all off—Mia let herself miss her. She didn’t openthe drawers full of organized compartments. Instead, she put her palms to the cool, stone top and imagined her mother sitting there.

What had she felt when her own parents passed and she moved into this room? This bathroom. How had she felt when the house was hers? She’d been older than Mia was now, but Mia didn’t think it made much of a difference. When did anyone feel ready to let go of someone they loved?

It hadn’t happened right away, Mia remembered. It had easily taken her mother a year to move into this bedroom. Had taken her much longer than that to change anything.

With a deep breath, Mia stood. She’d come back, she vowed, but today wasn’t the day to move her mother’s things. Impressed that she’d existed in her mother’s space without breaking down, she walked out of the room, but this time she didn’t close the door behind her.

She was in the pool house, sweating her ass off while she hauled out box after box of stuff suitable for donation when she heard Tori’s voice. Glancing at her phone for the time, Mia cursed.

“You back there?” Tori called.

“Yeah!”

Mia stepped out into the quickly fading day, messy hair piled on her head where it wasn’t plastered to her forehead and neck. In a dust-covered T-shirt and shorts, she wasn’t exactly ready to go. Tori, however, looked sleek with her hair combed back and held in place with product. It made her dark eyes, lined to perfection, impossible to look away from. In tailored eggplant colored pants and a thin black sweater with the sleeves pushed up, she looked deadly.

“Jesus,” Mia breathed, stepping back from Tori so she didn’t ruin her incredible presence with her mess. “You look fucking incredible.”

Tori grinned with one side of her mouth before raising a single, perfect, judgmental brow. “And you look not ready to go to your own friend’s thing.”

Filthy thoughts ran through Mia’s mind while she looked at Tori and worked very hard not to touch her with grubby hands. “What if we just don’t go?”

Laughing, Tori slid her hands into her pockets. God, was there anything she did that wasn’t painfully sexy?

“Don’t threaten me with a good time,” she joked. “I don’t know why Daniela is obsessed with having people over. Like, girl, shouldn’t you be doing newlywed things?” She chuckled. “I hate having people in my house,” she added, as if Mia didn’t know that Tori would be happy to live in a castle surrounded by a gator-filled moat.

A balmy breeze carried Tori’s cologne toward her, smooth and clean and just earthy enough to make Mia want to bail on her friend’s party. But she resisted and moped her way to the shower.

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