Page 102 of Delay of Game
With shaky hands, I turned off the ignition and exited the car. She tilted her head toward me as I approached, face impassive but a trail of tears coating her cheeks. My stomach clenched as she patted the deck.
I sat down beside her. As much as I wanted to, I left enough room so we wouldn’t touch. A single porch light poorly illuminated her. I couldn’t read anything on her face besides she wasn’t ready to speak. I sucked in a breath and waited.
“What is wrong with you?” Exhaustion coated her voice. Her body listed against me, head hitting my shoulder with a comforting blow.
“Where should I start?”
She sighed. “Maybe start with the fact that you’ve been visiting my aunt every week for the last month and a half.”
“She’s a nice lady.”
She sat up. I winced, missing the softness of her body on mine.
“Really, Rob.” She pulled her knee onto the porch, separating us. “You haven’t even called me, but you visited her twice this week. Why?”
A confession bubbled up that I couldn’t quite force to the surface. “Do you remember the first time we talked about her? What you said?”
Her lips pursed as her eyes darted to the sky. “I told you she had Alzheimer’s which makes it difficult to visit her in the evenings. She’s usually confused and a little confrontational. And once school started, I’d only get to see her on the weekends.”
“You were worried she’d be lonely.” I sucked in a lungful of air. “And with Mila in school, I don’t have anything to do on my days off. The least I could do was visit your aunt, so she wasn’t lonely.”
She sighed, dropping her head onto the pillar beside her. “You could have told me.”
“I’m not great at talking. Obviously, that’s something I need to work on.” I sighed, raking a hand through my hair. “That I am working on.”
I fumbled around in my pocket, pulling out the sheet of bright pink paper folded and refolded so many times that the creases tore and the words faded. I’d written and rewritten the list a dozen times until it was barely legible underneath all the crossed-out lines and revisions.
I unfolded it and tipped it toward the porch light. “I should also tell you I donated the coffee to your school. And that I don’t have a bunch of leftover home improvement shit lying around my house.”
She closed her eyes and huffed out a laugh. “You lied about the drywall? And the flooring?”
“Yeah.” I admitted. “Not the paint brushes or the wall mud, though. I actually had those.”
“When you showed up with the right sized door for the kitchen, I sort of assumed, but thank you for being honest.” She glanced across at me, cheeks turning pink before her gaze fluttered down to the paper. “What’s that?”
“A list of ways I’m not going to fuck this up again,” I said. The corner of her lip turned up with her eyebrow. “It’s a working title. I started it after I apologized to Ethan. Or at least, I tried to. It was a real shit show.”
“How did your apology turn into a shit show?” Her upturned lips let out a fleeting smile.
“I tried to apologize without changing my behavior. I wanted to be sorry and move on. He, rightly, pointed out that’s not how apologies work. Not good apologies, anyway. That if I was actually, truly sorry, I needed to make changes so it wouldn’t happen again.”
“Is that why Ethan said you’re mentoring him?”
“Yeah. It’s a bitch. He sucks. But I actually think it’s good for the team as a whole,” I admitted. “The mentorship should have been my idea. And I don’t like repeating mistakes.”
She nodded down to the sheet of paper. “So, that’s why you haven’t called me?”
I gripped the paper in one hand, reaching the other into the space between us. “I couldn’t risk losing you again. I had to make sure that I gave you an apology worth taking.”
She eyed my outstretched hand and nodded. “Okay. Apologize.”
I cleared my throat, tamping down the surge of anxiety that warned me my apology wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready. And then I soothed it with a long exhale.
“One, I’m going to stop lying to you about how much I like you and how desperate I am to be around you and make yourlife easier. I hate home repairs, I don’t own a single room full of drywall, let alone four roomfuls—” I cut myself off. “I sort of already went over this.”
She shrugged. “I like hearing it. Keep going.”
I sucked in a breath. “I donated the coffee and will continue to do so even if you don’t accept my apology or accept me when I ask you to go out with me on a date.”
