Page 42 of The Fantasy League
“Oh, nothing. It’s silly.” I brushed it off, hoping he’d change the subject.
“Tell me.”
“I was just thinking about how you might go out to see your real friends and realize that you didn’t want to be mine anymore,” I told him honestly. I shook my head at how stupid I sounded. “It’s dumb. I-I don’t even know why I thought about it.”
“I’d never replace you, Red.” Seriousness coated his voice. “Have you ever tasted your fucking cooking? My buddies from college burned instant ramen more than a handful of times, so I’m keeping you around for as long as you’ll let me.”
I gave him an uneasy grin
I liked when he told me tidbits about his life before I knew him. For the longest time I’d constructed him to be such a monster in my head, and now when he told me stories about growing up with his mom or his college friends it made him seem more… human.
Comfortable silence passed between us while we ate our pie, and when I looked over at Abel, I found his eyes were already on me.
“Did I ever tell you about the one time Mae accidentally robbed a bank?” I asked, breaking our silence.
“How does oneaccidentallyrob a fucking bank?”
Abel and I laughed for another hour as I told him stories of all the stupid shenanigans Mae and I got into as kids, like the one time we stole Dads’ shaving cream and replaced it with hair removal serum, only for us to realize hours later that we didn’t really do anything because they were going to shave off their beards anyway.
When I began yawning uncontrollably, I took it as a sign that it was time to go home for the night. I had to be back here in a few hours for work after all.
Abel stayed planted on his front steps as he watched me sneak back across the street with clean plates in hand.
I waved at him from underneath Mae’s porch light and quietly, quietly opened the front door and slipped inside.Placing the dishes in the sink, I decided they’d be future Scarlett’s problem, and instead I stealthily climbed back into the same spot I had lain before I left and tucked myself underneath a fuzzy throw blanket.
“Scar, where’d you go?” Mae lifted her head from her pillow across the couch.
Damn her for being such a light sleeper.
“I just went to give Abel some leftovers and say thanks, nothing serious.”
“Nothing serious,” she repeated back to me with a small smile before pulling a blanket over her head and rolling to face the couch cushions.
TWELVE
ABEL
“Tropical storm Paulawill be hitting landfall overnight. Miami-Dade County residents, we encourage you to take precautionary measures as needed. We’ll be back with more details after this commercial break,” the female news reporter’s voice blasted through the flat-screen speakers on the wall.
I lay spread out on the couch, bored out of my fucking mind before settling on the weather channel. Who knew you could flip through infinite channels and still find nothing worthy of watching?
It had been almost a week since I’d last seen Scarlett and I was starting to regret letting her take the week off. Especially since I was leaving in a week for Los Angeles.
But she hadn’t exactly given me much of a choice.
Monday morning I found a bright-green sticky note taped to my windshield telling me that she’d stocked the fridge with prepared meals and the directions on how to reheat them were on the counter. Oh, and that she’d be back in a week.
A fucking week.
She did leave a cute fucking heart at the bottom of the note where she signed her name which eased some of my annoyance.
Apparently, she had early morning meetings with her editor all week to finalize the recipes that they would be using for her cookbook. At least that’s what Lea had told me when I interrogated her at practice about it.
Now that Scarlett and I had gotten close, it was lonely not having her around in the mornings. I liked teasing her about her cooking and seeing her eyes light up with fire whenever she got offended by my taunts.
It amused me more than I liked to admit.
I silently cursed myself realizing that I could’ve had mornings like that with her for nearly a year had I not been such a fuckup. My thoughts reeled back to our car ride after the gala a few weeks ago when she said that we might have been something different if our relationship started off differently.
