Page 12 of Kiss the Girl
“Good to know. I’ll steer clear.”
The rest of the night was like that, us hanging out and cracking jokes. But I was careful not to touch him again, and when Brooke tossed her bouquet, I nearly sprained six different muscles going out of my way not to catch it. But I cheered for the mob lawyer when she did. Better her than me.
When I got home around ten, I expected my parents to be in bed already. I lived in the “mother-in-law” apartment upstairs that I’d helped my dad build when I was in high school, but if a light was on when I came home, I still didn’t always make it past my parents’ living room. I liked extra time with my dad whenever possible, and a light shone now. I walked in to find my mom reading on the couch.
“Hey. What are you still doing up?”
She’d cropped the dark hair I’d inherited from her into a flattering cap of springy curls, but at the moment it was looking wild and slightly frizzy, like she’d been running her fingers through it a lot. That meant she was stressed.
“I wanted to hear about the wedding.” She set her book aside, a self-help book on personal finances. If ever a book could put someone to sleep…
“It went great. Brooke and Ian look really happy. Lily Greene’s garden was gorgeous. The food was good.”
“Sounds lovely.
“You’re looking…” I hesitated, trying to find the right word. “Ruffled?”
“Ruffled?” she repeated. “Am I a doily?”
“Is something going on, Mom?”
She sighed and rubbed her eyes with one hand, but when she dropped it, she was smiling. “Your dad worked in the yard with me today. For an hour.”
My jaw dropped. “You’re kidding.” He hadn’t had the energy to do that in over a year. His chemo treatments for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma had drained the energy from him.
“I’m not. He really did.” She leaned over and took my hands. “We didn’t want to say anything until we were sure, but he started that experimental drug trial six weeks ago. He’s been feeling better each day, and on Monday, he’s going in for new scans to see what kind of progress he’s made, but we’re pretty sure thereisprogress.”
“Oh, Mom. That’s amazing.”
“Yes, well.” She let go of my hands and sat back to wring them instead. “It’s meant everything to have you here, honey, but we’ll get you out of here soon. I promise.”
“I’ll be here as long as you need. Don’t worry. Now go to bed.”
She hugged me back and headed upstairs to her bedroom.
Most nights, I barely avoided crashing on the couch, tired from working all day, then heading over to Brooke’s a few nights a week to help her with something or another.
I guess that was why we’d grown so close so fast. We’d been hanging out for hours each week, working on different parts of her house. My mom had complained once that I spent more time with Brooke than with her and my dad, but my dad had shut her down quick.
“She didn’t come here to take care of me. She came here to take care of the store,” he’d said. “We’ve already asked too much of her. Let her have a life outside of us.”
Tonight, though, I didn’t have the same exhaustion, not even after working all morning and doing bridesmaid duty the rest of the day. We had a part-timer, Gary, a retired plumber who helped out twenty hours a week so I could take lunch breaks and have an extra cashier on our busy weekends, but I couldn’t leave him to handle the Saturday rush on his own. We’d given customers plenty of notice all week that we’d close at lunch, and then I’d left the store and driven straight over to Brooke’s house, ready to help her dress then get my game face on to socialize.
And socializing was ten times more exhausting than renovating.
So why wasn’t I tired?
I hopped up from the sofa and drifted toward the kitchen, stopping halfway to the fridge when I realized I was humming the song that had been playing when Noah first came over to my table tonight.
“No, Grace Winters. Definitely not. No Noah. No Noah-related songs. No Noah-related anything.”
Maybe this improvement with my dad was something, maybe it wasn’t. But I wouldn’t be staying in Creekville long-term, and Noah Redmond, high school teacher and small-town guy, was definitely a long-term kind of man.
Chapter Six
Noah
The first days back at school are a weird energy. A good energy, but odd. Teachers came in two days before the students did, officially. Unofficially, most of us got started even earlier than that. Otherwise, you didn’t have a prayer of being ready. Most of those two days were spent in boring in-service meetings and left little time for getting our classrooms set up.
