Page 65 of Jocelyn
Henry’s cousin.
Malachi:
No way.
Jocelyn:
Yep.
10:02pm
Malachi:
I miss you.
Jocelyn:
I miss you, too.
23
Jocelyn
“You’re getting as bad as Amanda,” Nicole accused as she lifted another folded length of material from a reusable shopping bag.
Amanda looked up from her phone. “The difference is, I’m working. I doubt Jocelyn can claim the same.”
I slid my phone between my thighs then crossed my legs. Out of sight, out of mind. For my friends anyway. And maybe a bit for me too. Maybe if I couldn’t see the device, I could focus for more than a few minutes on something other than the messages Malachi and I had been sending each other.
Two weeks. More time apart than we ever were together. But instead of the distance severing any sort of tenuous link we’d created, the opposite had happened. I felt closer to him now than I had when I’d been right in front of him.
A tiny part of me worried. Though I ached to see him again, to feel his reserved smile focused on me, the warm touch of his calloused hand, I worried the connection we’d forged through texts and phone calls would vanish like a morning fog when we saw each other again. Would he go back to being the man who hid behind his shyness, unable to verbalize what was in his heart, or would I be able to coax those words out like I had his laughter?
A glint entered Amanda’s eyes, and I realized too late my mistake. The hide-the-evidence move I’d used with my phone had only accomplished raising her suspicions. I grabbed the material on top of Nicole’s stack—a soft cotton blend with tiny yellow flowers—and unfolded it. The edges were already sewn in a seam. She hadn’t cut this off a bolt at a fabric store.
“This is nice. Where’d you get it?” I asked.
Betsy walked in from the kitchen carrying a tray bearing ice-filled glasses and a two-liter bottle of Coke.
Molly straightened from her position on the floor. She’d been hunched over a pattern she’d been pinning in place. She put her hands on her hips as she watched Betsy set the tray on the coffee table. “Really? That’s your idea of a mocktail?”
Betsy unscrewed the lid of the soda, waited until the fizz settled, and poured five glasses. She handed the first to Molly. “It’s a virgin Rum and Coke.”
I tried not to laugh when she passed me a glass. Last time Betsy had been on refreshment duty, she’d served virgin Mimosas that consisted of a single ingredient—orange juice.
Nicole put her glass on the table without imbibing then took back the fabric I’d stolen from her pile. “It’s a vintage sheet I got at a thrift store. I’m going to repurpose it.”
Amanda eyed the fabric. “How…industrious of you.”
My phone vibrated under my leg, and Amanda’s head whipped my direction. Sitting right beside me, she’d felt the alert of an incoming message too. I sipped at my Coke, trying to appear nonchalant even though everything within me screamed to dig my phone out and read the text.
Not that I was hiding my budding relationship with Malachi from my friends. I was merely trying to postpone their interrogation for as long as possible. Like, until after I saw him again and could get a sense of whether we could work as a couple in real life, face-to-face.
“Jocelyn…” Amanda tinkled the ice in her glass. “You don’t happen to have any salty kinds of snacks, do you? Fizzy drinks always give me the munchies.”
Molly spoke around the trio of straight pins in her mouth. “Go check the cupboard.”
Since Molly and I were roommates and she’d done the grocery shopping last, she’d know better than I what the pantry held, but I had a suspicion Amanda had something less innocent than snacking in mind.
