Dolly grins. “Oh, Sweet Pea. Why don’t you just go talk to him now?”
“I’m not done here yet,” I say, wanting to put it off, wanting to stay here, where I know I’m wanted.
“I think I can manage rolling the rest of these,” Miss Dolly says, seeing right through me. “We still have to count out the register and make the deposit at the bank. That should give you two plenty of time to talk.”
I nod and look down at her wrinkled hands—the only part of her that seems at all old. I reach out and give her a hug, and she smells like lavender and home. We’re almost exactly the same height, and for a second I forget that there are so many years between us. “Thank you,” I tell her. I throw my jacket and scarf back on, and I’m out the door before I remember to grab the umbrella Pop told me to take from the break room.
* * *
—
The rain is still falling in cold, thick sheets, but Dom’s house is only a few blocks away. I sprint past brownstones and wide apartment buildings, a small park, and a guy walking a dog in a bright yellow raincoat. There are a few kids in galoshes splashing in puddles on a fenced-in driveway and a woman pushing a stroller covered in plastic, and I marvel at how, even in the rain, the streets here are never empty.
At the end of Dom’s block, I spot Stormy crouched beneath a black sedan. I bend low and reach out, trying to get her to come to me so we can both get out of the rain, but she only backs farther into the inky shadows under the car.
I knock on Dom’s door loudly, and he answers so quickly that for a second I wonder if he saw me coming.
“Hey,” I say. “Your cat is under that car! I tried to get her out, but she wouldn’t come to me.”
He blinks at me, and I notice his eyelashes are wet. He must have gotten caught in the downpour too. “Yeah,” he says softly. His eyes travel from my combat boots all the way to the scarf wrapped around my head. He smiles. “She likes the rain. That’s why we named her Stormy Skye.”
He moves backward so I can step into his foyer. He reaches up and pulls the dripping scarf off my hair. “Why are you out in this mess?” he asks.
He’s wearing what look like the softest pair of sweatpants, a clean white T-shirt, and thick gray socks, and I want to snuggle up to him. To bury my face in his cotton-covered chest.
“I went to the diner to help your grandparents close.” He grins and shakes his head a little. “But also,” I continue, “I wanted to apologize. For earlier today when I yelled at you. And also for suggesting the fundraiser thing. You told me about the restaurant in confidence, and the first thing I suggested was to tell a bunch of other people about it.” I look up at him and he bats his pretty, wet eyelashes.
“It’s been a rough couple of months,” I say. “And getting to know you better has really been one of the best things in my life lately. Talking to you and Jase, Sydney, and now Willa has kind of saved me. The last time I messed things up with someone, I waited too long to apologize. So here I am.”
I take a deep breath. I reach out and squeeze his hand once before letting go. “I’m really so, so sorry.”
He bites his bottom lip. “I’m sorry too,” he says. “For being pissed about your suggestion about the diner. You were only trying to help, and the truth is my dad had just offered my grandparents money earlier that day. He’s always doing that shit—sending money instead of coming around. But yeah. It was a dick move to take it out on you.”
I look down, and when I look back up he’s smiling. The tiniest shiver shakes through me because the rain has seeped into my clothes and onto my skin.
“Do you want me to dry your clothes? I got caught in the storm too, so I was just about to start the dryer with my jeans and stuff.”
I don’t know if that is what I want, but I know that this is what I’ve wanted for a while: To be close to Dom again like I was the first time we talked about Macbeth on his rooftop; to be alone with Dom in an empty house where anything might be possible. I want to trust him, I suddenly realize, in a way I haven’t let myself trust anyone since my life started to fall apart piece by piece a few months ago. I want to trust Jase and Sydney and Willa, my mom and my dad and Ms. Novak. I even want to trust Layla again, though I know I probably never will. But Dom is the one I’m standing in front of when this realization hits. And maybe that’s a sign. Maybe I can start right here, with him.
I’m terrified, but I take a breath. “Okay,” I say.
And when Dom reaches out his hand, I grab it and let him lead me forward.
A NEW BEGINNING
“Why do you like Shakespeare?” Dom asks out of the blue.
After he pulls me out of the rain and leads me up the stairs, he offers me a pair of his sweats and a long-sleeved T-shirt. I step into his room with my dripping jeans and sweater in hand and he takes the wet clothes from me and dumps them into the dryer in the hall. I’m still wearing my damp underwear because I was worried that either my body touching his clothes directly or seeing his hands on my bra would make me spontaneously combust. I’m barely holding it together with the soft fabric that smells like him touching easy places like my wrists and the backs of my knees. I wouldn’t be able to handle much more.
When he steps back into his room, I’m standing in one corner near the window looking out at the rain. His clothes are all way too big, and a part of me wants him to occupy the space my small body has left in the unrolled sleeves of his shirt, the drooping fabric of his pants.
“Why do I like Shakespeare?” I repeat, turning slowly to face him, because I’m surrounded by too much Dom-ness for my brain to operate at full capacity.
He nods. “Do you like it for its beauty or for its meaning?” There’s a light in his eyes that isn’t normally there, and I want to give him the answer that will make me seem smart and interesting and worth knowing. I’ve decided to trust him, and I want to prove that he should trust me too.
Somehow I am a girl who makes all the wrong choices, but I am also a girl who aches in every way to be wanted despite my mistakes. I’m about to answer when he steps closer to me and keeps talking.
“Pretty words are easy, Shorty,” he says, reaching out to me. He rolls up the sleeves of the shirt I’m wearing, revealing one of my small hands and then the other. “But the stories are the complicated part. They’re messy and tragic and funny and broken.” Dom licks his lips and something inside me falls off a cliff.
“Shakespeare, he used a lot of pretty words, and sometimes he used them to obscure the truth a little.” I nod and Dom kneels. He rolls up the bottoms of my (his?) too-big pants, and his warm thumbs graze my ankles. He looks up at me from the floor.