Rev was curled up sleeping on one of the barstools, so I took the other one, rubbing his head once as I sat. He peered at me through one lazy eye before blowing out a loud breath and closing it again.
“Wine?” Wren asked, pulling two glasses from above the sink.
I cleared my throat, adjusting my shirt where the broken button had popped out when I sat. “You have beer, by chance?”
The corners of her lips curved up as she put one glass back and ducked into the fridge for a can from the local brewery in Gold Bar. I popped the top on it and took five full gulps. I’d forgotten what nerves felt like, and suddenly I was at war with them without a single weapon to fight with.
Wren cheersed her glass to the empty air between us.
“To you, Anderson Black.”
She took a sip and I relaxed, watching as she went back to cooking. Conversation was light as she manned the griddle, making pancake after pancake and whipping up a pound of bacon, too. I was happy to talk about the weather and tell her about nearby hiking trails, because if my brain had to work any harder, it would have failed. I’d never seen anything so distracting as Wren in a short dress and tall heels cooking bacon. By the time she sat a plate piled high with cakes in front of me, I’d already downed two beers just from nerves.
Stupid.
I thought back about how long it had been since I’d last slept with a woman as Wren took her seat next to me, a fresh glass of wine meeting her lips. The true answer was never, because all the girls I’d slept with before my life stopped had been just that—girls. Sarah had been the only one between my sheets since guilt pulled me under, and it had only been a few times, on nights when I was too weak to refuse her.
It was entirely the wrong time to be thinking about the last woman I’d been on a date with or even kissed, let alone slept with, because thinking about it meant I was comparing it to my current situation with Wren. We were just having dinner. Casual conversation, pancakes, bacon. That was all.
I cleared my throat and shook the thought from my head as I picked up my fork.
“Thank you, it smells delicious.”
“Just wait until you taste it,” she said with a wink, using the edge of her fork to cut off her first bite of pancake. She popped it between her red lips with a moan of satisfaction and nodded toward my plate, waiting.
Cutting through all four pancakes on my plate at once, I stacked the first bite, and when the sweetness hit my tongue, I had to smile. “Damn,” I said, still chewing. “Those are some pretty mean pancakes.”
“I told you!”
I laughed as she pumped her fist into the air in victory, and we settled in, taking turns chewing or talking.
“So what do you think of our little dot on the map so far?” I asked, dipping a strip of bacon into my syrup.
“It’s nice,” she answered with a warm smile. “So much different from the city.”
“You’ve lived there your whole life?”
She nodded. “Born and raised. I love Seattle, but I wish my parents would have taken me out of the city at least once in a while. I had friends who went skiing or camping or hiking, but never us. My grandparents took me camping when they could, they live out in Kansas. But I never went with my parents. Dad had his practice and mom was always planning parties. The perfect little Seattle socialite family.”
I swallowed another bit, thinking about how different our upbringings had been. “Practice?”
“Plastic surgery, to be exact.”
“Ah,” I said, a little uncomfortably. “That’s uh... that’s interesting.”
Wren rolled her eyes. “If by interesting you mean vain, then I agree. He wanted so badly for me to follow in his footsteps and take over the practice, Mom wanted me to follow in hers and marry a man with more ambition than me.”
“And neither of those happened, huh?”
Wren swirled the wine in her glass, her eyes following the swell of the liquid before she tipped the glass to her lips again. “Did you get all the parts you ordered? Have everything you need for this old place?”
She took a long drink, eyes avoiding mine even as she sat the glass back on the island and picked up her fork.
I wanted to press her for more—I knew she wasn’t a doctor, which meant the question she was avoiding was about being married to a man with more ambition than her. From what she’d told me about her clothing line she’d started at just sixteen, I found it hard to believe a man with more ambition even existed.
Still, I knew what it was like to be pushed to talk about something you weren’t ready to, so I let her drop the subject, tossing the last bite of bacon in my mouth with a nod. “Yeah, got everything. It’ll be a brand new cabin by the time the summer ends.”
“Maybe Abdiel will give me some of my cash back then,” she said with a smile.
“So are you really thinking of staying, or did you just tell him that?”
It was a stupid question to ask, especially since she’d laughed in my face when I’d asked a similar question the first day I worked on her cabin. She had no intention of staying, and she’d made that perfectly clear. I wasn’t sure why it bothered me. I wasn’t sure why I was asking again.
Just like the first time, Wren laughed, splitting the last bite of her pancake into two. “I think we both knew when we made our deal that I wouldn’t be staying past the summer.”
My stomach tightened at her response and I shifted, uneasy at the fact that I had any reaction at all.
“I think he knew, you know?” she asked, eyes lifting to mine. “I just need to be here right now.”
I swallowed, holding her eyes for as long as I could because I did know, and for some reason it was important to me that she saw that.
The girl in the green dress from the city wasn’t so different from me, after all.
When we were finished, I helped her collect the dishes and we stood at the sink, her washing and me drying. She handed me the first dish and my hand covered hers, our skin sparking at the transfer of energy. Neither of us acknowledged it, though—just worked in silence washing dish after dish, her bobbing her head along as Wu Tang spilled from her portable speaker.
I was lost in my own thoughts, thinking of how quick she was to laugh off the thought of staying in this town any longer than a few months. I used to be the same way, and I wondered where I would be now, if things were different.
“Tell me something about Dani,” she said unexpectedly as she handed me the freshly washed batter bowl.
I froze, gripping it a little too tight before numbly drying it with the towel. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Tell me a funny story about her. Or what was she like? What did she like to do?”
I frowned, but not because I was upset, more because I was surprised. Most people who didn’t know about Dani wanted to know how she died or how old she was or how I was coping. I couldn’t remember the last time someone had asked me about her—the girl who lived, not the one who had died.
“She was smart,” I started, a little unsure, unable to find the words to express who she was. “So damn smart. I mean, you could just be talking about anything—anything in the world—and she’d have something to say about it. She just knew things, and she loved to tell stories. Like one time when we went for a hike, we came across this plant that has leaves that curl up into themselves when you touch them, and she went on for the next hour of the hike about the name and origin and legends of the plant. I couldn’t even tell you any of it now, and I used to always tease her for it, but truthfully I liked listening to her talk.”