Page 45 of Regal Feather
“Half of the places I know must be closed or something by now.”
“Try.”
I shook my head. “Nah. You pick, babes.”
Open choices were turning out to be that level I couldn’t quite beat. Carlos had said it was normal. He’d shared plenty of funny anecdotes of his first couple of years as a civilian. I brushed those off.
It made me illogical, but I still didn’t care that others had gone through the same. I was going through it, on top of everything else. On top of ignoring the text message from Carlos’s friend that suggested we meet up for a drink. I hated the sort of messages that pretended to be harmless but were anything but.
I knew I was on a deadline. The longer I didn’t acknowledge the invitation, the likelier it was that he and Carlos would run into one another, one of them would bring up my name, and the gossip circle would begin. I wanted to avoid that one at all costs.
I reckoned I could still take a couple of days without risking it too much.
Yeah, it could be a Saturday activity. By then, Ever’s parents should already be here, too, so it would look good if they saw me coming in and out of the house. They might want me to keep an eye on their son, but I highly doubted they wanted the kind of separation anxiety we were recreating here.
“I don’t have a nickname for you.”
He said it with the most adorable frown, too, which was not a thought that helped when I was trying to keep myself from clinging to him like a limpet. “Okay?”
I hardly thought calling him babes constituted a nickname, but if he wanted it that way, I could keep it exclusive to him. It wasn’t like there was a line of people out there begging for my time, or like I was interested in them.
“You call me Ever, or babes, or stuff, but I don’t do the same.”
“It’s fine.”
It wasn’t something I’d even realized until now, whatever that said about me. Even now, there wasn’t a gap, a shadowed crevice in our foundation because the truth had made it to the surface.
I knew I was solid with him, even when things were anything but. Even when things stood like they did right now, flimsy and unknown in a way that I would’ve never associated with him. With us.
“I’ll think of something,” he mumbled to himself before stretching. He hadn’t gone back to the outfits I had seen on him the first few weeks after I arrived, but he wasn’t wearing oversized everything, either. I chose to think of it as him healing. It came with the benefit that I could track the strip of skin that showed every time his shirts rode up when he lifted his arms over his head. “We should still go out, though. There’s a Greek stand by the beach. They only serve sandwiches, but they’re really good, and they don’t deliver here. María asked for me.”
Of course he got someone to ask.
“Okay. Car or bus?”
“Car?” He scrubbed a hand down his face. “I know I shouldn’t care, but I don’t want to deal with people.”
If that meant he wanted to dress up more—also known in my head as healing—I was not going to complain.
“Okay. The underground parking is still there?”
“Yep.”
“The sea breezealways hits so hard here,” I mused. Ever had thought of grabbing a beach towel before we left, and hehad somehow spotted a bit of sand that wasn’t surrounded by a dozen screaming children throwing sand everywhere they could reach and beyond. “It’s weird.”
I inhaled deeply, imbuing myself with the rich, salty smell that meant I was home. The more it burned my nostrils, the more I relished in it.
“You gulped down your sandwich so fast!” Ever grumbled. He still had half of his clutched in his hand. “I don’t eat that slow.”
“You do.”
I’d throw hands if necessary. Unless he was angry eating, he was the kind of eater that made some servers confused because they wanted to bring out a second course, but it was a bad look to do that before everyone had finished their first dish.
“Whatever.” With the breeze, his hair kept getting in his face. I noticed he sometimes wore a thin headband, but he hadn’t put it on today. It made me want to pull him into my lap to shield him. It was too Neanderthal, though. The kind of thing I shouldn’t do before we resolved all the obstacles that had been placed on the way to getting back to us. To the two of us against the world. “I wish my parents weren’t coming.”
“Why?”
I knew the basics, sure, but there had to be more to what we’d already discussed and his general feelings about them.
