Page 6 of Call You Mine
Instead, it turns a few more times.
Ava knows the code to unlock the deadbolt. She’s used it before—she just used it tonight.
The knob keeps turning, over and over again, my confusion deepening as I throw off my twisted bed sheets, pullingon a pair of sweatpants from my dresser and heading across the first floor of my house toward the front door.
I’m just about to unlock it when my arm freezes in the air.
Is she…counting?
It’s not whispered, but it’s muffled—so much so that there’s a sliver of doubt. It isn’t until I hear Ava’s voice crack when she reaches the number seventeen that I know I’m not hearing things. My heart aches at how that one word sounds so broken yet so relieved at the same time.
Her boots begin slowly crunching against the few inches of snow we got today, and I push my confusion about why she would be counting how many times she turns a locked doorknob to the back of my mind.
For now.
I open the door just as I hear Ava say, “Hello?”
But she isn’t talking to me. Her phone is held up to her ear, her body swallowed by her huge sweatshirt, which is definitely not warm enough for her to be wearing in the middle of a freezing night like tonight.
She’s a few steps away from her car, phone pressed to her ear, one arm wrapped around herself like she’s trying to hold in the warmth, and I just watch from my porch like an idiot. The streetlight at the end of my driveway catches in her hair, turning it copper, the ends brushing her sweatshirt as a gust of wind comes through. She doesn’t say anything, just listens intently to whatever the person on the other end is saying, her body completely still, her keys dangling from her fingers—already halfway gone even though she hasn’t driven off yet.
My body aches to go after her—to cross the concrete barefoot, to drape a blanket over her shoulders, to pull her back inside like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
Like she belongs here.
Like this is where she sleeps, where she leaves her shoes by the door and her coffee mug in the sink, and doesn’t haveto take calls outside at two in the morning in the dead of winter.
I picture her sliding back under the covers, her cold hands finding mine, her breathing evening out against my chest. Staying.
Standing there, I feel so useless, watching my breath form a cloud in the cold. I know if I go to her, if I ask her to come back, she’ll smile that soft, apologetic smile—and leave anyway.
But I can’t stop my lips from parting, her name on the tip of my tongue.
She gasps, and my stomach drops. “Go to your room and close the door,” she instructs whoever she’s talking to, a sense of urgency in her direct tone that worries me. “Don’t come out until I get there. I’m on my way.”
She unlocks her car and opens the driver’s side door as I step further onto my patio, ignoring the cold concrete on my feet and the freezing wind against my bare chest.
“Ava,” I call to her. “What’s wr?—”
But she doesn’t hear me.
Her car door slams shut, and then she’s speeding away and out of sight.
CHAPTER 3
AVA
“Ava,”my sister says from the front seat. “Are you sure this is okay?”
Her voice is soft, worry thick in the way that makes my heart clench. The tear streaks on her cheeks are more evident under the orange glow of the rising sun peeking through the clouds.
It started snowing sometime between when I got the call from her and when I was leaving Anderson’s to pick her up from my mom’s house. I’m tired and emotionally drained, and I have to open the coffee shop in less than two hours.
But sleep is not in the cards for me right now.
I glance at my rearview mirror, reaching up to adjust it slightly.
Again.
