Page 36 of Mom Com

His car stops then, and I realize we’ve made it to my house. He keeps his foot on the brake, but never shifts into park. “Goodnight, Maddi,” he says, his smirk still present. “Tell your mother I say hello.”

I want to shake my fists in the air. How can one person give you so much and yet so little in one tiny conversation? But instead, I glare at him and get out of his car. At the very least, Liv didn’t win that bet.

CHAPTER12

I Feel like a Giant Fool(s)—

an old-fashioned English dessert made with tangy gooseberries and sweet custard, served with a hangover that I wish was amnesia

Ow. Fucking ow.

My head feels like it’s one of those tin cans strapped to the back of a wedding car. My body is pulsing with the faint thumping of my dead heart and my torso is made of stomach acid. The extra time I gave myself this morning to beat Wilder to the bakery was pissed away by a sluggishness that can only be matched by a sleeping sloth. And so here I am, sitting in my car outside the bakery wondering if I stand, will I puke? And if I puke, will it be a relief or will I just lie down in it, making an art piece of myself to fulfill the townspeople’s expectations? My only solace is that the sun has yet to rise and mock me with its cheery rays of fuck you.

I peer at myself in my rearview mirror, only to discover that I look exactly the way I feel, and then I go about easing myself out of the car like I was nine months pregnant.

I’m never drinking again.

In fact, no one is. I’m burning down the bar. Both of them. Fuck all y’all.

I laugh halfheartedly. But the sudden movement hurts and I immediately return to cursing everyone I know and mostly myself. I make it through the door of the bakery with a distinct lack of elegance. And as I head around the counter and push through to the kitchen, the memory of my last conversation with Wilder hits me with stunning clarity.

“Don’t,” I say, as he turns around with a knowing look. “I can’t.”

His eyes smile, but he doesn’t breathe a word. He just turns back to his mixing bowl and leaves me to my misery. At my station, or at least the place on the counter where I was baking yesterday, there are two small black capsules and a giant glass of water. My eyes flit to Wilder in surprise, but the motion makes me queasy. I don’t bother asking him what it is; I just shove the vitamin-looking things in my face and down the water.

Jake holds my hand as we walk down the row of cars lining either side of Matt Mazzeo’s private dirt road. Matt lives in one of those big old farmhouses (that his dads transformed to have a gorgeous beachy interior) on the edge of town, tucked away behind a mess of trees that act as natural soundproofing for his parties.

Jake opens Matt’s front door for me, heat and music spilling out into the cool air. I lift my chin, pulling Jake in with me and wrapping my arm around his waist, replicating a shadow of the closeness we shared earlier, pleasantly surprised by how easy it all is. It’s not that I expected it to be awkward; it’s just that I thought it would be a bigger deal, weighty the way it had been with Wilder. But then again, Wilder and I only had sex twice. We didn’t rush, we were careful, and we made it mean something. Only that was absolute bullshit; it meant exactly nothing, as evidenced by him breaking up with me a couple of weeks later.

“Beer?” Jake asks, smiling down at me with his arm around my shoulders.

“You read my mind.”

He heads for the kitchen, and I pick my way through the living room, saying hellos and politely declining when Jenna waves me over to join her group on the dance floor. And for a flash of a moment, I miss Liv immensely. She was barely home this summer. Not that I can blame her for going to Europe with her Yale friends instead of hanging out with me in tiny Haverberry. But still, it feels like she’s a million miles away.

I sigh, some of the thrill of the evening dissipating, replaced by a wisp of anxiety. And that’s when I spot Wilder leaning up against a window chatting up some girl who will most likely become girlfriend number four this year, each relationship shorter than the last. For a moment, my anxiety blooms into something more, but I stuff it down, telling myself it’s fine and that I’m fine. And as though he could sense I was looking at him, he turns, halting whatever he was saying like he lost his train of thought mid-sentence.

Without breaking eye contact with me, he apologizes to the girl and maybe says he’ll be back? It’s hard to be sure because I can’t hear him over the music.

But when he takes a step in my direction, I pivot so fast that Jake doesn’t get a chance to announce his return, and I wind up smacking into his chest with a small yelp.

“Whoa there,” he says with a chuckle, rebalancing the cans of beer he’s carrying.

“Perfect timing,” I say, as I grab a beer and immediately chug it. When I don’t come up for air, he looks at me questioningly.

“Everything okay?”

I finish the beer before answering. “Of course, why wouldn’t it be?”

Jake’s eyeline drifts over my shoulder and back again in a way that makes me think he, too, sees Wilder. Only he’s not scowling, which means Wilder must have changed his mind about coming this way.

“Because you just crushed a beer in like ten seconds flat?”

I shrug. “I was thirsty.”

“Apparently,” he says, but when I don’t immediately offer up an explanation, he doesn’t pry.

“I’m going to get another. You good?” I ask, and when he nods, I stalk toward the kitchen, determined to get rid of this unsettled feeling any way I can.