Nothing More (Landon Gibson 1)

“Dakota.” I use my knuckles to tap on the door.

She’s silent. Seconds later, she turns the sink on and I wait.

Time seems to move incredibly slow when you’ve made a fool of yourself and someone else all in one quick motion. I knock again and she doesn’t answer. The water is still running and it’s been at least three minutes. I knock again.

She doesn’t answer.

“Dakota, are you okay?” I say against the bathroom door.

The running water is the only noise I hear when I press my ear to the door.

Is she okay? Why is the water still running?

On instinct, I turn the knob and open the door.

“I’m sorry . . .” I begin again, but when I look around the small bathroom, it’s empty.

The window is open.

The curtains are blowing in the wind.

And I curse at my building for having a fire escape.

Chapter Twenty-five

IT’S BEEN LESS THAN TEN minutes since Dakota left my house and I’m more and more ashamed by the minute. I hate that this happened to me, to her.

I can’t imagine how my inadequacy made her feel.

Well, I can sort of imagine, given that she climbed down my fire escape and obviously preferred just getting the heck away from me. I wish she would have talked to me, even yelled at me, instead of sneaking out my bathroom window. I feel like shit about it.

I imagine that she may feel even worse.

Her words ring through my ears:

“I don’t get it. How can you not?”

“I don’t get it. How can you not?”

I felt so much worse in that moment and now those words won’t stop looping through my mind.

I don’t get it.

How can you not????

I sit on the couch and bury my face in my hands. Dakota is probably not going to want to talk to me for a while, maybe never again. The thought of that makes my head spin. I can’t imagine her being completely out of my life. The notion is so strange. Too strange. I’ve known her half of my life, and even when we broke up, I still knew she was out there, not hating me. Her having bad feelings toward me for the rest of our lives just wouldn’t be right. It would be like messing with the universe.

A knock on my door pulls me from my thoughts and I jump up.

It must be Dakota—back to hear my apology . . . or possibly even offer her own?

As I rush to the door, another knock sounds and I yank it open.

Only it’s not Dakota. It’s Nora, with some groceries.

“Can you grab something, please?” she asks, struggling with the bags, and I grab as many as I can, careful not to accidentally make her drop them as I help.

When I glance inside them, there’s lots of green stuff. I can’t tell what any of it is, except that it’s green and looks kind of fluffy. The heaviest of the three bags makes a clinking sound when I put it on the counter, and when I peek inside, I find three bottles of wine.

“Sorry,” she says as she puts the other bag on the kitchen counter. “I was either going to lose an arm or the wine. And after today, I’d rather lose an arm.”

She begins to pull stuff out like she lives here and I watch her silently navigate my kitchen and place her food inside my fridge. She pulls out the bottles of wine, one by one, and puts them in the freezer.

I thought that, unlike liquor, wine froze, but I don’t want to ask her and look like an idiot.