Four Day Fling

“And if I fall in love with him, that’ll be it for me. I’m not afraid to tell him how I feel. I’m afraid to fall in love and get my heart broken.”

“So is everyone else, but it doesn’t mean it stops them from doing it.” She smiled at me sadly and put her phone in her purse. “I’m gonna get to work. I think you need to be alone to think about this.”

I agreed with her. As much as I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to think about this. My mind was made up, and he’d all but agreed. He hadn’t exactly told me we should take it further.

Sure, he’d said that a part of him wished we’d never said it was just the weekend, but that didn’t equal “Let’s see each other in real life.”

Maybe I was beating a dead horse to make myself feel better, but whatever. I had to do what I had to do to convince myself this was the right choice.

No, you know what? I didn’t need to convince myself because I already knew it was, and I didn’t need to justify myself to anyone else either.

There.

I pulled my sketchbook over in front of me and pulled out a pencil.

I couldn’t keep Adam, but I could keep one of his poppies.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO – POPPY

Time Heals Cuts, Not Hearts

THREE WEEKS LATER

“Will you please turn that off?”

Avery looked over her shoulder at me. “What?” she asked, eyes fluttering innocently.

I looked at the screen. Adam Winters sat on my TV in all his handsome glory, doing a press conference for some sponsorship deal he’d just signed.

It was cool. It was fine. It’d been three weeks. I was so over it.

“You know exactly what,” I said to her, sitting at the table. “Do you have to watch him?”

“I like hockey.”

“You haven’t watched hockey the entire time we’ve lived together, and this isn’t even hockey. You’re trying to make a point.” I picked up my paintbrush and dipped it in the red paint I’d mixed earlier that day. I’d been trying to finish the poppy for weeks, and now all I had was a photo I’d had to take.

Avery sighed and muted the TV. “I don’t get it. It’s been three weeks. This shouldn’t bother you, and if it does, you need to call him.”

“I think he’s doing just fine without the random redhead he spent a weekend with,” I retorted. Especially if the figures the media were throwing around were correct.

“Poppy. You’ve started following the news on the Storms and you actually Googled him last week.”

“I’m not following anything. It’s that freaky thing the internet does when it gives you ads about things you’ve never Googled.”

“Okay, so what about Googling him?”

“I don’t have to justify my Google searches to you. I didn’t make you explain when you searched for lesbian porn.”

She shrugged. “Totally straight, but it’s hot.”

“Your porn is your porn. He’s my porn, and I had a moment of weakness.” I added a smidge of detail to a petal. “It didn’t mean anything.”

“It didn’t mean anything? I think you miss him, or you wouldn’t care so much that he’s on TV.”

“I don’t know him enough to miss him.”

“You know him plenty!”

“I’m trying to concentrate over here, Aves.”

She shook her head and put the volume back on.

All right, so I wasn’t over it. It bugged me. I didn’t want to see his face if I couldn’t kiss it and I didn’t want to hear his voice unless it was in my ear.

Three weeks. It’d been three weeks and I’d thought about him every day. I’d drafted texts I’d never sent and hovered on the call button way too many times, but I’d never been able to do it. How lame was I?

“Can you at least turn it down if you won’t turn it off?” I asked Avery.

“Nope.”

That was that, I guess.

I did my best to block out everything that was coming from that direction to focus on adding the finer details to my poppy. The seeds, the shadowing, the tiny things that would preoccupy my brain and stop me paying attention to him on the TV.

I even hummed. Hum, hum, hum. A tune I didn’t even know, but one that was designed to make me not listen.

“Oh my God call him!” Avery yelled, throwing the remote in my direction.

I ducked, and it hit the fridge behind me, falling to the door. The back popped off on contact, meaning the batteries went scattering across the floor.

“If that still works, you’re gonna be so lucky,” I told her.

“Poppy.”

“No.”

“Poppy.”

“Go away.”

“Poppy!”

“No!” I was about to throw something of my own when my phone rang. I pushed the chair back and glanced at the screen. “It’s my dad,” I told her expectant face.

She sulked and went back to watching Adam.

“Hey Dad,” I said, answering. “What’s up?”