Best Served Cold

I twisted the key in the door and unlocked it, and upon opening it, saw a face I hadn’t seen in two years.

My mother’s.

A face I most definitely didn’t expect to see.

“Your father left me.”

And I most definitely did not expect to hear that.

***

I scrubbed the floor harder than I’d scrubbed anything in my life.

The painting in Best Served Cold was done, and the floor was filthy despite all my best efforts with dust sheets during that process. I still had to reattach shelves to the wall and put the ice cream cone lights on the walls, but I couldn’t think about that right now.

Anything was better than the scene I’d left at my house.

My mother had been crying on the sofa because my dad had apparently run off with someone younger with perkier tits than her—her words, not mine. My grandma was confused about why she’d come home without calling, and my grandfather had walked in, saw in hand, taken a look at the situation, and turned around again.

I’d made a break for it at that point. I couldn’t handle my parent’s issues as well as my own, but of course that was how it worked.

When something wanted to shit on you, it didn’t just take a shit. It ate three currys and took ten laxatives and covered you in it.

At least my toe didn’t hurt today. Small mercies and all that good juju thought bullshit things.

I dipped the brush into the hot, soapy water in the bucket next to me and, after giving it a shake, got back to work on the floor. It wasn’t dirty, per se, but it definitely needed a good scrub to make it look the way I wanted it to.

AKA, white again.

It was therapeutic. All the frustrations and anger from the past week—and last night—that I’d held tight in my muscles was being worked out. Every scrub I made provided a release from the emotion that was knotting itself inside my body.

I’d had enough. I was done.

I didn’t want to hurt anymore. Where Chase was concerned, I didn’t know how to move forward, but I just knew I didn’t want to hurt. I didn’t want to fight with him.

I knew him.

I knew he hadn’t done anything deliberately to hurt me. His ideas were stupid and his execution of them even dumber, but he wasn’t a cruel person. He wasn’t mean or vengeful.

Not like me.

I was vengeful. I wasn’t perfect. If you wronged me, I wanted to see you get your comeuppance. I wanted karma to bite you in the ass and laugh in your face.

I was human.

I had flaws, and I owned up to them.

One of my flaws was the inability to face my emotions.

I mean, I’d left my own mother crying on the sofa to scrub a fucking tiled floor.

I wasn’t exactly daughter of the year, never mind human of the year.

I knew it. I couldn’t face my emotions. I didn’t handle them well. Handled them a lot like picking up a hedgehog with my bare hands, if I was honest.

Hell, not even a hedgehog.

I’d handle sitting on a wasp nest better than I would my emotions.

The fact was, I knew Chase hadn’t deliberately tried to hurt me. I believed him on that. I wasn’t going to hate him forever because of something that had happened… Well, I don’t know why it’d happened. His idea was fucking dumb, and I think he knew that. He knew he’d fucked up, he admitted it, he owned it.

There was nothing more to discuss there.

Chase Aarons couldn’t lie to me.

I knew him too well. Although only days ago, I’d thrown back in his face that he “knew” me, it didn’t matter. You didn’t change a whole lot in two years unless you moved away and had a fucking epiphany or some shit.

He hadn’t moved. Neither had I.

Neither of us had changed. We’d grown older and gotten more experience, but we hadn’t changed as people.

I still binged on trashy TV and murder mystery shows. I still ate my weight in pizza. I still drank vodka with water because that way, I could get drunk and be hydrated at the same time.

He still let his beard grow just long enough to be a little unkempt but kept it trim enough that you couldn’t tell whether it was deliberate. He still had the same laugh that could light up Main Street during a blackout.

He was still Chase.

I was still Raelynn.

And, in the end, we’d broken each other’s hearts.

It didn’t all have to be hard. It would never be easy. I didn’t know if I could forgive him, but I knew I didn’t want him out of my life. Even if we were only ever friends…

But could we be friends while he still loved me?

How did I feel about him? Did I have any feelings? I’d sure as hell felt something when he’d kissed me last night. I’d felt that zing of delight and familiarity as his lips had pressed against mine.