“I’m making breakfast,” I announce, flipping the eggs, pushing them around in the pan—anything to keep from glancing over my shoulder again. So what if we shared the same bed? We’re still just friends. He’s still my cousin’s ex. He’s still a rock star. He’s still untouchable.
I still have to move back home.
“You eat eggs?”
My breathing stalls when Mike’s voice sounds from right behind me, and my whole body stiffens when his chest brushes against my back. I glance up at him over my shoulder, momentarily losing myself in those big brown eyes. While I search for my voice, he adds, “I thought vegetarians didn’t eat eggs.”
“Some do,” I manage. “But I don’t . . . These are for you.”
The sleep seems to clear from Mike’s eyes, the sun rising on his expression. “How’d you know I’d be up?”
“I didn’t,” I say, and when I reach over and pop open the microwave, he chuckles. He removes the plate stacked with two already cooked omelets, and then he grabs a fork and butter knife from a drawer and sits at the kitchen table.
“It’s a good thing I’m hungry.”
“They’re probably terrible,” I warn as I flip the third omelet in its pan. “I haven’t made eggs in forever.”
“I’m sure they’re amazing,” he says, and I glance over my shoulder to see him carving off his first bite.
“Would you tell me if they weren’t?”
Mike shovels the bite into his mouth and smiles as he chews, shaking his head no. When he swallows, I ask, “Well?”
“Amazing,” he repeats, and his teasing forces me to turn away to hide my smile.
I stand there wondering if he could do that for Danica—if he could find her in the middle of a storm and make her forget it was raining. And if he could, I wonder why she would ever give that up, why she wouldn’t fight tooth and nail to keep him.
For a moment, I think I can almost understand why she lost her mind and broke my computer and trashed my room yesterday. But the moment passes, and I shake my head, and I remember she’s a psychotic bitch.
“So,” Mike says, and when he hesitates before finishing, I know what’s coming next. “Have you heard from your cousin yet . . . ?”
I must have checked my phone five hundred times this morning—for a call from my uncle, for a text from Danica, for a call from the local fire department letting me know that she burned the rest of my belongings on the front lawn of our apartment. But five hundred times, there was nothing. Except one text, from Dee, asking if I got laid yet. It had a time-stamp of 7 a.m., and since I’m guessing she set her alarm solely to ask me that question, I responded by telling her to go back to bed.
Now, resting the spatula on the counter, I pat my back pockets for my phone. One, then the other. Then the right one again, the front ones, the left one, the back ones a third time. “Shit.” I spin around, scanning the counters, the tables. “Do you see my phone?”
Mike stands up to help me look for it as I anxiously search the living room, the bathroom, the bedroom. When we meet in the kitchen again, both of us are empty-handed.
“Do you want me to call it?” he asks, already moving his thumbs over the screen of his phone.
I take one last look around the kitchen before nodding. “Yeah, I think my ringer is on.”
A couple more seconds pass, and my ringtone begins going off somewhere in house. I head to the living room again and lose its trail while Mike heads down the hallway leading to the back of the house.
“I think it’s in here,” he shouts just before the linen closet clicks open. Just a simple click, and my eyes flash wide with terror.
“WAIT!” I beg as I race for the hallway. My socks slip on the hardwood floor, but I force my useless feet to keep slipping and sliding in a desperate attempt to beat Mike to my phone. I’m a banana-peeled cartoon character, panicked as I scream, “WAIT, DON’T!”
One second, I’m careening toward the back of the open closet door. The next, that door is swinging shut and Mike is staring down at my phone. I slide to a stop two feet away from him, cursing the day I was born. I must have dropped my phone into the hamper when I threw my dirty towels in there after my shower, and now the corner of Mike’s mouth is slowly tugging up, up, up while he stares down at it. When his eyes meet mine, they’re full of mirth that makes me want to drop dead right where I’m standing.
“Sexy as Fuck, huh?”
Dee’s name for him in my phone. God hates me. God really, really hates me.
“Dee did that!” I insist, knowing damn well that my burning cheeks aren’t helping my case. My shitty excuse does nothing to erase the smug amusement from Mike’s face.
“Then why are you freaking out?”
My tongue is in so many knots, I just stand there like an idiot.
“Just admit it, Hailey,” Mike teases as he offers me my phone. “You think I’m hot.”
It nearly drops as I tug it out of his grasp. “Whatever.”
I’m walking away from him, wishing I had drowned in that stupid pond back when I had the chance, when Mike says, “What do you think is hot about me?”
“Why don’t you ask Dee?” I counter, and Mike chuckles as I continue my walk of shame back to his burnt-to-a-crisp eggs. I want to hide in the pantry, or bang my face against a wall, or stick my head in the oven. Instead, I have to keep pretending that I’m not the most mortified I’ve ever been in my entire freaking life.