"I remember."
"Why did you hate it so much? I mean, I could see where you wouldn't love it. But it seemed like it almost made you mad or something."
He was quiet for several long moments. "You want the truth?" he finally said. "I wasn't mad. I was jealous."
I stopped walking. "Jealous? Why?"
"Maybe it was all the candy." His tone grew teasing. "And wasn't there ice cream, too?"
Therehadbeen ice cream, not at the candy store itself. But in my fictional world, the parents had been stupidly fond of taking the family out for ice cream.
In hindsight, I guess itwaspretty ridiculous. Still, I teased, "What do you have against ice cream?"
"Nothing," he said. "Maybe I was hungry. And you had it all."
"Oh stop it," I laughed. "Youknowit wasn't real, don't you? I mean, look atyourpaper. Yours had an alien eating the world. I knewthatwasn't real, so you had to know that mine wasn't real, too. Right?"
He gave my hand a tender squeeze. "I knownow."
And something in his voice made me wonder if there was more to what he was saying. But I didn't ask – just like I didn't ask a lot of things as the house moved ever closer to completion.
Chapter 46
Arden
"So," Cami said, "is he going to let you buy it?"
She meant the house, of course.
The question was a dark cloud over my otherwise happy mood. "I don't know," I said. "We never talk about it."
It was almost seven o'clock at night, and I was hunkered down in my bedroom talking to Cami on my cell phone while Brody was away, meeting with his brothers on some company business.
Cami said, "But why wouldn't you talk about it?"
"It just seems wrong. That's all."
"Why?" she laughed. "Because you're donking him?"
I didn't see the humor. "Yeah. I guess."
"So?" she said.
I sighed. "So I don't want him to think that I'm 'donking' him for all the wrong reasons, like to get him to sell me the house or something."
"Oh, please," she said. "He'd never think that."
"But how can you be sure?" I asked.
"Because no one would. You're not the type."
I frowned. "And what type is that?"
"Oh, you know," she said. "The type to ho yourself out for a beach house, or cripes, even rent money."
She was right.
I wasn't the type.And yet, her words served as yet another reminder that in spite of everything, Istillwanted the house. And Brody still wasn't giving it up – at least not that I knew of.
