I wonder if she ever thought that about cars.

“So you’re into all this stuff now?” I ask, shutting the laptop screen to aide my bleeding eyes.

We turn to each other from our seats at the kitchen table. She shrugs. “Not really. I just do it when I’m bored. I thought you were into it!”

“What?”

“Yeah. You were asking all these questions and telling me to google stuff,” she says.

“I was just trying to sound interested, Ry. Like you did with my car stuff.”

“What?” she says.

“Huh?”

“Did we just waste…” she looks at the clock on the wall. “… six hours!”

I laugh. “I was trying to be nice!”

She stands quickly and stomps her foot. “You know what we could’ve been doing in those six hours?”

I get up, grab our mugs off the table and put them in the new dishwasher. “What would you rather be doing?” I ask, leaning back on the counter and facing her.

“Anything.”

“Anything?”

“D. Seriously. I’ve puked stuff better than some of the prints on those boards. I’d rather wallpaper the house with Bacon. The dog and the food.”

I laugh, my hands finding her waist before pulling her between my legs. “You know what I love most about you, Riley?”

She smiles “What?”

“Everything. You’re so damn perfect.”

Sighing, she says, “I’m far from perfect, Dylan.”

“You’re perfect for me.”

“Then that’s all that matters.”

Riley

I’d love to say that we made the most of the two weeks he was back. We spent most of the time at home, in the bedroom or garage, keeping to ourselves. We did make an effort to see our friends and family, but mostly, we just wanted to be together. Alone. We drove, a lot, and we talked. He told me about what he’d done, leaving out details I’m sure would be too much for me to handle. And he told me about Dave—about the shenanigans they’d get up to. He did mention that Dave had changed a little while he’d been gone on medical leave. Most likely because he wasn’t as close to any of the other guys as he had been with him. It makes sense, I told him. It would be lonely out there and without the presence of your best friend, it would be hard. I knew that first hand.

I told him about the brownie incident with the girls and how Heidi and I had gotten closer that night. He gave me a weird look that had me asking what he was thinking. “You guys didn’t like… compare notes or anything?” I gagged a little, and then smacked his gut. He laughed. “I was just making sure,” he told me. He may have found it funny. I didn’t. In fact, I was pretty upset over it. I think maybe because the thought of him being with someone else, as long as and as often (puke) as him and Heidi… I can’t even finish that thought. He knew how unsettled it made me feel—which, honestly wasn’t hard to work out considering I didn’t bother hiding it. He held me in his arms, and told me he loved me, and only me, and that I was being dumb. I waited until he was in the shower on his own and threw a bucket of cold water at him, followed by glitter. Because glitter solves everything. It sure as hell solved my bad mood.

He paid me back though, of course. Because the first rule of Mayhem is retaliation. He asked me to go out and get him something from the hardware store to fix our jammed windows. Want to know what it’s like to walk into a hardware store and ask for a tube of Slip Airy Deep Sock-It? Trust me, you don’t. I repeated it for the fifth time, my eyes moving to the note in my hand and back up at the three guys with confused faces staring back at me. Then it clicked for the youngest one. He repeated it over and over again. He even announced through the store speakers, “Rodney, please come to the front desk. We have a Slip Airy Deep Sock-It enquiry.” They all seemed to be in on some kind of private joke as they typed on their computers, repeating the word over and over again, smirking and chuckling to themselves. It wasn’t until the hundredth or so repeat of the product’s name that it finally dawned on me.

Yeah.

I’m slow.

Slip Airy Deep Sock-It = Slippery Deep Socket = Wet vagina.

I kicked his ass when I got home.

He didn’t stop laughing.

Not until he had my pre-flailing arms held behind my back, my chest sticking out in front of me. “We even now?” he asked, smiling down at me.

I called a truce. I had to.

Hey, don’t judge. You’ve never been captured in the arms of Dylan Banks while his perfectly blue eyes looked down at you like he was ready to devour you. And devour me, he did.

*     *     *

Time is an asshole, I’ve decided.

The ticking and the consistency of it.

Because as much as I wanted it to slow down, it doesn’t. In fact, the harder I wished, the faster it went. Until we’re back here, standing hand in hand saying goodbye to each other. Only now we’re at the airport. “I’m going to miss you, Banks.”

“I’ll miss you more, Hudson,” he says, stepping forward and wrapping his arms around my waist. He lifts me off the ground, kissing me as he does. When he places me back on earth, he pulls away. “I’ll be back before you know it, Ry.”

“Promise?”

He nods.

I nod.

He kisses me once more.

And then he’s gone.