Over the next week, that didn’t stop me from enlisting Amie’s help with the rest of Sully’s meals. Monster Brains (clam chowder, with biscuits), Putrid Pot Pie (turkey and sweet corn—Amie didn’t like the corn.) Seasick Stew, which, according to Amie was meant to look like vomit. Thankfully, it looked more like another chicken casserole, but Sully still laughed.
My two or three hour-long visits to his place in the evening were becoming less and less stressful and more enjoyable with each passing day. Miracle upon miracle, the edge wore off Sully. It was an interesting thing to watch. He flirted like a fiend, and he was still sharp as a whip with his comebacks, but the hostility was gone. He would text me once or twice a day, and surprisingly I would rarely want to kill him because of the contents. Rarely. There were still times when he sent something so barbaric and over-the-line that I considered telling him to go screw himself, but for the most part he was behaving himself.
On Friday, seven days after he came home from the medical center, I let myself into the lighthouse, and Sully handed me a mug of coffee. “Big and black, just how you like it,” he said, grinning.
“That doesn’t even make sense,” I told him, taking the coffee and drinking deep.
Sully smirked, shoving his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “Doesn’t it? I’ll let you think about that for a while. What terrible creation have we brought over with us today, then?” he asked, waggling his eyebrows at the box I had set down on the coffee table.
“Why don’t you come see?” I picked it back up again and went into the kitchen, searching for plates. Sully hobbled after me, still bracing himself, doing his best to minimize the pain from his ribs, which was still constant and grating.
“Damn it, woman. I’ve already had my workout for the day. I don’t need to chase you around the entire house, y’know.”
“You call showering and getting dressed a workout?”
“I do. And wiping my own ass. Do you have any idea how painful it is to twist and wipe right now?” He demonstrated for good measure, twisting his torso, and then yelped when his ribcage pinched.
“Serves you right.”
“Just open the damn food, Lang,” he grumbled, holding his hand to his chest, as if that would stop the pain.
I opened up the Tupperware and showed him what Amie and I had made just before I left the house. “This is her favorite meal,” I told him. “She said she wanted to make it for you so that you’d finally get better. I explained that broken ribs took a little longer to mend than a week, but she seemed fairly convinced this was going to do the trick.”
Sully considered the meal: pancakes, drowning in maple syrup. Chicken and apple sausages. Eggs, over easy, still hot from the frying pan. He sighed, leaning back against the kitchen counter. “Our mom used to make this for me and Ronan nearly every day whenever we were on vacation,” he said quietly. “She called it the sunshine scramble.”
I bit my lip, not sure if I should say anything. What the hell, though. It couldn’t hurt to tell him the truth. “Amie calls it that, too. Ronan used to make it for her.”
Sully stared at the food some more, shifting and twitching like he was extremely uncomfortable.
“Well. Fuck.” He ran his hand back through his hair, and left it there at the base of his neck, his lips pressed into a tight white line.
“Let’s just eat, Sully. It doesn’t have to be a thing.”
“No. You’re right. It doesn’t.” He still looked like he’d had the wind knocked out of him, though. We sat and ate in silence. When we were done, Sully did something that surprised the hell out of me. He stood up, and then he reached out and took me by the hand, making me stand up, too. I thought he was going to escort me out of the house or something—he’d been broody and silent ever since I’d shown him the food—but instead he raised his right hand and he brushed my hair back behind my ear, giving me a complicated smile.
“I’ve never kissed a girl for the first time without being drunk, y’know?” he said.
“What? You’re not about to, either.” I tried to step back, embarrassed, too shocked to even believe for a second that he was being serious. He slipped an arm around my waist and stopped me, though.
“God, Lang. Not much in my life is easy. Just getting out of bed at the moment is a goddamn uphill struggle. Breathing is far more taxing than it should be most days. Don’t go making this difficult, too.” He smiled his reckless smile, dimples locked and loaded, ready to kill, and my chest squeezed tightly. He was being perfectly serious, and I had no idea how to react. I just kind of froze, alarmed and unarmed, caught completely off guard.
“I—”
“You don’t want me to kiss you?”