This must be a mind game, but as a self-titled authority on ice cream, I can’t not answer.
“Are you kidding? Rocky Road is gross. Who wants nuts in their ice cream?”
He reaches in and grabs the Rocky Road, plops it in his cart, and turns his back to me. He’s already halfway through the frozen pizzas by the time I realize he’s blown me off.
Out of spite, I reach in for the mint chocolate chip.
I catch up to him in front of the milk. He wants 2% and so do I. He reaches in for a gallon and holds it up for my inspection. I nod and he puts it in my cart.
“Thanks.”
His gaze falls over my cart as he heads toward the yogurt. “Did you leave any zucchini for anyone else?”
“Ha! I knew you would bring up the zucchini!”
I sound disproportionately pleased about this, like I’m an interrogating detective and my perp just confessed.
“I’m just curious about what you—or anyone—could possibly do with that much. It’s filling up a quarter of your cart.”
I hadn’t thought that far ahead.
“Bread,” I declare proudly, like a toddler that knows twelve words.
“Zucchini bread?”
He sounds like he doesn’t believe it’s a thing. By some miracle, it is.
“It’s delicious. Like banana bread, but better.”
He nods. “I’ll take your word for it. Yogurt?”
“Greek.”
“Same. Here, try strawberry-on-bottom. It’s my favorite.”
I don’t protest because it’s my favorite too. There are a few one-dollar-off coupons dangling from the shelf and I grab them all for myself, trying to provoke him out of this bizarre calm. Infuriatingly, he only smiles and heads toward the front.
“Are you done shopping?” he asks, casually plucking a tube of Crest off an endcap.
I nod, mute.
We walk in silence toward the checkout lines. There’s no one ahead of us, so we finish up at the same time. Seeing my cast, the teenaged bagger offers to help load up my car, but I decline. It’s a slippery slope into old-ladydom, and I won’t be taking my first step at 28.
Lucas isn’t so easy to brush off. “It’s going to take you an hour to load all those bags one-handed.”
It’s like we’re right back at work—me at the mercy of my rival—but while I don’t have the choice to refuse his help from 9-5, I do now.
“I’m okay. Really.”
“Right, then you won’t mind if I help.”
My more dramatic brain cells tell me he just wants to get me alone in the back of the parking lot, stuff me into the trunk when no one’s watching. In reality, he unloads the bags into my mom’s car swiftly and then steps back, hands in the air like he’s under arrest.
“That wasn’t so bad, right?”
God, he’s cute in the hazy light from the parking lot, almost boyish in his baseball hat.
“Torture,” I muse.
He shakes his head and drops his gaze, smiling at the pavement a few feet in front of me. It’s almost like he enjoys my cheekiness. I guess he would. After all this time, he has to enjoy our fighting as much as I do. Anyone else would have walked away a long time ago.
He starts to back away, over to where he’s parked his cart by his truck. “For the record, you’re the one who came up to me in there.”
“What?”
“I know most women don’t enjoy bumping into people when they’re out in their sweats. I was trying to do the polite thing—pretending not to see you.”
“I thought you were trying to psych me out.”
He laughs and turns, throwing his last few words over his shoulder. “Right, yeah. I guess it doesn’t matter. I think you look pretty cute like that.”
He means in my sweats and no-makeup state. I’m actually taken aback; even my dramatic brain cells think he sounds genuine. I’m left staring out after him, trying to decipher the last thirty minutes in my mind. It’s only during my drive home that I catch sight of myself in the rearview mirror and scream. No. No. Dear god no. I forgot I was wearing stupid under-eye masks my mom wanted me to try. They’ve been stuck to my cheeks for the last hour. I look absolutely insane, like an over-moisturized raccoon.
That’s why Lucas was giving me space. He was trying to save me from the embarrassment.
My mom assures me it’s not as bad as it seems.
“On the plus side, your skin looks really great now.”
I groan and stuff the carton of milk in the fridge.
“Also, Daisy…what the hell are we going to do with all this zucchini?”
Chapter Seven
A lot of people used to wonder if my friendship with Madeleine was purely strategic, as if she existed only to be my eyes and ears behind enemy lines. Though I was sometimes tempted to use her as a spy, my love for Madeleine had nothing to do with the intel she provided me on her brother. Living next door to her for nearly two decades, she became the little sister I never had.
Madeleine was everything Lucas wasn’t: friendly, decent, human. She was two years behind us in school, but I often forgot. She was wise beyond her years, and though I’d tried many times to turn her against her brother, she never picked sides. He’s really nice to me, she said as I tried to enlist her help in procuring a voodoo doll. Don’t be so hard on him, she insisted after I dreamt up a diabolical plan to get him deported.
After moving away from Hamilton for college, I weighed the pros and cons of continuing my friendship with Madeleine. She was indisputably my dearest and closest friend, but she was also my last remaining connection to Lucas—something I refused to hold against her.