Matt chuckled. “I think it has that effect on everyone sooner or later.”
“Yeah. But I think I’m done with places like LA. Anyway.” She gestured at the porch. “Come on in.”
He followed her up the steps and into the house, and with one look around, he understood what she meant by the interior being a little too cutesy. There wasn’t a single wall in sight that was plain white. The kitchen was bright yellow, and what he could see of the dining room was wallpapered with some country pattern that teenage Dara would’ve been tempted to vandalize with little Sharpie demons and devils.
She started toward what appeared to be the living room—it was hard to tell with a sea of boxes around the couch and coffee table—but paused. “Do you want something to drink? I, uh, don’t have any beer or anything, but…”
“It’s okay. I don’t really drink anymore anyway. Coffee would be great, though.”
She took him into the kitchen, which was mostly moved in, aside from a couple of boxes. He didn’t miss those days—it must’ve taken him three months to get all the boxes and packing material out of his house. How he’d ever fit that much crap into his penthouse condo, he’d never know.
As she poured them each a cup of coffee, she asked, “So what made you stop drinking?”
“Side effect of working myself so far into the ground.”
“How so?”
“Because of the stress, I started getting really bad migraines, and I still get them at the drop of a hat now. Alcohol makes it worse, so, it had to go.” He scowled. “Unfortunately.”
“Oh right. You mentioned that when we had dinner with your…” She waved her hand and then handed him a cup of coffee. Black, of course, which was how she apparently took hers now too. “Anyway, I feel ya. I’m going through a dry divorce.”
“A dry divorce? Is that a thing now?”
“Yeah.” She smirked. “It’s a thing where I want to drink myself senseless because of all the bullshit, but I can’t because…” She gestured at her stomach.
“Ouch.”
“Tell me about it.”
He eyed the cup in her hand. “Are you supposed to be drinking caffeine?”
“In moderation.” She sipped it carefully. “Hey, if this kid’s going to make me worship the porcelain god more than I did in college, then he’s going to put up with a little bit of caffeine now and then.”
Matt cocked his head. “He?”
“Or she. I don’t know. I just felt weird calling him ‘it’.”
“Somehow I don’t think it’ll mind at this point.”
“No, but ‘it’ makes him seem more like some sort of parasite or something, and I don’t want that image in my head once I can feel him moving around.” She shrugged. “Or maybe I’ve just watched Alien too many times.”
Matt laughed. “Knowing you, that’s probably it.”
“Yeah, probably.”
Their eyes met, and though they both laughed, it took some effort on his part and sounded like it did on hers too. Then they broke eye contact, and he sipped his coffee while he searched for something to say.
Dara cleared her throat. “Why are we standing around the kitchen? Come on. Let’s go sit in the living room.”
He nodded and followed her into the living room, where they took seats on her sofa. He guessed this was where they’d start unpacking today. It would be his first choice, anyway—nothing made a house feel more like home than a living room where a person could actually relax without being reminded of all the work still left to be done.
But before they started cutting open boxes and breaking a sweat, they needed to do something about this lingering silence.
“So, um.” He muffled a cough. “About our conversation. Last night.”
Dara’s cheeks colored. She stared into her coffee cup. “Yeah. I wanted to talk about that too.” All that playful confidence she’d had last night had vanished. Was this what some of their classmates had felt the morning after prom? Like what had made sense in the dark was a mistake in the sun?
“What do you think?” he asked quietly.
“I’m…” She sighed. “I keep going back and forth. I really do want to show you what it’s like, but I don’t want to make things weird between us, you know? We’ve just gotten back in contact. There’s the baby to contend with. I don’t want to put us back where we we’ve been for the last ten years.”
“There’s no going back to that,” he said.
“No, but we can make things weird in a hurry if we don’t play our cards right.”