Page 29 of While the Sun Shines
Whit smacks Cooper’s hands apart. “She’ll absolutely murder you,” Whit says. “And Pen, as your aforementioned gallant prom date, I honestly would probably help.”
Penny just closes her eyes. “You’re the one dating him.”
Abelardo just laughs. And Drew slumps in his seat. Right. Well. The innuendo of Cooper’s gesture, the clearly unspoken fact that Penny slept with Travis…it’s not like Drew didn’t know. Or couldn’t have guessed at least. Who else around here is there? Besides those odd, occasional weekends Penny drives down to Manhattan with her friends and sisters, and Drew listens to the emptiness of the house around himself.
Penny tosses her hair back. “Travis is super into talking about the stock market and is boring as fuck, and I have been dodging him for ages after a single, truly horrible mistake of a night. It’s not easy with his mom living next door, though.”
She won’t be for long, Drew opens his mouth to say, but Penny’s still talking, waving her beer bottle through the air.
“Plus, he cares so much about his damn clothes, it’s actually kind of weird. It’d be nice to come first, for once.”
“He does have some nice threads,” Cooper says.
“I mean, literally, come first,” Penny says and takes a drink.
Literal—oh. Fuck you, Travis, Drew thinks.
“You tell ’em, Pen.” Abelardo clinks his bottle against Penny’s.
That’s—it’s so much. Too much. Drew shoves his chair back.
Travis and Penny. Which Cooper clearly knew about and that means Whit did too. When it was, how it happened—Drew can only guess and he doesn’t want to know.
No, not with Abelardo here now, rubbing a broad palm over Penny’s back as she laughs and groans. They’ll be going upstairs together tonight, Drew’s sure.
The cheese room, he thinks, but who knows what else he’d hear in the time it takes to get his shoes on.
“Give me a shout when dinner’s ready, yeah? I’m gonna go get some work done,” he says, already jogging up the stairs.
Whit’s room is stacked with pieces of trim that still need to be nailed in place around the windows, electrical boxes hanging empty and waiting for their sockets and light switches, and buckets of paint that have probably separated, after Drew so idealistically bought them over the winter.
Sanding, he tells himself when really, he just wants to yank the door shut at the sight.
But what then, go back downstairs? Watch Abelardo and Penny laugh? Have to sit there and be polite, keeping a strained smile on his face? Get to know Abelardo? Who is, apparently, nice and kind and fucking offering his help. If only he’d be an asshole, Drew could go ahead and hate him.
Drew kicks a piece of sandpaper and sends it skittering across the floor. Snap out of it, he tells himself. Be happy for Penny that she has a friend here—and maybe really has found someone who will turn into something more. Move the fuck on, like he should’ve done years ago, not let himself wallow in the habit of longing for her.
The door swings open. “That’s not working,” Penny says.
“I am, I am,” he mutters. Quickly, he grabs for the piece of sandpaper, refusing to look where Penny lounges against the doorjamb, sipping from her beer bottle.
“You sure ducked out of there quick.”
“I’m sorry. I know this is really driving you nuts that this room isn’t done. I’m getting it finished.”
“At this point, you constantly apologizing is driving me just as nuts. Here, you left yours downstairs.” She holds out her own beer and he takes it, sipping from where her mouth had just pressed.
How embarrassing, to be caught up on details like that. To care how close to him she stands, how their fingers brush when she takes her beer back, and that she doesn’t wipe the bottle off when she takes a drink.
He rubs the sandpaper over a ridge of dried spackle as she perches on a paint can, her beer resting on her knee. “What’s going on?” she asks.
“Nothing.”
“Sure,” she says.
He rubs harder at the wall. “Abelardo seems cool.”
There. Casual. Friendly.
