Page 8 of Unwrapped

“Can we not do this again?”

He sighs.

“Look, I’ll wait until the roads are cleared, and if it’s still bad this afternoon, I won’t go. Deal?”

He considers for a moment. “Deal. But you take the Range Rover.”

“Wow. It’s almost like that was my suggestion.”

He ignores me, and I walk over to the island, where my backpack is sitting on one of the stools, pulling out the blue spiral notebook I use for pretty much everything. I flip to a blank page.

“Okay, shoot. What do we need?”

“Chicken breasts, potatoes, broccoli. We’re out of milk, too.”

I write everything down, drawing a little box beside each item.

“Eggs?” I ask.

“Probably.”

“Bread?”

“Yeah. Whatever you want for breakfast, too.”

I add eggs, bread, yogurt, bananas, and coffee creamer. Then I draw a line under the list and write CHOCOLATE in capital letters.

Vince leans over to look. “Chocolate?”

“Yes. Anything else?”

“No, that should do it.”

I cap my pen and close the notebook. “I’ll go this afternoon,” I tell him. “Once the roads are better.”

“Thanks, Soph.”

“No problem.”

“Oh, by the way . . . I’m going out tomorrow night with a friend.”

With a friend. It’s the way he says it. I know immediately it’s a woman, and that shouldn’t bother me at all.

But it does.

I want to ask, what does she look like? because suddenly that seems important. But instead I say, “Cool. Anyone I know?”

“Nope,” he says, and that’s it. Nothing more.

“Okay,” I say. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

He smiles and heads back to his office, closing the door behind him.

I have a whole day with nothing to do. I should probably text my friends or do some laundry, but lying on my bed scrolling through my phone sounds considerably more appealing.

I’m halfway through probably my four-hundredth consecutive video of dogs getting up to antics when my phone buzzes with a text. It’s Tyler.

I dated Tyler Bowman for the last six months of senior year. When I got accepted to university out of town, we never once discussed what that meant to us. We talked on the phone a bit at first when I moved away, but then that kind of petered out. He tried to get me to have phone sex with him, which I felt was a bit of a stretch since we never had actual sex, and then we just kind of . . . drifted apart.