Page 45 of Smoke and Roses

“Because you’re pale and your hands are cold.”

He makes me grilled cheese in his one frying pan. The first one burns. He fans the smoke out the window with a dish towel and says, “Damn it,” under his breath, dead serious.

The second one is perfect. He cuts it in triangles. Wearing that serious expression, the Ranger heats a can of tomato soup in his one pot, brings it over and sits on the coffee table in front of me.

“I’m not hungry,” I tell him.

“Three bites.”

My appetite returns and I finish it all. When I’m done, he takes the plate and comes back with a mug of chamomile tea.

I stare at it, seriously confused. “I never figured you’d drink tea.”

“Bought it last week.”

“Why?”

He shrugs one shoulder. “You get up and make it at night when you can’t sleep. You think I’m asleep.”

Heavens. This man is so attentive. “Who the hell are you?”

“Your tenant.”

I laugh. Then I set the tea on the floor and pick up the diary.

“I want to read it again,” I say. “From the beginning. All of it.”

“Okay.”

“Will you stay?”

He gives me a look. “Honey. It’s my couch.”

Big and silent, my tenant sits down at the other end of it and pulls my feet into his lap, and wraps one warm hand around my ankle.

For a moment, I can’t open the diary, I’m too caught up in how it feels to be here with him.

“You okay?” he asks, gaze locked on mine.

“Better.”

I open the purple cover. On the inside, in silver gel pen, in letters I somehow missed at Carol’s, she wrote: PROPERTY OF DANIELLE HAYES. KEEP OUT. THIS MEANS YOU, LINDS.

Chapter Fifteen

“ ‘May 14,’ ” Lindsey reads. “ ‘Linds wants to stay. I don’t blame her. I’d stay too if I could.’ ”

She turns the page. It’s blank. So is the next one.

“That’s the last one,” she says quietly, staring at the empty paper.

She’s read me every page.

“I still can’t believe this is happening,” she says with a heavy sigh as she closes the purple cover and lays her head back on the arm of my couch.

By 2130 she’s asleep and I sit there with her feet in my lap, looking at my little apartment. It’s bare. A couch. A table. A bed I don’t sleep in anymore. Boxes I haven’t unpacked from Colorado because I didn’t think I’d stay long enough to need what’s in them.

On the windowsill there’s a mason jar of yellow roses. She brought them up three days ago. Lindsey thought my apartment looked like a prison cell and she couldn’t stand it.