Page 110 of None Of Your Business

“Name one.”

“I invited you into my house.”

I flip him off with one hand and dig my fork into a piece of pancake with the other.

Goddammit.

Still good.

The last time I was here, we threw paint on a wall. The time before that, I woke up wearing one of his T-shirts, with no idea whose bed I’d climbed into.

Tonight is considerably less traumatic.

I abandon the fork and hop off the stool.

Hudson looks over. “Where are you going?”

“Exploring.” I start toward the living room. “You have a beautiful house, and I’ve only seen the kitchen and bedroom. That feels like an incomplete data set.”

He leans a hip against the counter. “That’s an interesting use of my own terminology against me.”

“I learn from the best.”

“You were terrible data.”

I grin and keep walking.

His living room is very Hudson. Books that have been read instead of arranged for decoration. A couch big enough to sleep on. Plants near the windows that I’m convinced are fake because nobody has plants that look that good.

A row of framed photographs sits on the lowest shelf. I crouch to look at them properly.

A much younger Hudson stands on a beach with another boy beside him. They share the same dark hair, but the boy is leaner, grinning at the camera with one arm draped over Hudson’s shoulders.

Ethan.

My chest aches looking at it. Not just for what happened to him. For how alive he looks in this one frozen second, like nothing in the world could touch him.

“You found him.” Hudson’s voice comes from behind me.

I turn to see him leaning in the doorway, dish towel thrown over one shoulder.

“He’s handsome,” I say.

“You wouldn’t be the first woman to think that.”

“He looks like fun.”

“He was.”

He pushes off the doorframe and crosses the room to stand behind me.

I feel his heat at my back as he reaches over my shoulder and gently takes the frame from my hands.

“We were at my grandparents’ place,” he says. “I was nineteen, so Ethan would have been seventeen. He’d just gotten his license three weeks earlier and drove us the whole way there without telling our parents. Our father had told him not to take the car on the highway yet.” He huffs a quiet laugh, eyes still on the photo. “Ethan said those rules didn’t apply when I was in the car with him. He spent the whole first day telling anyone who’d listen that he’d driven ninety miles on the interstate like it was a moon landing.”

He’s not really talking to me anymore. He’s somewhere back on that beach.

I don’t say a word. I think this might be the first time in a long while that he’s told it and felt something other than the ending attached to it.