She’s still missing. It’s been a week now. I’ve been checking the news daily for updates, and the tone of the stories is sounding less and less optimistic. By now, if she were able to, she would have contacted somebody. The longer somebody is missing, the less chance there is of them turning up alive and well.
I tried to bring it up last night with Tim, and he changed the subject. I suppose I don’t blame him. He seems uncomfortable talking about his exes—as do I.
Tim opens the door to the house, wearing a T-shirt and jeans. His whole face lights up when he sees me at the door, the way it always does. You would think now that we’ve been dating for over two months, he wouldn’t always look so excited to see me. But he does. It feels like fate that we ended up together after all these years.
“Brooke!” he says. “Get in here… it’s cold!”
He’s right—the temperature has dropped in the last week, and my thin jacket doesn’t seem nearly warm enough. Raker gets a lot colder than Queens.
Once I’m inside the house, Tim helps me out of my coat and then wraps his arms around me to warm me up. I rest my head on his shoulder, feeling a rush of happiness. I never thought I’d have a relationship this good ever again. With every passing day, I’m more and more certain that Tim is The One. And he’s made it no secret that he feels the same way about me.
“Hey,” he says, “how did Josh’s math test go?”
Last night, Josh and Tim spent an hour studying the addition of fractions with different denominators for his test today. I had tried to explain it to Josh the week before, but somehow it didn’t get through. Luckily, Tim is a professional elementary school teacher who taught this very subject.
“He got a hundred,” I say.
“All right!” Tim does a fist pump. “That’s great.”
“I’m glad one of us is good at teaching math to ten-year-olds.”
“Don’t feel bad. You’re cute, at least.”
I laugh and smack Tim in the shoulder. “You know what you’ve done, don’t you? You’re going to have to do this from now on every time Josh has an exam. You are now the designated teacher.”
He smiles at me. “I don’t mind that.”
As I head to the living room, I smell something tantalizing coming from the kitchen. It’s not as good as Margie’s kitchen aromas, but it smells pretty damn good. I inhale deeply as I settle down onto his sofa. “What are you cooking for me?”
Tim sits beside me on the sofa. “Guess.”
I take another sniff. “I smell tomato sauce.”
“Ding ding ding.”
I remember the one other night I came over, Tim cooked spaghetti and meatballs. “Spaghetti and meatballs?”
He makes a face at me. “Should I be offended that the fact that you smell tomato sauce makes you assume I must have made spaghetti and meatballs? I am capable of making other things, you know.”
“Well, what is it then?”
“It’s spaghetti and meatballs,” he says, a touch defensively. “But it could’ve been something else. It could’ve been lasagna. Chicken parmigiana. Just saying…”
I lean in to kiss him. “I love spaghetti and meatballs.”
He kisses me back, pulling my body close to his. Is this the way he kissed Kelli Underwood? She certainly seemed to think he was a good kisser.
No, stop it. Why am I thinking about that?
“I love you, Brooke,” he murmurs in my ear.
Since the first night he said it to me, we have opened up the floodgates. He loves telling me he loves me. And I can’t say I don’t love being loved. “I love you too.”