“No thanks.” His response was fast and his eyes on the task at hand. “This might take me a while, since I’m clearly doing it myself.”

I stepped away from Troy’s hold, feeling unmotivated for a movie suddenly. “I don’t know if I should be watching either. I need to detail my sketches before Monday.”

“Well, it’s still early. Why don’t you work on that while the boys work next door and we’ll start the movie in about an hour?”

I nodded.

“Fine. Let’s do this.” Troy sighed and followed August out into the rain.

August hadn’t joined us for the movie. He’d walked in a few times, his eyes brushing past Troy and me sitting side by side on one end of the sofa, while his parents were on the other. Though Grace kept running to the kitchen during the freakier parts of the movie—which was most of it. Needless to say, a movie with my ex-boyfriend and his scary father was not the least bit enjoyable.

It was close to eleven when I settled back into the bed of the guest room downstairs. Everyone else had gone up, except for August, who seemed to be in and out of the house. He was clearly still working on something.

And if I were honest, being alone with him was frightening me more than any Halloween movie, so I didn’t step out of the room.

Choosing to focus on my sketches, I sat up against the headboard in the pumpkin spice scented guest room, where the sheets were floral and the décor in the room was perfectly mismatched. It had been a while since anything felt homey to me. This was as close as it got in almost two years.

After my mother’s illness took a turn for the worse, there was a dark cloud over our house and it didn’t feel much like a home anymore.

I started outlining the fan signs and detailing the words that I’d scribbled before. Number nineteen’s face was turned away from the frame and toward the audience holding up the cheer signs. I shaded in the number on the back of his jersey and jumped when there was a knock on my door, which was slightly ajar.

August.

He was in the same clothes and his eyeglasses still on, but they had streaks of water marks on them and his hair was wet from the rain.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you, I just thought…” he glanced down at my sketch pad and walked in.

I moved off the bed and stood. My jeans were off and Troy’s t-shirt hung to the top of my bare thighs.