“Correct your shitastic opinions of yourself.”
“They’re not opinions. They’re facts. Ask my brother.”
Sid opened his mouth, but Dante’s stricken expression silenced whatever he’d planned to say. Instead, he rubbed Dante’s newly tanned forearm and jerked his head at the front door. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s eat.”
He didn’t wait for Dante to answer. With the furnace in his nerves quieted by the joint he’d smoked, he took advantage of his steady legs and slipped inside to face the bread dough he’d abandoned when it was still daylight.
It washuge, with air bubbles bursting from the top.
Sid laughed as Dante came up behind him.
“What’s so funny?”
Sid pointed at the bread. “That’s, like, three times as big as it should be. I forgot about it.”
Dante frowned. “What is it?”
“Bread.”
“You made bread?”
“No. Rhonda made bread. All I had to do was leave it half an hour before sticking it in the oven, and I forgot.”
“Because you fell asleep on the porch?”
“I wasn’t asleep.”
“Okay.” Dante stepped around Sid, his socked feet silent on the tiled floor, and peered at the bulging bread dough. “What are you going to do with it now then?”
“Bake it anyway and hope for the best. You want some soup while we wait?”
Dante shrugged. “I don’t mind.”
“Did you eat already?”
“No.”
“Then I mind you going hungry.”
Sid threw the bread in the oven, then lit the burner beneath the soup pan and set it to a low simmer to heat. He felt Dante’s gaze on him the whole time but kept his own to himself while he toasted pumpkin seeds in a dry pan and found the olive oil in the wrong cupboard as if a stranger had put it away.It wasn’t a stranger. It was you.“Tell me something I don’t know,” Sid muttered.
“What?”
Sid glanced up to meet Dante’s frown. “Sorry. I was grouching at myself.”
“For what?”
“For putting things in the wrong places. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and think I’ve been burgled.”
“You don’t have that problem in the tool shed.”
“No. But I have limited resources in my fucked-up brain, so by the time I get home I’m a walking—or limping—master of disaster.”
Dante watched Sid tip the toasted seeds into a cup, lips pursed, keeping whatever he wanted to say locked up tight.
Sid scowled and banged two chipped soup bowls onto the counter. “You don’t have to do that around me.”
Dante raised a brow. “Do what?”