The Happy List (Better With You, #1)

by Briar Prescott

The country singers that threaten to destroy a cheating boyfriend’s property, cut off the sleeves of his suit, and pour marinara into his laptop case are Cecilia’s guilty pleasure, so I hope one day she can remember me fondly as the man who gave her the chance to live out the fantasy of bashing somebody’s headlights in with a baseball bat.

“Nobody wants to buy my stuff,” I eventually say. “I’ll end up with a boatload of, I don’t even know… chairs that’ll remind me of my failure for years to come. Eventually I’ll start conversing to the chairs because I’m so bitter and lonely, and before you know it, I’ll start treating them as my children, and you’ll start receiving Christmas cards from me and my family of chairs. I’ll die surrounded by my chair children, and you’ll have to transport them all to my funeral and set them up next to the grave, which is both sad and convenient because my human mourners, the few there might be, can sit on my kids.”

I’m also not a huge fan of swimming in general. Mainly because I don’t know how, so the drowning factor takes some of the pleasure out of the activity.

Gray squints his eyes at me, but I just stare back, portraying all the innocence of an angel. And not one of those fallen ones. Nope. I’m pure of soul. No manipulation going on here. I might be going to hell.

eyes. “March has disguised itself as a spring month when in reality, it’s the dying cry of winter.”

The moment February ends, we’re all pumped up with the sweet promise of impending spring, but let’s be honest, March is not spring. At best it’s a shitty preview, and at worst it’s a middle finger from winter. Nobody wins with March. It’s all withered and gray and plain or snowstorms and freezing temperatures you’re not equipped to handle because you’ve already packed away your winter coats.”

but instead of mild March weather we get a trial run of Antarctica.

“Creative writing?” I echo as I follow her to the door. “I watched one of those superhero movies a couple of days ago when I couldn’t sleep, and now I want to start a movie review site to bash it.”

Kai is distracted the whole way home, so he doesn’t seem to notice the unnecessary extra turns I take here and there and the fact that I manage to stretch the usual fifteen-minute car ride to a whopping thirty-three minutes by driving at the pace of a snail and slowing down before every traffic light to give it the opportunity to turn red before I reach it. There are a lot of horns blaring, and by the time I park the car in my spot, I’ve seen enough raised fingers to tide me over for the rest of the year, but I don’t give a fuck. This conversation matters, and I need to be ready for it.