Helping Kev unload the truck took longer than Lip expected, which probably should not have surprised him.
It was not the work itself. The boxes were heavy but manageable, and after the first few trips his body fell into the rhythm of it easily enough. Lift, carry, set down, turn back, repeat. The problem was Kev talked like silence physically pained him, and once he got started he could stretch a five-minute job into forty without even noticing.
By the time they were halfway through the truck, Kev had already complained about a supplier, told a long story about a guy who tried to pay for beer with Canadian coins, and circled back twice to something Veronica had said that morning which he was apparently still trying to prove wrong in his head.
Lip hauled another box down from the tailgate and dropped it beside the back door of the Alibi.
"You always get deliveries this damn early?" he asked.
Kev grunted as he dragged a crate across the concrete. "Only when the people bringing 'em hate me."
Lip glanced toward the front of the bar. "Thought that was everybody."
"That too."
Kev laughed at his own answer and shoved open the back door with his shoulder. Lip followed him inside, weaving around stacked cases and a broken barstool shoved against the wall like somebody had meant to fix it three years ago.
The Alibi smelled like beer soaked into wood and bleach that never fully covered it. Familiar in the same way everything else had been since he woke up—like he was stepping back into a place he had known for years, only now he was inside it instead of watching from the outside.
Kev set down his crate and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, even though it was still cold enough outside for their breath to show.
"So," he said, the word already carrying the tone of a subject change, "Mandy still hanging around you all the time?"
Lip grabbed another box before answering, mostly to keep his hands busy.
"She hangs around. I hang around."
Kev made a face. "That your version of an explanation?"
"It's enough of one."
They went back for more boxes. Kev walked backward up the truck ramp with one balanced against his chest like he had done this a thousand times and never once considered using proper lifting form. Lip followed, catching the edge of the next carton with both hands.
Kev shot him a sideways look. "Man, that girl looks at you like you hung the moon."
Lip snorted and stepped down off the truck. "Relax. She knows what it is."
Kev did not answer right away, and that silence said more than anything else would have. When Lip looked over, Kev only raised an eyebrow and kept moving.
It was the kind of look people gave when they thought you were missing something obvious.
Which, to be fair, Lip had been.
Not him exactly. The other him. The original him. The one who managed to have a girl like Mandy Milkovich sitting right in front of him and still acted like she was background noise.
He set the box down a little harder than he meant to.
Kev noticed. Of course he did.
"You going over there tonight?" Kev asked.
Lip straightened. "Probably."
That got a grin out of Kev. "Figured."
Lip shook his head and reached for another crate. "You got a real unhealthy interest in my business."
"I got healthy interest in neighborhood entertainment."
"Get a hobby."
"This is my hobby."
They worked in silence for a minute after that, if it counted as silence when Kev kept humming under his breath and muttering at a torn label on one of the boxes. Lip was grateful for it anyway.
The strange thing was that he did not mind the work. There was something steadying about it. Simple enough that he did not need to overthink every movement, but physical enough to keep his brain from spiraling too far ahead. Since waking up in Lip's body, every quiet second had opened the door for too many thoughts at once. Timeline. Future knowledge. The Gallagher house. School. Frank. Fiona. Karen. Mandy.
Especially Mandy.
He knew enough already to understand that changing nothing would be its own kind of choice. It would be easy, in a twisted way, to just slide into the role exactly as it had been. Say what Lip said. Do what Lip did. Keep things casual until casual turned mean and then act surprised when it all went bad.
But standing there with his hands raw from cardboard and dust sticking to his sleeves, he could already feel how stupid that would be.
Kev nudged the last crate toward him with his boot. "That should be it."
Lip picked it up. "Finally."
"What, you got somewhere to be?"
He shot him a flat look. Kev only laughed harder.
By the time they finished stacking everything inside, the sky had darkened into that murky Chicago evening gray that made every house on the block look more tired than it already did. Kev disappeared around front to deal with something inside the bar, and Lip ended up leaning for a second against the back wall, rolling the stiffness out of one shoulder.
The neighborhood noise carried easily out there. Cars passing. Somebody shouting down the block. A dog barking at nothing. A siren somewhere farther off, far enough away that nobody nearby would stop what they were doing for it.
Normal.
That was maybe the strangest part of all this. How quickly impossible things got shoved aside by routine. He had woken up in another person's life and by evening he was unloading beer with Kev like it had always been on the schedule.
When he finally started walking, he kept his hands in his pockets and took the long way without really meaning to. The South Side at dusk looked exactly how he remembered from the show and a little rougher now that he could actually smell it. Fried food drifting out of somebody's kitchen window. Cigarette smoke. Damp pavement. Cheap weed. Kids still out in the street because nobody was making them come in yet.
Two houses down, somebody had dragged a basketball hoop into the driveway and a few kids were playing under a streetlight that buzzed every few seconds. Music blasted from a parked car farther down the block, too loud, bass rattling through the doors. Across the street, a man and a woman were in the middle of an argument that sounded old enough to have been going on before dinner.
Nobody paid much attention to him.
He had thought that part might feel strange—walking around in a face people knew—but instead it only made the whole thing feel more set in place. A nod from someone on a porch. A muttered hey from a guy passing the other way. Familiarity without warmth. South Side standard.
By the time he reached the Milkovich house, the air had gotten colder. He stopped at the door, knocked once out of habit more than necessity, and then let himself in. The house had its own particular kind of tension. Quieter than the Gallagher place in some ways, but not easier. More like the noise had learned to stay low because it knew what happened when it got too loud.
He headed upstairs and found Mandy in her room.
She was sitting on the bed with a laptop balanced across her knees, the screen lighting one side of her face. The room looked about how he expected: lived in, a little cramped, not especially neat but not a disaster either. Posters on the wall. Clothes tossed over a chair. The kind of room put together by someone who knew exactly what mattered to her and exactly what didn't.
She glanced up when he stepped in.
"Well," she said, closing the laptop halfway. "Look who actually showed up."
Lip leaned against the doorframe for a second. "I said I would."
"Yeah," she said, "and you also said that last week."
He walked farther into the room. "That was different."
She gave him a look. "How?"
He sat on the edge of the bed and thought about it for exactly one second before deciding honesty was not going to help here.
"I don't remember."
That got an eye roll. "Amazing. Real compelling defense."
He looked at her, the faint annoyance in her voice, the way she was trying to sound more irritated than pleased. "You still invited me over."
"That's because you're entertaining."
"In a good way?"
She set the laptop aside and tucked one leg under herself. "In the same way a train wreck's entertaining. Hard to look away, kind of depressing, and eventually you start wondering if the whole thing's gonna catch fire."
He laughed before he could help it. "That's harsh."
"It's accurate."
"You been waiting around all night to say that?"
"Maybe."
There was no real bite in it. That was what kept throwing him, even when he expected it. Mandy could be blunt enough to make anybody else flinch, but with Lip there was usually something else threaded under it. Familiarity. Fondness, maybe, even when she was trying hard not to make it obvious.
He noticed the laptop again. "What were you doing?"
"Nothing."
"That looked like a lot of typing for nothing."
She narrowed her eyes. "You here to interrogate me?"
He lifted both hands in surrender. "Just asking."
"College stuff."
That made him pause. "You?"
She scoffed. "Not for me, dumbass."
He nodded once. "Right."
"For you," she said, like it should have been obvious.
He stared at her for a second, and she misread it immediately.
"Oh my God, don't make that face. I wasn't writing your application or something psycho like that." She grabbed a pillow and shoved it into his shoulder. "I was looking up schools. The ones people keep talking about. Seeing what they want."
The pillow wasn't hard enough to hurt, but he caught it anyway and dropped it beside him. "Why?"
She gave him a flat look. "Because you're smart enough to get into one."
There it was again. That same certainty she had about him, the one he remembered from the show and somehow still had not been prepared for up close. Mandy said things like that as if they were simple facts. As if his potential was not fragile or complicated or one bad decision away from being wasted. As if of course he could do more. Of course he was supposed to.
Most people in Lip's life saw intelligence as something useful. A trick. A way to get out of a jam or make some money or show off when the room called for it. Mandy looked at it like it meant he should have a future.
That was harder to shrug off.
He forced a crooked half-smile instead. "You stalking college websites for me now?"
"Don't flatter yourself." She shifted closer on the bed. "You planning on staying a while or what?"
"Depends."
"On?"
He looked at her. "What you're offering."
She let out a short laugh through her nose. "You are so full of shit."
"Sometimes."
"Most times."
But she leaned in and kissed him anyway, cutting off whatever stupid comeback he might have made next.
Mandy kissed the same way she did everything else—direct, no hesitation, no pretending she had not decided on it already. There was no awkward pause, no asking, no overthinking. Just her hand catching in the front of his shirt and pulling him closer like she expected him to follow.
He did.
Later, the room settled into quiet in the way rooms do after the energy has burned out of them. Not silent exactly. There were still distant sounds from elsewhere in the house. A television turned up too loud in another room. Floorboards shifting. Pipes knocking once somewhere in the wall. But inside the room itself, everything had gone still.
Mandy lay beside him with her head resting on his chest, one arm draped across his stomach like she had fallen there and not bothered moving. The laptop sat abandoned on the chair now. The only light came from the lamp by the bed, dim enough to leave most of the room in shadow.
For a while neither of them said anything.
Lip stared at the ceiling, one hand resting lightly against her back, feeling the slow rise and fall of her breathing. It was strange how quickly this felt less like stolen time and more like something ordinary. Not casual exactly. Casual implied distance, and there was not much distance in the way Mandy curled into him without asking if it was okay first.
She shifted a little, not quite asleep yet.
"You know," she said, voice heavy with tiredness, "if you actually tried at school, you'd probably end up some rich genius or something."
He let out a quiet breath that was almost a laugh. "That what you think?"
"Yeah."
She said it without hesitation, like there was no point pretending otherwise.
"You're the smartest guy in that school," she went on. "Maybe the smartest guy in this whole neighborhood. And you still act like none of it matters."
He looked down at the top of her head.
She had no idea how weirdly close to the truth that first part might end up being. Not because of school alone. Not because he was secretly some misunderstood academic miracle. Mostly because he had landed here with a head full of things no one else knew yet.
Bitcoin, for one.
The thought drifted through his mind again, distant but persistent. A stupid word for something that might eventually change everything, if he handled it right. He still did not know exactly when or how he would start. There was time. He hoped there was time.
For now, Mandy was warm against him, and the room smelled faintly like laundry soap and smoke, and the South Side was going on outside the window exactly the way it always did.
He tipped his head back against the pillow. "Maybe I care more than I look like I do."
Mandy was quiet long enough that he thought she had drifted off, then she mumbled, "Could've fooled me."
There was no edge to it. Just tired honesty.
He brushed his thumb once against her shoulder. "I'll work on my presentation."
That got the smallest laugh out of her, soft enough he felt it more than heard it.
A few minutes later her breathing evened out for real. She had fallen asleep without ceremony, still half on top of him, trusting enough not to think twice about it. He stayed where he was, listening to the old house settle around them.
After a while, he reached over carefully and switched off the lamp.
The room went dark except for a stripe of weak streetlight slipping through the curtains. Somewhere outside, a car rolled past. Somebody shouted, then laughed. Nothing unusual. Just the neighborhood at night.
Lip closed his eyes and stayed still, Mandy asleep against him, the day finally catching up with him all at once. There would be time tomorrow to think about school, the future, and all the ways this life could still go sideways.
Tonight, things were quiet enough to leave alone.
Advanced Chapters: cozyread.org