But there I was, less than twenty-four hours in, spewing it all out to Summer as if it were the most normal, natural thing in the world. And the weird thing is, sitting next to her in her cozy kitchen over tea, it felt like it reallywasthe most normal, natural thing in the world.
After we’d eaten half the banana bread, Summer skipped off and came back brandishing tweezers. She was on a mission.
At least the pain is distracting me from the touch of her hand. The initial flesh-on-flesh contact caused groin action that would have been embarrassing if I were standing.
She takes back my hand and runs her thumb over the remaining sliver in my palm. Tingles run all the way up my arms and across my chest, making my heart flutter. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt an actual heart flutter before. I would have been tempted to call a doctor if my hand wasn’t being held by this sexy woman who still has something of the just-crawled-out-of-bed look about her.
“Does the patient need something to bite on?” she asks as she slides the tweezers around the tiny fragment of wood protruding from my skin.
“Because this is like medieval torture? Or because you think I have some sort of fetish?”
She looks back down at my hand and blushes. Funny, she’s feisty but coy. An intriguing combination.
“Okay, Dr. Tweezers, let’s get this over with.”
She sticks out the tip of her tongue and gently bites down on it as she tries and fails to grip the end of the sliver. To take my mind off the discomfort, I slide my eyes from her mouth down to her breasts. I’m fairly sure there’s no bra on under that sweatshirt. And my best guess is the T-shirt hanging out at the bottom is what she slept in. I bet it smells good.
“Ow.” I snatch my hand away and press it against my chest. “That wasskin.”
“Oh, God. I’m sorry.” She puts her hand over her mouth to muffle a laugh. Her eyes crinkle when she smiles. “Let me see.”
She takes hold of my hand again and inspects it. I shift a little on the stool.
“You’re being dramatic,” she says. “It’s not bleeding. You’re fine. Rest it here.” She pulls the back of my hand down onto her thigh. “Then I can get a better grip.”
I’d better get a grip, too, because this isn’t going to make my groin situation any more comfortable.
Why the hell am I finding a hippie who knits and lives in a cabin in the middle of nowhere attractive? It’s annoying and makes no sense. She represents a whole bunch of things I’ve worked half my life to escape.
She strokes her fingers over mine to flatten out my hand. Those tingles run up my arm again. And the tweezers get back to work. I almost don’t want her to be able to remove my final wooden tormentor. Once it’s out, she’ll have no reason to hold my hand.
“Can you get a knitting degree from Berkeley?”
She looks up from the tweezing, the poking, and the general excavation of my flesh, with a puzzled expression. “What do you mean?”
With my good hand, I point at the university logo across her chest.
“Oh,” she says. “I studied accounting.”
I can’t disguise my surprise. “That’s not what I was expecting.”
“There you go judging me again.” She raises her eyebrows and purses her lips in the cutest display of victory I’ve ever seen. “Pray tell, what were you expecting? A degree in basket weaving, or maybe the energy of crystals?”
“Okay, okay, fair point. But I just thought maybe something more, you know, creative.”
She shrugs. “I was trying to be sensible.”
I sense a story she might not want to tell. Not yet anyway. She looks back down and focuses on trying to grab the end of the sliver.
She looks like she’s probably three or four years younger than me, maybe twenty-four or twenty-five. A quick bit of mental math puts her right across the bay in Berkeley as I was starting the business in San Francisco. Yet it’s not until we’re both three thousand miles away from there that our paths have crossed.
“I love Berkeley,” I tell her, wincing at the stab of the tweezers. “Haven’t been for ages. But I remember this great little hole-in-the-wall food place. Do you like smoked salmon?”
Her eyes dart up from my hand, lock onto mine, and light up. “Oh, my God. Do you mean Sammy’s Smoked Salmon Shack?”
I laugh. “That’s the one. Not sure how I forgot a name like that.”
She lets go of my hand and raises her palms to the ceiling in surprise. “It was my favorite treat spot. My friend Izzie and I would go there as a reward after every exam.”
