I rolled my eyes at my friend. Zoe had always seemed larger than life to me. She marched to the beat of her own drummer, but somehow, it was a beat everyone else wanted to follow. I didn’t mind living in her shadow, not really. It had gotten me through high school, and those shaky, formative years after. She hadn’t gone to college either, and though we never lived together, I’d spent more late nights at her place than my own. We only really started to drift apart once I started dating Paul. And even though Paul and I were long over, Zoe and I had never quite found our way back. She had plenty of other friends to fall back on, after all; friends I’d never clicked with.
“Reid is a good one, I promise.”
“Hazel, I totally believe you, but I’m gonna need a picture of the guy you’re shacking up with, like, immediately.”
Even with the sunglasses on, I could visualize the glint in her eyes.
I minimized the video chat to pull up a browser. I searched his full name. Reid Mitchell. A ton of results. I searched again, this time with our location, but there was nothing. Not even an article about that cold case he and his group solved. It didn’t surprise me that he wouldn’t have wanted to be mentioned by name.
“I just googled him. There’s nothing,” I said, bringing the call with Zoe back up. “I’ll try to sneak one when he gets home.”
Reid had left the townhouse around five, right as I was getting back from work, to help his dad with something at his house. Cleaning a dryer vent? Something with a radiator? I’d zoned out when he explained it to me. It was certainly something I had never done, and I could promise Gran had never done, in our old house.
But so far, living at his house was going pretty smoothly.
This morning, I’d had that initial moment of waking up in a new place and momentarily forgetting where I was, butother than that, it had been pretty normal. When I’d stumbled into the kitchen, Reid had already been sitting at the dining table, drinking coffee and scrolling his phone.
I pulled a mug out of the cabinet and poured myself a cup.
“Oh, there’s milk in the fridge if you want.”
I held up the cup. “I’m good with black.”
Then he’d given me a strange look when I grabbed a cold slice of leftover pizza and plopped down next to him.
“Pizza for breakfast?” he’d asked, like that wasn’t a perfectly valid thing to do.
But then he’d smiled, and I forced him to have one too. He’d insisted he didn’t like cold pizza and I’d promptly told him that was impossible. I’d said it was basically like a pastry. He ate the slice. Maybe just to appease me, but it was the best breakfast I’d had in a while.
Zoe slurped loudly, drawing my attention back to the call at hand. “Have you guys hooked up?”
“No!” I was getting a little fed up with this line of questioning.
“Really?” She lifted her shades, eyes searching mine through the phone screen.
“Really! We met last week.”
“So? That’s a perfectly reasonable amount of time to know someone before having sex. Hell, I’ve waited a lot less.”
“We’re friends,” I said, surprised to find I actually believed the words.
“And friends don’t sleep together?” Zoe asked.
“You’re impossible. You don’t even know what he looks like.”
“I can tell from your red cheeks that he isn’t hideous.”
That just made me flush even more. It was true, Reid was far from hideous. In fact, seeing him waltz about his house in sweatpants last night and this morning had just fanned the flame of my growing attraction.
“He’s cute,” I admitted.
“Knew it.” She smiled triumphantly, settling back into her seat. “So how are you doing otherwise? I mean, you know, with everything.”
The question caught me off guard. I loved Zoe, but deep conversations weren’t really her thing. She was more the queen of distraction. She’d get your mind off something, not pick it apart.
“I’m doing okay. Better now.” A part of me should probably analyze why I’d only started to feel better since meeting Reid, but I didn’t want to delve too much into it.
“Seems like you could use a night out,” she said. And there it was. That was the Zoe I knew.
