As I fastened my seat belt, I peeked up at him. “As long as you don’t mind.”
I heard Beck muttering to himself as he closed the door. He shook his head at me through the windshield as he rounded the hood and went on muttering about “impossible” and “like I need a hole in the head” and “good time to start a drinking problem” as he settled beside me and started the car.
“What was that?” I leaned toward him, tapped my earlobe. He stared down at me like he’d caught me sneaking cookies before dinner. He wasn’t mad but he was disappointed. Toying with this man really was one of life’s great pleasures. Enunciating more clearly than anyone could ever require, I said, “I didn’t hear what you were saying.”
Beck pulled out of the driveway and up Succotash Lane without comment but he grabbed my hand and pulled my knuckles to his lips, and he didn’t let go. Not when he turned onto Market Street, not when he stopped at both of the lights in the center of town, and not even when he glanced over at me with a gaze that seemed to fall somewhere between pissed off and penitent.
Perhaps it was unapologetic.
Since I was overtired and hopped up on the gambler’s high of bothering him, I said, “I will need to walk the dogs when I get home.”
That did it. He heaved out a breath against the back of my hand and lowered it to his chest, which was no less intimate than his lips.
“At this fucking hour of the night?” he asked.“Alone?”
“We’ve been over this so many times.” I shook my head. I could feel his heartbeat against my fingers. “I havetwolarge dogs, Beck.”
Another rib-rattling sigh. “Then I’ll walk the dogs with you.”
“I should also start some laundry. I’m at least a week behind and I’m going to run out of underwear any day now. Probably tomorrow, actually.”
“Hmm. No. Not a problem.”
“Maybe not for you and your endless supply of three-piece suits and such,” I said, “but I have a limited number of Naked t-shirts and you already know the underwear situation.”
“I can make that problem go away.”
“Is this where you suggest I go without underwear? Because that seems forward even for you.”
“Even for me,” he repeated, laughing. “No, that wasn’t what I had in mind.”
“And I need to check on some orders,” I went on. I did not have the wits about me to ask for clarification on what he did have in mind, not when I was exceptionally committed to being impossible and the source of his future fictitious drinking problem. “The shipment was already delayed and we’re running dangerously low on glass juice bottles. Beth is going to start demanding people chug their drink in front of her and hand the bottle right back.”
He shifted our hands, flattening mine to the unbelievably fine weave of his shirt and layering his on top. It was like we were holding his heart down which was, of course, ridiculous because no hearts were involved with anything in this vehicle. We were just two people who liked to harass each other and sometimes paw at each other like savages. Nothing out of the ordinary.
“You’ve been working since first thing this morning,” he said. “Probably sixteen hours.”
I watched as he turned toward my neighborhood, his eyes on the road and his smartwatch glowing in the darkness. Cuffs rolled up to his elbows, jaw sharp and rigid as always. He had that solid, stately confidence that seemed to come so naturally to some men and project out of them like radio waves. “Just about sixteen hours,” I said. “Same as you, right?”
“Yeah. Sure. Except I’ve spent at least half of that time sitting in my office while you haven’t sat down since that hour with your friendMarsthis morning.”
“Ah, we’re back on that.”
I felt a growl move through his chest. “Okay, so, five consecutive minutesistoo much to ask. Noted.”
He came to a stop at the curb outside my house. Or, my parents’ house. It was mine now. I’d lived in it long enough to dismantle three decades’ worth of intense coastal cottage décor, right down to the sand-dollar-stenciled toilet lid. So, it was my place. Where I lived with my dogs.
Where I had yet to bring a single romantic partner.
It wasn’t that I’d chosen to drop out of the dating scene so much as I’d diverted my energy to things that didn’t suck my soul out by the spoonful. It wasn’tthatbad but it was shabby, and that was worse than bad. Shabby to the point that I missed nothing about the whole song and dance, and it didn’t bother me at all when I just…stopped doing it.
For two years.
Intimacy had always been tricky for me, especially so with new partners, and when everything happened with winning the bait shop and then The Soggy Dog closing and the birth of Naked Provisions, I didn’t have a good reason to go looking for love. Or whatever it was I got out of dating.
Yet here I was, sitting outside my house with my hand pressed to Beckett Loew’s chest at eleven-thirty at night, wondering if this was the end to my accidental vow of chastity. Wondering if this was the moment when decisions went from bad to irreversibly, unapologetically bad.
I motioned to where Jem and Scout’s faces filled the front window. “They are not going to put up with us sitting here for long. Jem will howl.”
