“Darling it is.” Brooke was well and truly fucked.
Chapter Five:
“Well?” Christine squeaked through the phone.“How’d it go?”
Brooke was still pacing in her bedroom. She had dropped Anna off just thirty minutes ago, but her pulse hadn’t slowed down in the slightest. Anna had kissed her cheek again when Brooke had walked her all the way to the front door of her walkup apartment. Walking Anna to her door probably hadn’t been necessary. If Anna had taken the bus or an Uber even, no one would have been there to walk her, but Brooke was already painfully, embarrassingly head over heels and the thought of anything happening to Anna now made her chest ache in a way she had never experienced before.
“Thank you for walking me to my door, Honey,” Anna had said with a mischievous grin.“For the record, if this had been the end of a real first date, I would have kissed you goodnight.” She clutched her new book to her chest as her long dark eyelashes had fluttered against her cheeks as her eyes drifted down to Brooke’s lips.
Brooke was standing with her hands stuffed as far into her front pockets as she could get them. She was afraid that if they were free she would do something insane like trace the edge of Anna’s jaw with her pointer finger. Her eyes flashed to Anna’s lips, more than a little aware of the way her own breath stuttered out in an uneven huff. She swallowed, audibly, and forced her eyes up to meet Anna’s.“So, that’s the story then?” She asked, her voice rougher than she had heard it in a long time.
Anna nodded, her hands staying firmly locked on the sides of her book.“I think so,” she whispered back.
The night air was almost warm around them, summer just around the corner, but Brooke felt a shiver creep up her back. She nodded along in agreement.“Noted.”
Anna took a deep breath and offered Brooke a small smile.“I guess I should let you get home,” she said, starting to turn towards her front door. The tension snapping all at once.
“Anna, I really can’t thank you enough for this. Not just for agreeing to come with me, but for tonight…” Brooke paused. She didn’t want to sound like a total loser, but it had been a long time since she had made a friend, and Anna was, at the very least, quickly becoming one. Surely, that was an acceptable thing to say.“And for quickly becoming a friend.” She cleared her throat.“I don’t often let people in, but you’re”—she searched for the correct word,inevitable,she thought. But, not wanting to overstep, she chose—“radiant.” It still felt like too steep a word to use for a new friend, but it was true. Anna was radiant.
Anna’s smile matched her recent description. She leaned forward and pressed another gentle kiss to Brooke’s cheek. This one less a brush of her lips, but soft all the same. She let go of her book with one hand to cup Brooke’s cheek and let her thumb run over the space where her lips had just been. Her dark brown eyes held so much emotion. Brooke had been worried that this arrangement would cause Anna to only ever look at her with pity, but Anna was looking at her now with a warmth that Brooke couldn’t label.
“Goodnight, Honey,” Anna said, her voice as soft as her lips had been.“Text me when you make it home?”
Brooke’s heart warmed. That was the modern day equivalent of walking her to her own front door. She nodded.“Yes, of course.”
Anna grinned and stepped back, turning to unlock the front grate of the walk up. It appeared to be a small, divvied up town home from the early 1900’s. Brooke loved old buildings like this, old houses that used to hold single families, that had in the past fifty years been divided and divided again to accommodate better rates and more people. She loved seeing how kitchens and bathrooms had been worked into the designs. She wondered what Anna’s apartment would look like, if she owned any plants, what color the walls were, what the floors were made of, if her home was as inviting as she was.
Anna pushed the front door to the building open and Brooke took a step back, towards her car, parked safely against the curb.“Goodnight, Darling,” Brooke said quietly before turning around to walk to her vehicle.
Anna looked back at her then and smiled shyly.“What are you doing tomorrow night?” Anna called after her.
Brooke turned back and shrugged, hands still deep in her pockets.“I don’t think I have anything planned, why?”
“We need more photos,” Anna said, so matter of factly, Brooke didn’t even think to question it.
Brooke nodded.“Okay, yeah.”
“Like cozy domestic photos,” Anna said, her voice a little more conspiratorial than anything else.
“Domestic photos?” Brooke asked, no longer following.
Anna nodded.“Yep.” She grinned, she wiggled her eyebrows in Brooke’s direction.“I think we’d spend more time in your apartment. Is it okay if I invite myself over for tomorrow evening?”
Brooke had a thousand questions; why would they spend more time in her apartment? What in the hell was a domestic photo? Was Anna really wanting to hang out with her again so soon? Instead she just nodded, lamely.“Yeah, that’s fine. I can text you my address?”
Anna was positively beaming.“Perfect. I’ll see you tomorrow, Honey.” She pushed into her building without another word, letting the door fall closed behind her.
“What does it mean?” Brooke asked Christine. Brooke had always been good at puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, logic puzzles, word puzzles, it didn’t matter. But Anna wasn’t a puzzle, she was a gorgeous, radiant, hilarious, charming woman and Brooke was positively lost.
There was a thoughtful hum on the other end of the phone as Christine processed everything that Brooke had told her. Brooke was not someone who called and gushed. She was someone who listened. Her friends called her, for advice, for help, just to be an open ear. But here she was, calling Christine, close to midnight on a Wednesday, and Brooke was wired like she had just chugged a whole pot of coffee.
“What if, and hear me out here,” Christine started.“What if she has a crush on you, too?”
Brooke frowned and resumed her pacing. There had been times throughout the evening that it had felt like they were flirting. Anna was clearly a touchy, physical person, but there were times that her gaze had dropped and lingered, that her blush had crept far lower than her cheeks, that her playful touches had traipsed past friendship and settled into actual date-like territory. All of her air left her lungs with a pathetic whine.
“I mean, everything you’ve said kind of points to her being into you,” Christine spoke gently, as if she said anything too loudly and Brooke might disconnect the call.
“I don’t think that’s possible,” Brooke whispered, her walls slowly building back up, brick by painful brick.
