“You don’t know that.”
“I know from personal experience that you’re a good man. Nothing is truer than that.”
I turned toward him, and we faced each other. The dim light from the lamp lit him from behind. I could make out his face, but not his expression. Not his eyes.
“Whatever happened, it didn’t happen because you’re not a good man,” I told him. “It didn’t happen because you were lazy or greedy or uncaring. Because that would be impossible. It would be impossible for you to be those things.”
Hudson snorted. “You’re too kind to me. I’m so happy you had that nervous breakdown in the ice cream aisle. It brought you into my life.”
“I bet. Now you have a nice maternal figure to say kind things to you.”
Hudson shook his head. “Eliza, I don’t think of you as a maternal figure. Nothing like a maternal figure.”
I realized that I had stopped breathing, and I took a deep breath. My heart was beating hard, rattling my chest. “Like an aunt?” I asked in a whisper.
He shook his head, again. “Not like an aunt or a cousin or an older sister.”
“Oh.”
“Not like a platonic friend, either,” he added. “Nothing resembling a platonic friend.”
“Oh.”
I made a point to breathe again, and when I did, I inhaled his scent. His cologne had worn off, but his pheromones hadn’t. They shot at me like bullets, each one hitting its target. I had never been close to a man like Hudson before. He was masculine from his head to his toes. Capable. He was in complete control of his body, and what an amazing body it was. I was happy that the room was so dimly lit. I didn’t want him to read my face and understand my feelings.
I waited for something to happen because it felt like something was about to happen. Something big and important and impossible to turn back once it happened. The air was thick with it, whatever it was.
But Hudson stayed on his side of the couch, and I stayed on my side. I didn’t dare move a muscle, and Hudson didn’t move either. We stayed there until morning, talking. I told him about high school and getting pregnant, and he told me about foster care and about rifle practice.
And there was a lot of silence in between. A lot where we froze in place with only the sound of our breathing filling the space between us, paralyzed to move in a direction for fear that it was the wrong direction.
CHAPTER 15
“A First Encounter Kind of Thing”
At some point, I must have fallen asleep. It had to be after five in the morning but before sunrise. In any case, at around nine o’clock, I woke up slumped over the arm of the couch, my mouth open, and Hudson’s blanket draped over me.
Sitting up, I saw Hudson tiptoeing past from the bathroom to the kitchen. Somehow, he had showered and dressed without waking me, and now he was fully groomed and wearing black jeans and a blue t-shirt that brought out the color of his eyes. I watched as he scrambled eggs and dropped bread into a toaster.
“Be careful,” I called to him. “Those are whole eggs. The yolks might kill you.”
He turned around in surprise, and his face turned red. It was an honest-to-goodness blush that started at his collarbones and went straight up to his thick hairline. It was an honest blush because we hadn’t done anything the night before except talk, but he had probably said a little too much for his normally taciturn self, and that made him embarrassed.
Or he could have blushed because he remembered he told me he didn’t think of me as a platonic friend.
It could have been that.
At the memory, I felt my face go hot, too, and I put my hands on my cheeks to cover them.
“It’s my whole eggs day,” he said, gathering his composure. “I get one whole eggs day a week.”
“I love fried eggs,” I said. “Over easy with a good cup of coffee and sourdough toast with butter. Yum.”
“You think a lot about food.”
“So do you, but we think about different foods and for different reasons. You think about food because you’re using it as a tool to make yourself look like Henry Cavill. I’m thinking about food because…” I was about to say no one loves me, but I stopped myself just in time. “Is some of that for me?” I asked.
“I made it for both of us.”
