I watched him fill two mismatched bowls and realized that the meal was vegetarian. Had I told him that I was veg?
“Let’s eat on the couch, these chairs are awful.” He nodded toward the two hard stools in front of the island.
I grabbed my bowl along with two slices of warm bread and then followed him to the couch. Despite the fact that Andrew and I were about to eat dinner he’dcooked for me, with his own hands, it all felt shockingly normal. Like it was something we’d done before even though the closest we’d come to sharing a solo meal was the time Nolan left the dining hall early and we were stuck glaring at each other across the table for four minutes until I couldn’t take it and walked away.
Dude eyed us from his bed as he gnawed on his bone. Andrew settled in on the couch, kicked his feet up on the coffee table, and let out a contented groan. “Perfect.”
I tucked myself in the opposite corner and drew my legs up beneath me. “What is?”
“This.” He made a vague gesture around the room. “A fire. Good food. Excellent company. There’s no better feeling.”
“I never took you for a homebody,” I laughed. “The Andrew I knew considered every night a Friday night.”
He pulled the spoon from his mouth slowly, his eyes locked on mine. “Then maybe you didn’t know the real me.”
The intensity in his expression sent a shudder up my spine. OfcourseI knew the real Andrew. He was the life of the party, always the first one on the dance floor, who tormented everyone else into joining him. He knew which songs to program on the jukebox to get the crowd singing. Open mic night? The guy coulddo a ten-minute riff on his professors that left people rolling. Whoever this cozy-vibes person was sitting on the couch across from me was an imposter for the real Andrew Gibson.
“Okay, help me understand, then. What’s a typical night for you like these days?” I took a mouthful of soup and let out my own groan of satisfaction. “Hold on, do I taste truffle oil?”
He grinned at me and nodded. “Yeah, you do. But you know it’s all fake, right?”
I frowned but didn’t stop shoveling the soup into my mouth.
“You can’t buy real truffle oil at the grocery store. It’s all olive oil that’s flavored with an organosulfur compound, not real truffles.”
“Look at you with the ten-dollar word!” I laughed.
His mouth went tight for a millisecond. “Yeah, I’m full of surprises.”
I realized my mistake too late and tried to recover. “Anyway, you were going to tell me what you do for fun these days.”
He was already scraping the bottom of his bowl. “Work, obviously. You get it. Entrepreneur life is twenty-four/seven. I don’t go out much. Most of my high school friends left Millville, and I don’t know many people in Wismer yet. I mean, I know my clients, but there’s a tricky balance. Can’t cross any professional boundaries, you know? So I work, I hang out with Dude”—he gestured to his dog, who was nose-deep in bone rapture—“I cook a little. I read.” He shrugged. “Lame.”
“Are you me? That’s pretty much my life.” I ripped off a hunk of bread and dipped it in the soup. “What are you reading? Grisham? Clancy?”
He furrowed briefly, another microexpression that let me know exactly what he thought about them without sayinganything. “I finished the entire George R. R. Martin series and now I’m on a nonfiction kick. I’m reading about the science of the placebo effect. It’s so cool.”
“Tell me the most interesting factoid about it.” I licked a dollop of melted honey butter off my fingertip.
“I’ve been fascinated by the placebo effect forever. It plays ahugerole in what I do. It’s not exactly the same thing, but if I tell you to ‘drag’ a weight down it’ll get a different response than if I say ‘pull.’ You’ll fatigue faster if I say ‘drag.’ We have no clue how much power we have up here”—he tapped the side of his head—“and what we could do if we really put it to work.”
“Speaking of dragging and pulling, I’m ready to get back to Crush. We never scheduled my second session.” I never imagined that I’d willingly subject myself to weightlifting, but I suddenly wanted to be anywhere Andrew was.
“Seriously? I thought you were lying about wanting to come back. I was sure that you were one and done. Honestly, I was a little insulted that you practically ran out of our first session.”
I shrank down into the corner of the couch. “I was, um, having a hard time following everything.”
“Well, shit. Was I going too fast? Or was it confusing? I need your feedback because if you were having a hard time as a beginner then I guarantee some of my other new clients are too.”
He almost looked nervous as he waited for me to respond. I needed Andrew to understand that it had nothing to do with his teaching skills and everything to do withme. I pushed myself to say it out loud as butterflies crowded my heart.
Andrew had moved his empty bowl to the coffee table and was facing me with his arms crossed tightly over his chest, waiting for my critique. His anxious expression sent a hairlinefracture through my heart, so I took a breath and forced myself to speak. “Your instruction was perfect. You made me feel like I could bench-press a billion pounds. You’re phenomenal at your job, but when you touched me, all I could think of was doing this.”
I stood up and then eased myself onto his lap, silencing my nerves as my body came to rest straddling his. Andrew’s expression shifted from concern to amazement as he unfurled his arms and placed welcoming hands on my hips. I trembled when his thumbs brushed against my skin where my shirt had come untucked.
He looked like he couldn’t believe what was happening, and that he wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do next. He’d always been the aggressor and I was the rabbit trapped in his snare, but this time I was the one calling the shots. My breathing went shallow as I enjoyed the power of sitting on top of him, even though it felt like I was sitting on a steel beam and all it would take was a bump of his hip to bounce me off. I’d lived this scenario in my head a million times, where I followed through with what I’d missed out on all those years ago on the boat.
That’s why it felt both natural and terrifying as I leaned closer to him and finally placed my lips against his.
