“You probably didn’t need me to tell you that,” she says with a short laugh.
“Ishouldn’thave, but clearly, I did.” I rub my palm along my neck, the visceral memory of the itching and swelling still very front-of-mind.
“Okay, well, one person listens, then. Of course, you aren’t from Sweetwater, so do you really count?” She scrutinizes me with one eye squinting, and I slap my palm to my chest.
“Ouch! I’d like to think I count. Man, you are harsh!”
“I warned you I was hungry.”
I nod, checking my mirrors as I switch lanes to the left so I can lay on the gas and get us to the city a few minutes faster.
“You did. And I listened. One order of IKEA meatballs coming right up.”
I manage to get to the IKEA parking lot in under an hour, and as promised, I have a dish of hot Swedish meatballs in Renleigh’s palms, and we’re on our way up an escalator with enormous blue shopping bags looped over our forearms.
“Are you sure you don’t want one?” Renleigh holds a single meatball out on a fork, but I shake my head. I got a glimpse of this girl in hangry mode. I’m not denying her a single calorie.
“I’ll wait and grab something on the way out, maybe a smoothie,” I tease.
She smirks, then pops the morsel into her mouth and chews.
“Let’s do this,” I announce as we set off into the maze of strangely spelled closet organizers and end tables.
Renleigh takes a seat at one of the kitchen counters while I peruse the first mock apartment. She swivels in the bright orange circle poised atop a chrome pole, and I flop back on the oversized canvas sofa.
“This feels like me,” I say, glancing around what is definitely a masculine, college-aimed space.
Renleigh wrinkles her nose as she gets up and tosses her empty carton in a nearby trash.
“It looks too messy. You need something that looks like you cleaned it even though you didn’t. Let’s keep going.” She holds out a hand and helps me to my feet, and our fingertips tangle for an extra second that feels both awesome and awkward.
“Messy, got it. What exactly makes a living room messy?” I back up into the next design, running my hand along the wooden back of a chair. There’s a black leather sofa in this space, and the walls are covered in dark wood paneling. I don’t know that I want to rework my rental condo so much that I have tocompletely dismantle the walls when I leave, but I do like the rich wood look.
“This is neater, but still not quite right. You want the upholstery to be low-maintenance, and black is good, or brown. But this feels too cold. We need something that also says . . .take a nap here.”
“Nap. Yeah, I like naps.”
I follow Renleigh through a few more spaces, and when we come to a soft leather sofa, we both pause with our hands cupping our chins.
“What do you think?” I quirk a brow and she meets my gaze.
“We should test it,” she says, rushing around the gold and white coffee table to slouch on one end of the sofa while I do the same at the other. We prop our feet up on the coffee table, and stare ahead at the cardboard television propped on a matching entertainment center across from us.
“Yeah,” I say.
“See? Home. You can practically envision your Sunday night here, winding down with a good bowl of cereal, the remote stuffed somewhere between these cushions,” she says, her hand diving into the space about a half second before mine.
“Oh, sorry,” I say, my palm pressed against the back of her hand in the crease. I don’t pull away because her eyes flashed to mine, and time has stopped.
“It’s okay,” she says, dragging her hand away slowly. The feel of it grazing along mine produces a pleasant tickle. My fingers curl in response as I pull my hand into my own lap.
“It’s a good nap couch, don’t you think?” I twist so my back is against the armrest, and I pull one leg up so I’m facing her with my body open and ready for her to crawl into the space I made.
She shakes her head with a sharp laugh, and gets up from the sofa.
“Nice try, Hunter.”
I exhale and lick my wounds, but I’m quick to rebound from rejection. I have to be. I play a sport where failure is built into the stats. Achieving thirty percent at anything in this game is to be highly successful. I didn’t expect to bat a thousand with Renleigh tonight.
