The new guy grinned up at me. “No.”
While the other pain in the ass muttered, “Not anymore.”
And that’s what I got for jumping the gun and thinking he’d been behaving better.
I just ignored him.
“How’s your day going?” Ashton asked right as they set the panel down.
It was only nine in the morning, but I thought it was nice of him to ask. “It’s great so far. How’s yours?”
“Good,” he replied, brushing his hands on his pants.
“My day is going great too,” Jason mumbled.
I didn’t even bother giving him a glance. “You liking the shop so far?”
“Yeah,” he agreed, in the middle of shooting the human wart a confused look for his little comments. “It’s great.”
I smiled. “Thank you for helping Jason,” I said like he was my child who needed assistance.
Which I guess in a way he kind of was. He was my little shit, spoiled kid that I was still trying to mold into a decent person.
You know, without talking to him more than I needed to.
And he was twenty years old instead of an impressionable three.
“Sure,” the new guy said.
I’d swear on my life that Jason snickered as he turned around and left the booth. I really just wanted to smack him sometimes.
“Do you know any good places to eat around here?”
“Yeah. There’s a food truck about a block down with really good burgers, but I thought I saw you with a bag from there already. There’s also a Mexican place about four blocks down that a lot of us really like; it’s a little hole in the wall place, but it’s great. If you go between eleven and one, there are lunch specials. And two blocks away, there’s a barbecue place that’s pretty good.”
He shifted on his feet. “The Mexican place is your favorite?”
“Yeah. I don’t go there that often, but it’s the best around here.”
“You doing anything for lunch?”
“She’s gonna be busy,” a deep male voice answered from somewhere behind me.
A deep male voice that could have belonged to only one person.
As I looked over my shoulder, sure enough, Rip was there, standing at the entrance into the booth with those giant biceps crossed over his chest and a bland, bland look on his face.
I was going to be busy? Since when? I had just talked to him that morning when I brought down his coffee, and we hadn’t talked about any kind of projects he needed me for.
But he had given me that smirk I liked and asked, “Did you fuck up your lunch?”
And I had smirked back at him, remembering the two hours we had spent at the bar on Friday and mocked him with, “It’s only a little burned, thank you.”
He had let that smirk stay on his face as he shook his head and went back to work.
And that had been that.
More than anything before. And maybe I didn’t understand why he was being, at times, so much friendlier, but I wasn’t going to complain.
