“All right,” I say now, turning away from that photo and looking at Aiden. “We have a new name for our list.”
“Who?” he says, his fork pausing halfway between his bowl and his mouth. One long noodle dangles off of it, his bite of fettuccini unraveling slowly, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
“Augustus Flanders,” I say. I go to the refrigerator and use the dry erase marker to add Gus’s name to the bottom of the list. “He knew Sandy. She used to be a regular—” And I break off as it hits me, the little nagging feeling that I couldn’t identify earlier. “Past tense,” I murmur to myself. “He spoke in past tense.”
“What?” Aiden says with a frown. He finally seems to notice that he’s about to lose a big bite of pasta, because he gives a little start and then jams the fork in his mouth as fast as possible, slurping up the escaping noodles. This behavior, combined with the messy hair that looks like he’s been running his fingers through it, gives him more of a Nutty Professor vibe rather than his usual sexy, dark academia thing. He’s got on another tweed blazer today, with honest-to-goodness elbowpatches—it should look almost comical because of how cliché it is, but it doesn’t. He just looks hot, messy hair and all.
I mean, I could do without the fettuccini slurping, probably. But other than that.
“When I was at Namaste, there was a picture hanging on the wall of one of the classes Gus teaches. Sandra was in it,” I say. And Aiden is paying attention now—his chewing slows as his eyes lock more firmly on me. I go on, “So I asked Gus, and he said Sandra was a regular.Was,as in sheused to be.He spoke in the past tense. That’s weird, right?”
“Kind of, yeah,” Aiden says once he’s swallowed his food. “Did he say why she wasn’t a regular anymore, though?”
“Kind of,” I say. I slump over to the kitchen table and sit down, stirring my own bowl of pasta as I think. “He said there was an incident.”
“An incident?” Aiden says, frowning. “What kind of incident?”
I shrug with frustration. “I don’t know. He wouldn’t say. He just told me it wasn’t relevant to my job or something and then shut me down when I tried to ask more.”
“Huh,” he says. His brow is still furrowed, and that troubled frown deepens. “That’s…”
“Weird,” I supply. “Yes. But also…Gus is kind of a weird guy. Don’t you think?”
“He is,” Aiden says with a nod. “I’ve known him for years, and he’s very socially awkward.”
“Plus all the smiling.”
He nods again. “Yep. The smiling.”
I don’t ask how Aiden knows Gus; Autumn Grove is one of those towns where you know people simply because they live here and you do too. You see each other at the store, you run into each other walking down the street—it’s a small space we’re all occupying.
I eat my food in silence after that; my mind is too full and too empty at the same time to deal with actual conversation. So I just sit there, twirling my pasta and shoving massive bites into my mouth like a true lady. I see Aiden eyeing me with a vaguely grossed-out expression, but hello—who’s the one that slurped all his fettuccini off his fork like a barbarian?
“Don’t look at me like that,” I finally snap at him through a mouth full of food.
His nose wrinkles. “At least chew properly before you take another bite. You’re going to choke, and it’s gross to watch.”
“My purpose in this house is not to give you something pretty to look at,” I say. Then, because I can’t quite stop myself, I grin. “Although you do have to admit”—I bat my eyelashes at him—“I’m prettier now than I was when I was seventeen, right?”
“I don’t really go for women with pink hair,” he says, twirling another bite of his pasta.
Rude.
“But,” he goes on, sounding completely unaffected, “you turned out all right, I suppose.”
Hmm…that’s a little better.
“Be honest,” I say, pushing my bowl to the side. This conversation is suddenly much more interesting than my food, mainly because Aiden is so fun to tease. “If you saw me and didn’t talk to me or know who I was, you’d be smitten. You’d fall head over heels.”
Aiden nudges his own bowl out of the way and leans forward, a wicked spark entering his eyes. “I’m glad you’re aware it’s your personality that’s the problem,” he says.
My grin turns into a full-blown smile. “With beauty like this,” I say, pointing at my completely average face, “it would be rude of me to have an incredible personality. No one should be good ateverything.”
“That’s true,” he says. “Just look at me.”
I nod. “Gorgeous, but absolutely insufferable.”
That spark of amusement in his eyes flashes brighter as a little smirk tugs at his lips. “Insufferable?” He leans over the table further and then says, in a whisper so low I almost miss it, “That’s not what you thought thirteen years ago when you tried to kiss me.”
