“I saw.”
“I would have knocked, but I was afraid I’d wake you. Besides, I couldn’t stay. The bar was short-staffed and my boss asked me to cover. I left your place and went straight to The Lush.” His frown deepened. He brushed my hair back from my face. “Everything okay?”
“Fine.” I couldn’t make my smile hold a convincing shape. There was a dead guy in my washing machine (or, at least, part of one, which might actually be worse). Someone was trying to murder my ex, there was a suntanned girl in Julian’s kitchen, his social media accounts were set to private, and he wanted to have atalk.
A sudden cheer erupted in the living room. Someone pounded on the wall and shouted, “Get out here, Baker! You’re missing the second half of the game!” Julian rolled his eyes. Murmurs rose over the dimmed volume of the TV commercials, followed by laughter. “Who’s the cougar?” one of them asked.
“She’s kind of hot,” said another.
“She’s no one,” a female voice chimed in. “Just someone he met at the bar. They’re not serious.”
I pulled out of Julian’s arms, my cheeks flaming. “I didn’t know you were having a party. I can go.”
He held fast to my hand, turning my face to his. “Don’t pay any attention to them. My roommate invited a few people over to watch the game. They’re just trying to get under my skin.” He toed the door shut, inciting another round of laughter from the next room. These were probably the same friends he’d gone to the beach with. An uncomfortable feeling I wasn’t ready to name left my stomach unsettled when I pictured Julian spending the week with the cute redhead who’d answered his door.
“I can come back when you don’t have company.”
He shook his head as he backed me gently against the wall. His mouth grazed mine and his eyes drifted closed. “They have really short attention spans. Two more minutes and they’ll forget you’re even here.”
I tried to relax into him, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that Ishouldn’tbe. The closed door. Their stares and laughter. The fact that none of them knew my name or who I was. It all pointed to the fact that I didn’t belong here. For all the same reasons I hadn’t invited him to my house to meet my kids—because we were both compartmentalizing this. Us. The pieces of our lives that didn’t fit in the same box.
“Parker’s out of town next weekend,” he whispered against my ear. “I’ll have the place to myself if you want to stay.”
His warm breath drew goose bumps over my skin. A thrill rippled through me at the prospect of spending a weekend with him. Julian had mentioned Parker before, but he had only ever brought me here when we were alone. And I’d never stayed the night. “Your roommate wouldn’t mind?”
“No,” he said, trailing kisses down my neck, “she’s cool.”
She?I felt the blood drain from my face. My lips parted, but words wouldn’t come. The cute redhead who’d answered the door…thatwas Parker—his roommate?
“Why did you lock your Instagram account?” I blurted.
Julian pulled back to look at me and frowned. “That had nothing to do with you, Finn.” He traced my cheek with his thumb. “Some of the guys I went camping with weren’t thinking about what they were posting. I’m in my last year of law school. In a few months, I’ll be graduating and applying for jobs, and the last thing I need is to have a firm see me tagged in someone’s Instagram pic, doing keg stands with a bunch of drunken idiots.” I looked down at the floor. If he was worried about potential employers knowing he’d cut loose on a beach trip, what would they think if they knew he was sleeping with a divorced single mother with a body in her washing machine? He tipped my chin up. “I don’t have anything to hide from you, and I’m not trying to hide you from anyone else. Parker’s just a roommate. It’s not what you’re thinking. We dated for less than a minute before she graduated last year, and I thought we’d clawed each other’s eyes out the whole time.”
“So you’ve always had a thing for older women?” I joked, feeling like a fool.
“No. I have a thing for smart women.” He towed me with him toward his bed, perching on the edge of it and drawing me onto his lap. “Mature women who are honest with themselves about what they want and aren’t afraid of it.” I felt like an impostor as he leaned in for a kiss. It didn’t feel honest and fearless when we were hiding in his room.
“I should go,” I insisted.
“Stay,” he murmured.
“I gave Vero the night off, and I have to get home to my kids.”His grip loosened on my waist. That one sentence seemed to stretch the distance between us. I climbed off his lap. His mouth turned down as our hands slid apart.
He stood and followed me to his bedroom door. “I’ll walk you out.”
“I can manage.”
“How can I reach you?”
“I’ll get a new phone this weekend.”
He bit his lip, as if there was something he wanted to say. “Call me later?” When I nodded, he dipped low for another kiss. His mouth was teasing and warm, beer and sand and sunshine, and I couldn’t resist drawing out that short, bittersweet taste of him before leaving his room.
I showed myself to the door, ignoring the appraising looks, stepping over someone’s abandoned shoes and resisting the urge to carry the greasy paper plates on the floor to the trash can. Parker glanced my way and I pasted on a smile, feeling guilty for reasons I couldn’t put my finger on. As if I had come looking for something in this apartment that never should have been mine.
CHAPTER 27
My mother’s Buick was parked in front of my house when I arrived home from Julian’s. Mrs. Haggerty, who must have heard the rattle in my engine, peeled back her curtains as I turned in to my driveway, and I offered her a good-natured wave. She wasn’t horrible, I reminded myself. She was just lonely and bored. In another thirty or forty years, that could be me—the old lady who lived in a big house all alone, who joined the neighborhood watch just to keep life interesting. Hopefully because I didn’t still have a dead guy in my washing machine.
