My brow arches.
Her gaze flicks down to the basket on my arm, and her cheeks burn red. “Grocery shopping. Obviously. Duh. Sorry, that was a stupid question.”
Jesus, she’s so fucking cute.
In a strangely endearing, slightly awkward kind of way.
I can’t remember the last time I referred toanythingas cute. Maybe Lily, and I’m not sure even then.
Certainly not a woman I’ve fucked.
Yet another reason to stay away from her.
“Yep.”
Maisie rocks on her heels, and a thick silence hangs between us.
I have no clue what else to say because we’re standing here, just staring at each other in the middle of an aisle in a grocery store on a Friday night, so I just mutter, “Have a good night.”
“Uh, yeah. You too. Bye.”
And then I walk away, further down the aisle, with no fucking idea about what I even came here for in the first place.
Thirty minutes later, I’ve managed to throw a bunch of random shit in the basket with zero rhyme or reason and check out, my head still occupied by Maisie. My entire night has been thrown off-kilter because she’s the last person I expected to see, and I hate that I liked it.
Seeing her doing something normal, like grocery shopping. It makes me wonder about things that I shouldn’t… like what her favorite food is or if she can even cook.
I sure as shit didn’t when I was her age. I survived college off five-dollar rotisserie chicken from the gas station near my apartment, canned tuna fish, and whatever vegetable wasn’t moldy as fuck in my fridge at the time.
Any extra money I had went to supplements, protein powders, anything I could to pack on the weight and muscle that I needed to play hockey.
Fucking hell.
I look up to find Maisie struggling to juggle more shopping bags than her hands can carry, and before I can even give myself yet another talk about why the fuck I should not, I’m jogging over to her.
Her head whips up at the same time one of the handles on the plastic bag tears from the weight, bursting open, and a can of beans falls to the ground, narrowly missing her foot, and rolls to a stop at my toe. “Shit.”
“Give me the bags, Maisie,” I murmur as I reach over to take them, but she shakes her head, her blue eyes flaring.
“No, it’s okay, I’ve got it.”
My mouth tightens. “Yeah, it looks like it,” I retort, taking the damn bags anyway.
How the hell she thought she was going to carry all of this is beyond me because all of this shit is not light. She should’ve gotten a cart.
“Show me where your car is, and I’ll put them in the trunk for you.”
After a pause, a moment of hesitation where I see the stubbornness written on her face, knowing that she wants to argue but ultimately decides not to, she simply nods and turns toward the parking lot.
I trail behind her like a good little puppy.
Not looking at her ass as she walks.
I keep my gaze fixated on the back of her golden hair, on the braid she’s wound the silky strands together in.
Until she slows down slightly, falling into step beside me.
“You didn’t have to do this, you know.”
