“Double damn.”
I should’ve moved, but I didn’t seem able to. I couldn’t see his eyes, but I liked everything I could see: full lips, closely cropped brown hair, broad shoulders, strong hands. But mainly it was his intoxicating smell, his willingness to play along with my silliness, his voice, the mischievous upturn to his lips.
And you want to jump out of the fire and into his frying pan because a part of you doesn’t want to live alone.
“I guess I should let you go,” I finally said.
“If you must.”
“I must,” I said with a sigh.
It had to have been my imagination that he wasn’t in any more of a hurry to leave than I was, because he then headed to the parking lot with purpose. He looked over his shoulder at me once more, still smiling. Then he paused briefly at the side of a newer-model, silver Lexus to take a phone call. “Malone here. What’s the problem now?”
I stepped behind the stairs that led to the upper floor and studied him through the gap between the concrete steps while pretending to check the mail I most certainly didn’t have yet.
Tall, tailored navy suit, expensive shoes. Those aviators cost as much as what my monthly car payment used to be. If he wasn’t in finance, then he was in something lucrative.
Not that it was any of my business. Or that I was in the market. Or that I even wanted a rich guy. Something about his height and suit had brought that silly song to mind.
“No, no. This is a delicate operation,” he said.
I studied the mailboxes so it wouldn’t look like I was eavesdropping. They were so old they had slots for the name of each person above the apartment. There was Malone. He lived in the apartment across the breezeway from me.
Taking my keys from my pocket, I opened my own mailbox—just in case he looked over to see what I was doing—and took out a collection of flyers for “Current Resident” as well as bills for people who’d lived in the apartment before me. Pretending to peruse a Lands’ End catalog, I ambled over to my Corolla.
“I’ll be there in a minute,” my handsome neighbor said as he ended his call and slid into the Lexus. “No, I’ll handle it.”
Handle what? Could I volunteer to be handled?
I shook those thoughts away. Sure, his baritone voice exuded calm confidence, but I was on a hiatus from men. For heaven’s sake, I’d left Ken only six months ago. Before that I’d been with him for almost twenty years. And before that it had been my high school boyfriend. Basically, I’d been involved in a relationship, juvenile or otherwise, since age sixteen.
I owed it to myself to learn who I was and what I wanted from life. I owed it to myself to learn to love my own company.
No more compromises.
No matter how intriguingly handsome my neighbor might be.
A part of me whispered,You’re just scared he sees you the way Soft Hands did, but I told that part of me to shut up and recited a new mantra.
Slow inhale:I may not be able to touch ...
Slow exhale:but I can most certainly look.
“Oh, Stark,” Salcedo sang as I walked into Finnegan’s. “I have a gift for you.”
“You didn’t have to do that,” I said. “My birthday’s next month.”
“Oh, but I wanted to. Don’t worry. It’s neither expensive nor anything you’ll have to dust.” She slid from her barstool and held her phone in front of me before pressing play on a video. From the angle I saw Ken in his office, which meant Salcedo had been filming from the building across the street.
“How did you—”
“Watch.”
In the video, Ken took a poster tube from the top of his desk, turning it from side to side before inspecting the mailing label. He opened one side, and bam! An explosion of glitter.
I slapped a hand over my mouth to keep from laughing.
For a moment I thought the video had stopped. No, he’d only been shocked into momentary stillness before he began frantically brushing at the glitter on his suit. The video shook with what had to have been Salcedo’s laughter.
