“Sure,” she whispered, and then he pulled back, the atmosphere now tender and somehow awkward at the same time. She indicated the sports drink, and Trap twisted the lid.
She got back to her feet. “I’m going to go check on your clothes.” And she left the house before he could protest.
Trap looked around and found the ice packs on the ground, as well as the wet towels. He didn’t see his phone, or his socks, or his boots, or anything else he owned, and he decided that right now he didn’t need to know where everything had gotten to. He started to sip the cool cucumber melon liquid, and prayed he could somehow find a way to keep this incident from his momma.
If he could get feeling better, there was no reason that anyone else needed to know what had happened in the stable…or about what was happening between him and Lila Mae in her tiny house.
9
Lila Mae kept an eye on Trap from where she sat at her tiny dining room table. Two people would fit, one on either side, but Lila Mae would have to pull down the bench seat attached to the wall if Trap wanted to come and eat. She took another bite of her delicious one-pot hamburger Spanish rice dish, getting a sweet pop of corn with the tangier, hotter spices of the rice, and watched as Trap slowly lifted another segment of orange to his mouth.
He’d eaten two triangles of watermelon already, and when that had gone well, he’d peeled the orange and started to eat that. He’d drank the two glasses of water as well as a complete sports drink now, and had already opened the second.
Lila Mae’s panic had subsided, and her adrenaline had spurred her to read several articles about heat exhaustion and the care for it. Yes, she had undressed Trap and put cool, wet towels on his chest and abdomen and blown a fan on them. She had taken off his jeans, because they’d gotten wet when she’d doused him with water, and the internet had said to remove restrictive clothing.
She’d put ice packs on his neck and armpits and the backs of his knees, where all the biggest blood vessels were, andwhen she’d really checked the time, she’d realized he’d only been passed out on her couch for fifteen minutes before he’d awakened. He really did not want to go to the hospital, and Lila Mae simply wanted him to be okay.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
Trap looked over to her and nodded. He swallowed his bite of orange. “I feel really good.”
“Do you think you want to try eating dinner?”
He nodded and swung his legs over the side of the couch, which was a full-size, three-person couch with an air bed in it. She’d been lucky to get him in the house at all, so she hadn’t pulled it out and made up the bed before letting him collapse onto it and fall back asleep.
“I can bring it to you.” Lila Mae jumped to her feet. She didn’t want Trap to get up yet, but she wasn’t sure why. He’d been awake for almost an hour now, and surely she would’ve noticed more signs of a serious medical condition, as she hadn’t looked away from him for longer than ten seconds.
“I want to get up,” he said, and he stood, the full grandeur of his body on display. The man had muscleseverywhere, and Lila Mae thanked her lucky stars that she didn’t have room for a dryer in her house.
“I’m sure your clothes are done,” she said, finally tearing her eyes away from his spectacular chest. “You can sit where I am,” she said. “I’ll pull the bench seat down when I come back in. There’s plenty of casserole right there on the stove.”
With that, she left him alone in the house again, stepping outside to the still-heated evening, which sure didn’t help the massive flush already working through her. Trap’s shirt was for sure dry, and she pulled it off the clothesline, which he’d attached to the side of her house and then a tree forty feet away.
She fisted his jeans in her hands, and they were hot and dry too, and she took them down and headed back inside.
“They’re dry,” she announced, and she found him standing at the stove, still dishing himself a bowl of rice.
“Great.” He turned and set the bowl on the table and then took his clothes from her. He moved out of the kitchen and dining space and back over in front of the couch, where he quickly pulled on his shirt and then his pants, while Lila Mae stood there and watched him button up and tuck in.
A light laugh came out of his mouth. “I feel way better now that I’m not naked.”
Lila Mae could only imagine. She wanted to apologize, but at the same time, she didn’t. She’d done what she’d had to do to help him, and if that meant she had to take off his clothes and wet him down, so that his core body temperature could be lowered, then she would do it all again in a heartbeat.
He took a step toward her and arrived in front of her, as the tiny house didn’t really have a lot of extra space. “Listen, I hope that didn’t come out as ungrateful,” he said. “I really appreciate you and what you’ve done for me tonight.”
Lila Mae looked up at him, trying to see something in his eyes and hear something in his tone that would indicate that perhaps they could be more than friends. He had reached up and cradled her face right before the delivery guy had arrived, and this moment felt very much like that: tense and drawn out, and yet also soft and good.
“I was thinking about you earlier today,” he said, his voice not actually very loud, but resounding in the small space between them.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.” He ground his voice through his throat. “I was trying to be brave enough to ask you to dinner, and I couldn’t do it. And yet, here we are, having dinner together.”
Lila Mae’s hopes filled with helium and soared into the sky. “You were thinking about asking me out?”
“Iwantto ask you out,” he said. “But I wasn’t brave enough.”
“Well, you’re brave enough to tell me now,” she said.
