He immediately gobbles it down. Then he gives me an assessing look and seems to determine that’s all he’s going to get, so he promptly turns around, providing us a with rude view of his asshole before he strolls away.
Turning my attention back to Riley, I see her rubbing at a couple red scratches on her thigh. “I’m so sorry about that. Are you okay?”
As I’m instinctually reaching for her, she stands abruptly, forcing me to take a step back. “I’m fine,” she insists.
“Do you want me to look at those?” I point at her leg. “I’ve got some first-aid stuff in the bathroom.”
She shakes her head. “They’re just scratches. I think I’ll live.”
“I’m sorry,” I say again.
“Really, it’s not a big deal. He didn’t mean to do it, and he’s too cute to be mad at.” Grabbing her bowl off the table, she says, “I’m gonna wash this.”
“Oh, no. You cooked, I’m doing the dishes,” I tell her, grabbing my own bowl and following her back to the kitchen.
Whatever moment we were having between us—whatever she was about to say, whatever was going to happen—it’s over. And that’s probably for the best. Even if I feel strangely disappointed about it.
CHAPTER NINE
ADDISON
“Ican,um,goupstairs and get out of your way,” Riley says uncertainly after I finish loading the dishwasher. She’s been hanging around the kitchen with me while I got everything cleaned up.
Not that there was too much to clean. She’d obviously been careful to make as little mess as possible, and she already had most of the pots and pans she used soaking in the sink.
I wipe my hands on a dish towel and turn to face her. “Feel free to do whatever you want with your night. If you want some privacy, that’s cool. But you’re not in my way.”
She smiles. “What would you be doing with yourself if I weren’t here?”
It’s a perfectly normal question, but I don’t answer immediately because I’m trying to come up with something that doesn’t make me sound extremely boring. And in my moments of hesitation, her eyes suddenly go wide, her face turns red, and she quickly directs her gaze to the floor.
I have no idea why at first.
Then I flash back to a couple hours ago—to Riley’s expression of shocked horror when she pulled my vibrator out from the couch cushions.
Kill me now, please.
“If you weren’t here, I’d probably play music, maybe read,” I rush tosay, desperate to steer her thoughts away from the same scene I just recreated in my head.
“Right. Yeah.” She still looks flustered, but after a few seconds, the red on her cheeks fades to the lightest pink. When she peers back up at me, there’s a small, shy smile on her face. “I like music,” she says.
I laugh in relief that she’s not going to let the awkwardness of that incident get in the way of the relationship we’ve been building.
Friendship.
The friendship we’ve been building.
Jutting my head in the direction of the living room, I tell her, “Come on, then.”
She follows me in there, and as I’m leaning over the back of the couch to draw the curtains closed, she says, “I really like those.”
It takes me a second to determine that she means my curtains, which are a sheer, dark blue covered in tiny silver stars. I really like them too, but now that she’s pointed them out, bad memories have me frowning.
I tip the corners of my lips back up in an imitation of a smile as I turn back to her. “They’re one of the only things I bothered to keep from my marriage. Sad, right?”
“Um.” She twists the bottom of her loose shirt into a ball around her fist. “I guess. I don’t know.”
“Christy didn’t like them. She argued with me when I bought them. And then, just to spite me, she argued with me years later as I yanked them off the curtain rods and packed them up with all the rest of my stuff when I was moving out.”
