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“Mr Barkly?” Damn it, Jerry! “We’re home.”
I pull back from where I’d been this close to another delicious kiss and peer out of the window. We’re parked in front of Matthew’s house, which I can see is large but understated. Elegant and charming. And just from this one glance at it, I love it already.
“Let’s get you inside and fed.” Matthew opens my door for me, his hand outstretched to help me out. “I don’t want the Hulk to make an appearance tonight.”
Right on cue, my stomach rumbles, a loud, boisterous sound that has him laughing and me blushing, and we walk inside, hand in hand.
“What do you feel like? Italian? Sushi? Indian?”
“Yes!”
He laughs, tapping away on his phone while I look around. If I loved the place from the outside, then I’m in love with the inside. Modern, with slick appliances and fixtures, the house is decorated with neutral colours that give it a calming feel. There’s a mix of textures and timber accents that take it from a house to a home, and when I stumble upon an alcove just off the living room that has been turned into a library, I know I want to move in.
“I live here now!” I flop onto the comfy reading chair in the library and curl my legs under me. This may just be a perfect room.
“Fine by me.” Matthew leans against the door frame, his eyes intent on me.
“This is incredible.” I wave my hand at the three walls covered top to bottom with rows and rows of shelves filled with colourful books. “How do you ever leave this place?”
He walks in closer and looks around. “My nanna would have loved this room; I built it with her in mind.”
I think back to our times studying together in high school. Matthew used to talk about his nanna a lot. We’d bonded over our shared love and admiration for our grandmothers, spending hours sharing stories about the giant roles they played in our lives. It was one of the many things I was surprised we had in common.
“I remember you telling me about her. She meant the world to you, didn’t she?”
His eyes glisten. “She was the best. My biggest supporter. The one who listened to my dreams and actually believed they’d come true.”
“And she was right. Look at you, a famous soccer player who’s going to play in the World Cup next year.”
He runs his hands through his hair, giving him a tousled look that I don’t hate. “I have fulfilled those dreams. But playing soccer isn’t everything…”
“It’s not?”
He looks off into the distance. “It’s not even close to what my nanna had wanted for me.” Brown eyes lock with mine. “What she told me I should go out and find.”
My breath gets trapped in my lungs by the look on his face. Does he mean…?
“Natalie—” He’s interrupted by the doorbell. With a grimace, he steps away from me—when did he get that close, anyway?—and walks away. “That’ll be the dinner,” he calls over his shoulder.
I stand up on shaky legs, ready to follow him, annoyed that our moments together keep getting interrupted. The universe really needs to butt out of our business!
“You coming?”
I follow the sound of his voice and the smell of the food and am just leaving my blissful library space when a familiar book catches my eye. That can’t be right.
“Matthew?” He looks up from the dozens of containers on his kitchen counter—he really did order everything I asked for—a half-smile on his face. “Why do you have this?”
His expression goes from puzzled to blank in a millisecond. “Huh?”
I hold up a tattered copy of The Fundamentals of Human Physiology, the book I’d been reading when he first approached me, that fateful day when our lives intertwined for the first time.
“Why do you have this?” I repeat, my confusion only growing.
He bites his lower lip—again, I want to kiss it better—and shakes his head. “I’m not sure? It probably got packed with the rest of my stuff after high school and has just stayed with me ever since.”
I open the front page and read the words on the front page written neatly in blue glitter pen:
Property of Natalie Pappas Henderson.
