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CAL: Seems or would?
ASTRID: Good night, Cal.
CAL: Good night, Astrid.
CAL: Thank you for the gift card for the super-secret shakes.
ASTRID: xo
Chapter Thirty-Two
Astrid was trapped between a doorjamb and the suspicious glare of the building bully, Mrs. Duffy.
“Please,” Astrid said, sending every please-stop-hating-me-just-for-the-next-two-minutes vibe possible toward her next-door neighbor. “Can I come in for just a minute?”
Her octogenarian nemesis wiped her nose with a Kleenex and then tucked it up her sleeve before asking, “Why?”
Astrid wasn’t about to admit it was because she was hiding from Cal so she wouldn’t do all of the things with him, to him, near him that she kept getting herself off to. She definitely wasn’t going to tell Mrs. Duffy that her only contact with him was via text—texts that she looked forward to every day and reread over and over in bed until she fell asleep. And there was no way she’d ever confess to anyone—let alone the meanest woman in the building—that she had used one of her new pink pens to doodle hearts with a C in the middle of them like some kind of obsessed teenager. She would take that one to the grave.
But she had to tell her something.
What would get her in the door and out of this hallway? It wasn’t like she could appeal to the other woman’s sense of being neighborly. Mrs. Duffy was more likely to trip a toddler with her tennis-ball-tipped cane than let Astrid borrow a cup of sugar. The most feared resident in the building didn’t go in for neighborly chats in her kitchen or even polite hellos in the hallway, for that matter. The stern senior citizen who scared even Astrid’s dad didn’t suffer fools, shenanigans, or people with nose rings.
Elizabeth Duffy had been here before Astrid had moved in three years ago, and she’d probably be haunting the place long after everyone on Earth who was breathing today had died. And yet, at the moment, she was Astrid’s only hope.
Down in the lobby, Jada thanked Cal for help hauling her lab Rufus up all three flights of stairs. The teen’s “Hello, Mr. Matsen” had carried up the flight of stairs to Astrid’s floor a minute ago, tipping her off to danger right as she’d been about to go down and grab her mail.
That was the point when Astrid would usually go hide in her apartment until the coast was clear. She’d been just about to do that when she’d realized she’d locked herself out. And her extra key? Down at the pub with Nola.
“His arthritis is almost as bad as my mom’s,” Jada said. “Now if you just put one arm in front of Rufus’s chest and the other around his back legs and under his butt, he’ll whine, but he won’t snap at you.”
“Good to know,” Cal said.
The unhappy complaints of the eighty-pound lab echoed up the open staircase as Cal, presumably, picked up the dog.
Astrid’s heart was going a million miles a millisecond. She had sixty seconds tops before he was far enough up the steps to see her standing in the hall.
“He’s just an old achy guy. He’s not mean—or at least he’s not on purpose,” Jada continued, her voice getting louder as they moved toward the steps. “I’d do it myself, but I twisted my ankle during the game last night, and we’re only three weeks out from playoffs, and I don’t want to make it worse before then. I’m the team’s point leader.”
Jada said something else, but it was just white noise to Astrid as her body went into panic mode.
Cal was coming.
The man she’d spent the past two weeks avoiding was coming up the stairs right now.
Mrs. Duffy cleared her throat of what sounded like two decades of built-up annoyance. “Am I just standing in my open doorway because of my cheerful disposition or was there something you wanted?”
“I want to apologize,” Astrid said in a desperate whisper as she edged closer to the open door.
The look in the old woman’s eyes matched her steely hair. “For what?”
Sweat trickled down the back of Astrid’s neck. A slow single stream of absolute fucking freakout because she knew—knew—she couldn’t trust herself around him. Especially when he was coming up the stairs with an adorable arthritic dog in his arms? Her panties might well invent teleportation. She could not bang him again. She could not bang him again.
Lungs tightening and the rush of blood in her ears getting louder, Astrid glanced back over her shoulder. “Not being a good neighbor?”
“Why is that a question,” the old lady snapped. “You either are apologizing for your appalling lack of manners or you aren’t.”
The top of Cal’s head cleared the sightline to the hallway.
