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“So you get where I stand. Now you need to decide where you do, inside the door or out. Because I don’t have the patience for the one foot in the door, one foot out the door shit.”
“Shane, I…”
“Need time. I get it. If you want, I’ll take you home. You can think it over. But in or out, your ass is now obligated to come to Fee’s with me to move furniture next Saturday.”
“If by ‘move furniture’ you mean hand out beers while you men do the grunt work, sure,” she said as she moved away, locating her shoes and slipping in.
“That’s exactly what I meant. You ready?” I asked, getting into my own shoes and grabbing my keys.
“Think the building will still be standing?” she asked as she opened the door, eyes a little wicked.
“No promises,” I said, watching as she took off down the stairs for a long minute before locking up and following her down, a part of me hoping the place was rubble so I could have a reason to have her in my place instead.
But I kept that shit to myself because it was crazy as fuck.TWELVELeaOkay.
Yeah.
Things happened.
Stuff was said.
Shane dropped me off at my still-standing apartment building, giving me a quick, almost rough kiss on the temple, his stubble scratching in a delicious way. Then he patted my ass and told me he would see me later and that he needed to clear the branches out of the parking lot.
I let myself into my apartment and sank down on my bed, my heart still beating way too fast… as it had been doing almost since I woke up that morning. See, I had felt it the night before too. Whatever it was that made Shane give me that speech, I felt it. I didn’t even recognize it, the concept being completely unfamiliar to me. It was a feeling of comfort, of rightness, of… home?
But that was insane.
A person couldn’t feel like home.
I would have been able to push that away, compartmentalize it, trivialize it.
Except then Shane had went ahead and said all the right things.
See… Shane was a bit of a brute. He was rough and tough and manly. He didn’t do teddy bears and ‘good morning, beautiful’ texts. But that was exactly what I liked best about him. He was just… real. He didn’t try, nor did he have to. Like he said, he showed his interest in his own way. And when he spoke, he said things. It was refreshing. It was nice to know exactly what was on his mind… even if what was on his mind scared the bejesus out of me.
The thing was, I’d had a colorful enough life to know that when things made you pee-your-pants scared, they usually turned out to be the best experiences. And I had a sneaking suspicion that giving Shane a chance would be one hell of a story. Hell, even if it crashed and burned. Even if it ended in ashes.
It probably would.
And the closer we got, the more we were together, the more he would want from me. He would want details of my life before, details that I could not give him.
It would fail when I refused to give those pieces of myself away.
But did that mean I should push him away before then?
Yeah, that was the question of the day.
And every time I thought I got closer to figuring it out, more contradictory evidence surfaced.
It was a long, frustrating morning until, out of nowhere, my landline blared, making me actually yelp it was so unexpected. I only connected it for emergencies, to cover my bases, in case something happened and my cell was out of reach. I never gave it out to anyone.
“Hello?”
“You should really have a lock screen on your cell. Just saying’,” the unfamiliar, deep masculine voice said.
My cell? My cell should have been in my bag in my car in front of work. “Who the hell is this?” I snapped, my voice sharp.
There was a deep, rumbling chuckle that any sane woman would respond to. “This is Colton King.”
Colton King? Christ, that sounded like a romance novel or porn star name. “Is that name supposed to mean something to me?
Again, the chuckle. Apparently, Colton King found me amusing. “Maybe not, love. I have your car at my shop.”
“Why would you have my car?”
There was a short pause that I didn’t think anything of at the time before he responded. “Township was doing street sweeps. It had to move. I took the opportunity to look it over.”
A part of me wanted to snap at the presumptuousness of that; the other part was painfully aware that the car really did need to be looked over so I shouldn’t bitch about it being done. “And?”
“It’s not pretty,” he hedged.
