“I’m talking about it like it was easy.”
“It doesn’t sound easy.”
She was just going to ask the question that had been swirling around in her head all evening. “Why are you being so nice to me?”
She expected him to send her an eye roll, or deliver a witty rejoinder. She wouldn’t have minded. In fact, she might have appreciated the chance to return their conversation—their relationship, whatever that meant—to more familiar footing.
He tilted his head and contemplated her like she was a paintingin a museum, staring at her for so long that she started to grow unsettled. She had asked the question sincerely. So why should she be surprised that he was apparently giving his answer serious consideration?
Finally he said, “I don’t know why I’m being nice to you.” He reached out and placed his palm on her cheek. Just as quickly, before she could fully process that it had ever been there, he retracted it.
She was able to process, though, that she had a real problem here.
“I really don’t have a TV,” Jack said as he unlocked the door to his condo. “We can watch something on my computer if you want to, though.”
“Nah, let’s skip it. I’m reading a great book right now. I think I’ll just read for a while and go to bed. What time do you want to head out tomorrow?” They were driving to his friend’s cabin in the morning.
“We should leave by eight. What are you reading?”
“Askance.”
“I can report that it is all it’s cracked up to be,” Jack said.
“Well, the Nobel Prize committee said so, too. I’m late to the game.”
“I have another book of hers, the previous one. I’ve been meaning to read it.”
“We should have some SSR.”
“I am almost afraid to ask what SSR is.”
“Sustained silent reading. My second-grade teacher, Mrs. Billings, used to declare SSR time. In retrospect, it was probably when she couldn’t handle us anymore. But I internalized the acronym. I used to have SSR with my kids once they were old enough to read on their own. We’d pile onto the sofa and everyone would read their own books.”
“Sold,” he said, throwing his keys on a console table inside thefront door and walking over to the truly glorious floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that lined one side of the living room.
Blair had no idea why she had suggested they read together. She’d nixed the idea of TV because the prospect of sitting next to him on the couch huddled over a computer was not appealing. Or it was too appealing. One or the other, and they amounted to the same thing: not a good idea.
“Here it is.” He picked a book from his library.
“I have to go change. SSR is done in pajamas.”
“Got it.” He set his book on a table next to an armchair and reversed course.
“You don’t have to put on pajamas. I personally can’t do SSR in street clothes, but you can do what you like.”
“No, it makes sense. Meet you back here shortly.”
Uh-oh. She wasn’t sure why reading in pj’s with Jack felt dangerous. It wasn’t as if they were going to jump each other as they had that last night at her house. That had been… a weird confluence of circumstances. If jumping were going to happen, she suspected it would have by now.
There would be no jumping.
Alas.
Jack reappeared wearing the same pair of plaid pajama pants he’d had on that last night in her kitchen and a short-sleeved gray Henley. It was an unremarkable ensemble to wear to sleep. Or to lounge around and read.
And yet.
“I brought you eight million blankets.” He dumped not eight million but three covers of varying types next to her on the couch.
