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“What if I told you I was naked?”
I swallowed, the memory of my fingers sliding over his hard stomach filling my head. “Are you?”
His voice grew lower. “Would you like it if I were?”
“I’d worry you were cold.” I lowered my voice, too. “Shrinkage and all.”
His chuckle was low. “I’m still in what I wore to the rehearsal,” he said on a laugh. “Sorry. Nothing too sexy.”
My mind flashed again to his slacks sliding down and the buttons on his shirt as I undid them. “So—um—what’s up? Why did you text?”
“I already told you. I missed you tonight.”
“Lear, c’mon. You missed hooking up with me.”
“Yeah... That’s not all, though.”
I felt antsy, the temperature around me suddenly rising, and my fingers got twitchy at the return of his softer tone.
“It’s not that weird, is it? We’ve gotten kind of close.”
I looked around as if someone in the seating area would give me the right answer. “I don’t know,” I said finally.
He was quiet, and I rushed to fill the silence, a silence bracketed by the creeping anxiety at this shift. Was it even a shift? Whatever it was, it scared me, because I’d missed him, too, and that wasn’t acceptable. Letting “maybe” linger in my brain wasn’t acceptable. Missing someone, wanting them, thinking about them outside the tightly drawn boundaries I’d created was a recipe for getting hurt.
“I mean, no. It’s not weird, it’s just... you know what we are.”
“I kind of thought after last weekend...”
I let my eyes fall shut and read between the lines of that sentence. I’d been thinking about that night—the way his eyes locked on me from across the room, the way his hands felt on my body that left me flushed and excited but that wasn’t exactly sexual. It was just a dance, but apparently it hadn’t been just me thinking about our time together when we were apart, wondering what it would be like if there were more. I knew I’d been sending mixed signals, making him think there was more, but I couldn’t go through it again. “Lear...”
“No, it’s cool. My mistake. You’re right.” His tone brightened, but I could hear the lie in it, the smile he was faking.
I bit my lower lip. “It’s not you. I just don’t do...”
“RJ, it’s fine. Get back to your mobile office and I’ll talk to you later.”
After we hung up, I let my head fall back against the wall, regretting it immediately as who knew what child had smeared who knew what against the surface.What was that?I gave myself only a few moments to linger on the awkward conversation before forcingmyself to open the laptop. It was no use, though; my mind wandered, and I couldn’t focus on work.
It wandered to the way his voice changed when he said it was fine.
It wandered to Case’s indifferent expression, and my dad’s roses, and realizing the old friendship with Michael that I thought was stone was made of sand. I thought about all the times I’d expected a man to be there only to find he’d gone.
My mind wandered to how much I enjoyed kissing Lear. I wasn’t an indecisive person, and I didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about people’s feelings. I knew we couldn’t be more than sex, maybe friendship, but that was all I could give him. I had the sinking feeling that if I let myself have more, it would ruin me.
Still, my mind wandered back to Lear and how he’d looked at me when we danced.
No matter how many times I shook it off and leaned into work, my mind wandered back to what it was like when we were together, and I had to decide if I could leave things with him saying “It’s fine.” It was much harder to shake off than I wanted.
Chapter 34
Lear
I GLANCED ATthe clock on my nightstand, the numbers a taunt. I had to be out the door by eight a.m., but I’d tossed and turned, wide awake, and now it was almost three in the morning. I’d gotten twisted in my sheets, and Harold’s familiar phrase came back. I was all twisted up. Only this time it was over RJ and our phone call.
The weekend before, the morning in the hotel, the slow dance... I’d been certain it was something, but my radar was busted, my tools to detect what the hell was going on needed calibration. I hated making a fool of myself and I’d done it in a big way. I rolled to my other side, hoping if I didn’t see the time, I could ignore it. The other side of my pillow was cool against my face and I willed myself to go to sleep, but every time I closed my eyes, I imagined RJ’s real smile, the one where she bit her tongue between her lips, and the way the slightly crooked fingertips I loved twitched when she was annoyed, and the way she sighed after a deep kiss, unaware she was doing it.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand and I reached for it, assuming it would be Caitlin checking in. She’d grown up here and she knew the time difference, but she never seemed to care when shewanted to tell me something. It wasn’t her name, though. RJ’s face along withYou up?sat on my lock screen.
