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“What job?” She removed her gaze from the doorway and looked at Geraldine. “He’s never told me what he does for a living.”
“Oh.” Geraldine’s eyes rounded. “Commercial fisherman.”
That didn’t sound right. “He said he doesn’t fish?”
“Oh.”
“What?” Lexie said through a laugh. “Is it a secret?”
“Yeah.” Geraldine nodded. “So secret we can’t talk about it.”
Which of course made Lexie super curious. “Does he work for the government?”
“If I told ya, I’d have to kill ya.” Geraldine laughed like she was real funny. Evidently Geraldine meant it, too. Above the sound of Wendy’s last segment, Geraldine talked about everything but Sean. She recited a lifetime of her misery. With every “Bless you” or “I’m so sorry” Lexie uttered in commiseration, the older woman elaborated and exaggerated her suffering.
I’m being punished, Lexie thought. Punished for:
Running out on her wedding.
Cowardly hiding out.
Having bad thoughts. a. Masking tape.
Geraldine’s mouth.
Finally, at noon, she left her spot on the couch and made lunch. She whipped up chicken salad sandwiches, complete with grapes, walnuts, and cranberries. She garnished the plates with radish roses. Geraldine loved the garnish, hated the multigrain bread, and ate it all despite that.
Lexie didn’t wait around to chat with Geraldine. Instead she stuffed several paper napkins in the breast pocket of the shirt Sean had loaned her, loaded up a plate, and walked up the stairs next to the back door. The top floor was mostly one big room filled with exercise equipment and a hallway with several closed doors near the back. Lexie’s footsteps faltered, and she almost dropped the plate as her eyes came to a skidding halt on a sweaty, half-naked Sean doing crunches on an exercise ball. An Edmonton Oilers hat covered his head, and he’d changed into a pair of red gym shorts and CrossFit shoes, but her eyeballs weren’t stuck on his shoes. They were glued to his bare chest and the sweaty glow covering his bare skin. A bead of sweat dripped from the dark hair in the hollow of his armpits to the exercise ball. Normally, all that sweat would have grossed her out, but he wasn’t a normal guy.
“I made lunch,” she said, and made her way across his line of vision to a workout bench.
She took a seat and placed the plate beside her. When she looked over at him, he was sitting on the ball, knees shoulder width apart, just looking back at her blankly. That’s when she noticed he was wearing earbuds.
“I made lunch,” she repeated herself. She tried not to stare as he rose and walked toward her, all hard muscles and sculpted abs. A bead of perspiration ran down the center of his chest to wet the happy trail circling his navel and disappearing beneath his waistband.
“Thanks.” He grabbed a towel from a weight machine and dried his face and chest. “You can go back downstairs if you want.”
For some reason, that sounded like he wanted to get rid of her, but she wasn’t ready to leave. “I’m good.” He stopped in front of her, and her eyes just naturally landed on his happy trail dipping south. She felt her cheeks warm as she lifted her gaze up his flat belly and the defined muscles of his chest. She looked past his square chin and into his deep green eyes looking right back at her. She felt like a perv, but where was she supposed to look? “I just need a few moments of sanity before I go back down,” she said. “I need a short break from hearing the details of your mother’s near-death experiences,” she said.
One side of his mouth twisted upward in an uneven smile as he tossed the towel aside and sat on the other end of the bench. He picked up half a sandwich and took two huge bites.
“Hungry?”
He smiled as he chewed and pointed to the other sandwiches.
“No thank you.” She’d snacked as she’d made lunch, but mostly she wasn’t hungry after listening to Geraldine’s bowel movement disorder. “The description of your mother’s skin lesions and bloody stools made me lose my appetite.”
His smile fell and he reached for a big bottle of BioSteel on the floor. His green eyes got a little squinty at the corners, like maybe she’d insulted his mother.
“Not that she isn’t a lovely woman.”
He swallowed almost the entire bottle before he lowered it. “She’s a hypochondriac.”
Even though several feet separated them, Lexie felt the heat of him rolling off in waves. It surrounded and pressed in on her. Overpowering her senses like a blowtorch to the face, and she liked it.
“Growing up, I was a hypochondriac,” she said into the uncomfortable silence. She reached into her breast pocket and pulled out the paper napkins and put them next to the plate. “Band-Aids were my addiction, and I loved the pain relievers my mother kept on hand for me. It wasn’t until I was about ten that I discovered the pain relievers were actually white Smarties.” He grabbed another sandwich and a BioSteel from the pack on the floor by his foot. “I know you’re probably thinking that I should have figured out that the medicinal Smarties where just like all Smarties, but I didn’t figure it out until I was ten.” She glanced up at the A-frame ceiling painted a bright white. “I don’t know why it took me so long to figure it out.”
He popped the top off his sports drink and sucked down half the bottle. “White Smarties taste like orange cream.”
