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Their eyes met. She knew. She knew exactly why his eyes had taken so long to find hers.
“Right this way,” she said, still smiling as she began backpedaling, motioning with both arms like a traffic conductor that he should follow.
Obeying, he quickly hung his coat, shut the door, and hoped she didn’t see as much color in his face as he suspected there would be.
The apartment inside was spacious, finely decorated, and pristinely kept—for the most part. Here and there, a few imperfections sprung up. In the foyer, where several sets of shoes were less orderly than their neighbors; in the kitchen sink, where some recently used pots needed cleaning; in the living room, where a blanket on the couch was messily balled up. He hazarded a guess that it was a bit of a yin-yang thing the two women had going on. He was curious about how they knew each other. Although he didn’t want to make too many assumptions, Anna didn’t strike him as the type to make merry with the… lively kind of woman that Avril struck him as.
Furthermore, as Avril beckoned him toward that same long couch in the living room where the blanket was balled up, a new thought emerged within his mind.
If she’s here, why can’t she go ice skating with Anna?
“Come on over and have a seat with me,” Avril said just a second before she thrust a vaulting arm onto the back of the couch and tossed herself onto the cushions. “I wanna get to know you a little before Anna gets back.”
“Before… she gets back?” Liam repeated, brow knitting together.
Avril reached over to the middle cushion, picking up a smartphone left discarded when she’d come to answer him at the door. She then picked upanothersmartphone from the coffee table in front of the couch. One in each hand, she waved them around like glowsticks at a rave.
A few seconds passed before the cogs in Liam’s head lurched into motion.
“It’s beenyouall day?!”
Avril grinned. “It’s stupidly hard to text like Anna does. It’s why you got such long delays from time to time. I have to remember how to be polite and stuff. ‘I would be delighted if you could come.’ Only Anna could text like that and not die of shame.”
Confusion slammed into Liam’s head like someone had dropped a cinderblock onto it. Stupefied, he struggled to recuperate enough of his thoughts to form a coherent sentence. Or a question. Definitely a question.
“Why would you do that?”
The gorgeous woman put both phones onto the coffee table, then patted the spot beside her. “Come on over, and I’ll explain it to you.”
Likely for the first time in her life, a man approached Avril warily. Amusement radiated off her as he approached, and she pulled a knee in and turned to face him. She gave the couch’s middle cushion one more welcoming pat.
The messily balled-up blanket owned the other cushion, allowing him only one option if he planned to sit down. And so, like a gazelle hoping the watering hole remained neutral ground, Liam placed himself beside the lioness who eyed him hungrily.
After a protracted examination of him, in which she tilted from side to side, she spontaneously announced, “You’re cute. Anna’s going to be a very lucky girl.”
“Uh, thanks?”
“Polite, easy to talk to, seemingly intelligent—all her words when she got back last night,” Avril continued without missing a beat. “All in all, it sounded like Tess was right on the money about you.”
Liam blushed slightly, unsure of how to reply. Confusion still had its claws into him, but thankfully, roundabout as it was, Avril seemed to be heading to a point.
“It’s too bad you couldn’t keep your cards a little bit closer to your chest. If it was anyone else, they might not have noticed.”
Avril paused, Cheshire grin revealing rows of sparkling white teeth.
“Noticed what?” Liam asked, brow furrowing.
“That your head over heels for Professor Williams. You’ve got it baddd, I hear.”
Liam flinched as if a bee had stung him on his bottom eyelid. The treacherously revealing crimson followed, splashing across his face like paint. For all the wrong reasons, his heart rate pounded inside his chest.
“Don’t bother denying it,” Avril said. “I’ve known Anna since we were kids, and she isneverwrong about this. For how romantically stunted a life she’s had, she’s always been able to tell. Back in middle school, I’d make her look around the class and tell me whom everyone had crushes on. Like with everything else, she earned an A in that, too.”
The woman folded her arms beneath her heavy breasts, but Liam barely registered their alluring shift. He chewed on his thoughts, oscillating between embarrassment and confusion like a Geiger counter in a nuclear waste dump.
“Okay,” Liam said slowly, placing words onto their predecessors as if he were building a house of cards, “I won’t deny it. So…?”
“So, she decided it’d be uncomfortable if she tried to date you because of it. You went and spoiled all our plans to get her away from that douchebag, Trent. Way to go.”
