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He really hadn’t hit her that hard. Just a light sting at the time. It had merely stayed in her mind like a whole hive had descended on her backside. She had a strange desire to bend over the sink and give herself a thwack with the brush, imagining him doing it again, while she put her fingers between her thighs and…
Clearly her emotional state wasn’t hampering the flare of arousal, strong enough to remind her how difficult it had been to tamp it down last night, especially when his leg had been pressed against her core. A little mortified at how tempted she’d been to rub herself against him, she put those thoughts aside and focused on getting cleaned up.
Her scrubs and underwear, clean and folded, were on the counter. They were beneath a change of clothes, far closer to her size than his sweatshirt. A pair of jeans and a light green T-shirt with a daisy print on it, size small. He’d also left a package of socks and cotton underwear. Her shoes had been dried.
He must have made a quick run out to a dollar store, the tags still on the clothes. The jeans were a little long, not unusual for when she bought them for herself, and a little loose in the butt, but they fit.
After she brushed her hair, she French braided it and used a rubber band from the supplies on his desk to hold the end. It left her bangs framing her temples, the wisps of them falling just above her eyes. Which looked tired, her mouth compressed. A more succinct reinforcement was in order. She bared her teeth at the mirror.
“I’m a grown woman. Act the fuck like it.”
But a grown woman took responsibility, didn’t she? When he was ten, Rory had broken one of his father’s tools. He’d tried to hide it, then pass it off as someone else’s doing. Her dad had told him, “You break something, you fix it. If you don’t know how, you ask. If it can’t be fixed, you figure out the next best thing to make it up to the person you’ve wronged.” He’d then given Rory the rare but effective “scary dad” look. “And you never lie about it.”
Despair surged through her, because what she’d done, there was no fixing or replacing it, no compensating someone for that kind of loss. But there was accepting responsibility, and facing the consequences, whatever they were. That was what an adult did. Not running away and showing up on the doorstep of her childhood crush so he had no choice but to take her in.
“I can hear you tying your head into knots.”
She started. Stepping out of the bathroom, she found herself alone, but before she could decide she was losing her mind, Brick’s deep voice spoke again, and she located the intercom beside the open bedroom door.
“Come on down and get some breakfast. We have a full schedule today.”
She was going to push the reply button, but he continued in a lazy drawl. “Don’t make me come and get you. It’s not your job to punish yourself. It’s mine. I was only getting warmed up with that brush.”
He said outrageous, crazy things, and her insides turned over. Not to mention what it did to the rest of her. He’d said last night they needed to talk about this kind of stuff. She wasn’t sure if she was ready for that, but she’d take any conversation over one about why she was here.
As she headed downstairs, and made the turn into the living room, she noted more pictures over the entryway table. His family. His dad had been an American history teacher at her middle school. She hadn’t seen Brick’s mother much, outside of church or community functions, but they seemed like good and loving parents. He had a brother and a sister, the same sibling make-up as her family. Brick had been the middle child, another thing he and Rory had in common.
The living room had the inevitable big flat screen for Brick to stretch out on his sectional and enjoy a game. He also had an overloaded bookcase down here. While the one upstairs was work-related, this one held fiction, history and poetry. Classics like Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, mysteries and thrillers by authors such as Louise Penny or Jack Carr. There were books of poetry and a section on Civil War history, which included worn volumes of letters compiled from the time period.
His father had done re-enacting, she remembered, and Brick had accompanied him to some of the events when he was younger, before they came to Fairhope. She recalled most things Brick told Rory, when she was in earshot. And if Brick was at the house, she made sure she was. Which was why her hand lingered on a book of poetry by John Donne.
“You a fan?”
Brick leaned in the doorway to the kitchen, one hand in his jeans pocket, the other braced on the frame. She wondered how long he’d been there. He wore a black T-shirt with a red Richmond FD emblem on the pocket. She tried to keep her gaze on his face, rather than giving in to the magnetic pull to peruse his broad shoulders and chest, and the fit of the jeans.
He looked every bit as good as he had last night.
She didn’t look like a drowned rat, which was an improvement. But—an unwelcome reminder of what else she needed to handle—she didn’t look like a long-legged blonde.
His question about the poetry should have been an easy yes, no, I-don’t-know answer. Because it wasn’t, she couldn’t answer that until she got the other out in the open.
“I feel like I owe someone an apology.” She cleared her throat. “Or I should hit you for being a jerk. Maybe both.”
“You’ll have to explain that.” His gray eyes didn’t falter. Her skin flushed under her clothes, wanting touch.
“The woman you dropped off. You kissed her. Are you involved with her? I mean, that’s not my business, but if you are…you should have put me in your guest room.”
“Her name is Tish. Short for Leticia. She and I aren’t in a relationship. Not that kind.”
She met his stare, refusing to back down. “Friends with benefits?”
It didn’t matter that she was swamped by that same strange compulsion to kneel when she challenged him like this. Certain things were dealbreakers for her in a relationship, and she would stand on two feet when she faced them.
The slow blink seemed like a courteous acknowledgement of her right to make that decision. “It started that way. But it’s not that anymore. I'll explain it if you answer my first question. Are you a fan of John Donne?”
“Yes…or not exactly. I overheard you talking about him once, to Rory and Todd.”
He’d been explaining a poem for an English assignment they had to do. She’d crept out of her room to sit on the floor outside Rory’s door, hoping to hear Brick’s voice, to listen to anything he was saying. They’d jeered at him when he told them to read the poem aloud.
