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She stared at him for a lingering moment, beaming. “Go make your call.”
He shut the door behind her and leaned on it, eyes closed. He’d barely let loose of his breath when he heard his phone ring.
* * *
Mariah openedthe bathroom door cautiously at first. She wasn’t wild about the idea of Sawyer’s mom figuring out why she was here, but she and Sawyer were adults. They didn’t have to explain themselves to anyone.
“Yes, sir,” she heard Sawyer say in a businesslike voice. Definitely not talking to his mom anymore. She was almost certain she’d heard the female Dr. Culver leave.
She poked her head out, and Sawyer glanced over at her distractedly. Before she could fully emerge, he’d walked into his bedroom and shut the door.
Okay, then.
This wasn’t good. He’d been borderline flipping out just before his mom had shown up, and now … now he didn’t so much as smile at her on his way past. Yes, he was busy on the phone, and she understood that, but a little grin would’ve gone a long way toward reassuring her.
She suspected reassurance wasn’t on the top of his mind. Or even in the top ten layers.
She wandered into the living room and discovered the shirt she’d taken off him draped over the lamp at the end of the couch.Fantastic. She hoped Dr. Culver had missed that.
As Mariah circled the room aimlessly, she could hear Sawyer’s muffled voice in the other room. Very official sounding. A hearty laugh here and there. But she couldn’t make out the words. At last, the bedroom door opened, and she heard Sawyer tell his caller good-bye. She waited for him to round the corner.
When he did, he wouldn’t meet her eyes. He seemed preoccupied, and she wasn’t even sure he knew she was still there.
“Is everything okay?” she asked from her spot by the glass door — the glass door she’d recently been nearly naked against.
“I got the job.” And yet he still wasn’t looking at her.
“Sawyer! That’s spectacular! Congratulations.”
He shuffled over to the couch and sat on the arm, a couple feet away from her. “Thanks.” His forehead was wrinkled with concern. “Mariah, this afternoon was a mistake.”
Disbelief jolted through her. “Really? A mistake?”
“Yes,” he said quietly.
“See, I think of a mistake more like when you do a math problem and you accidentally add instead of multiply so you get the wrong answer. Or when you’re doing a dance routine and you fall on your ass, and the whole audience knows because there’s no way to camouflage it. Not when something happens that’s freaking out-of-this-world amazing, that practically alters the tilt of the earth on its axis.”
“It shouldn’t have happened. It wasn’t fair of me to let it happen.”
“I don’t think you could have stopped it if you’d tried. It happened for a reason, Sawyer.”
He chuffed air out, almost like a laugh, but there was no humor in it. “It was a weak moment for both of us. We let our guard down.”
“If you have to keep your guard up to keep from havingthathappen, then you might need to rethink your priorities.”
“I told you what my priorities are.” He stood and strode to the opposite side of the room. After tossing his cell phone on the kitchen bar, he exhaled and faced her — though she noticed he didn’t look directly at her. “It has nothing to do with you, Mariah—”
“Awesome,” she broke in sarcastically. “One of those ‘it’s-not-you-it’s-me’ speeches.” She choked out a laugh. “The one guy I could get serious about, and instead I get a cliché.”
“Look how we got together. We were too drunk to stand up straight, let alone make a well-thought-out decision. I…” He swallowed and looked at the ceiling. “I didn’t know until today that we didn’t, in fact, sleep together.Thatis not how you start a promising relationship.”
“That was a fluke for both of us, Sawyer. You may think it was just another Saturday night for flirty Mariah, but I don’t let just any guy stay at my house. I’ve never let a man stay in that apartment with me for the four years I’ve lived there.”
His eyes sought out hers, though only for a moment, and then he shook his head shortly, scowling. “I don’t think that of you. I don’t know you, Mariah. You don’t know me. We got together because we were stewed, not because we have hope of making a good couple.”
Mariah bolstered herself against the pain of his words and straightened boldly. She wasn’t the type to shy away from something she cared about — and, stupidly or not, she cared about Sawyer. “We may have ended up having a slumber party because of the alcohol, but I’m here to tell you, in my experience, what just happened in your bedroom wasn’t something that occurs every day. Or every year. Or, I’ll go out on a limb and say, every lifetime.”
“That was chemistry.”
