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Something tall and metal and yellow slid past. Gravel crunched as if it were turning in. Then the awful sputtering stopped.
“Huh,” she breathed. Maybe someone wanted to slip her a hundred dollars to tune up a bulldozer or something. She was watching the side lot closely when Quinn walked into her vision.
Lori jumped back and frowned at the windowsill. For a couple of weeks there, she’d thought she’d seen him everywhere. At the grocery store, at the diner, even passing by in a car full of teenagers. But those had been brief glimpses of men with light brown hair and wide shoulders. She’d never hallucinated him entirely before.
Holding her breath, Lori leaned forward to look again, and the doorbell suddenly chimed. Her forehead hit the window with a sharp crack. “Oh, myGod!”
It couldn’t be him, could it? She was wearing red sweatpants, for God’s sake. And he couldn’t be here anyway. The pass was closed.
She’d finally lost it. The stress of the past year had been too much.
The stoop wasn’t visible from here, but she pressed her face hard to the glass, regardless, straining to see. It was just the bulldozer driver. Or it was just the UPS guy, and the sun had hit him in some weird way that added five inches of height and a few more of shoulder. Or…
Lori gasped.
Maybe it was the driver of an old, beat-up backhoe.
A man stepped backward, head tilted up. “Lori, is that you?”
“Ah!” She stumbled back from Quinn’s voice. Not only was she wearing red sweatpants, but she’d had her cheek squished against the window like a two-year-old making faces. How was she supposed to present a vision of burgeoning successnow?
No, no, no. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. She’d planned to casually drop by his place next summer. She would just happen to be wearing tight jeans and expensive heels. She’d mention her trip to Europe as if it were nothing. She’d be wearing the right day-of-the-week underwear for once.
Oh, God, it was Friday and she was wearing Thursday. A perfect storm.
“Lori?” he called.
She dropped the pants. And the underwear. “Just a second!” Naked from the waist down, she raced out the door and down the steps. The window was open, so she ran faster, hoping he’d keep staring at the second story. She nearly fell when she got to the bottom step, but held back a scream by sheer force of will. She wouldnotbe found sprawled at the bottom of the stairs wearing only tube socks and a tank top.
She spotted her jeans on the floor as soon as she hit her bedroom and tugged them on in record time. “One second!” she screamed as she sprinted for the bathroom to pat her hair into something bearable. She swiped the sweat off her forehead, took a deep breath and went to answer the door.
Quinn looked very troubled when she tugged the door open so hard it slammed into the far wall. His smile looked a little sick. “Um, hi.”
“Hi!” she said too brightly.
He glanced past her. “Is this a bad time?”
“No, not at all!”
“Are you all right?”
“Sure, I’m great!”
His eyes traveled down to her chest and back up. “You’re, um, kind of breathing hard. Do you…Am I interrupting something?” He looked behind her again, his jaw tightening.
“No, I just ran down the stairs and…” Wait a minute, did he think she’d been having sex? Lori smiled. “Whoever he is, he’ll wait. What can I do for you?”
Quinn’s eyes snapped back to her face.“What?”
She laughed, wheezing a little since she was already panting. “I’m just cleaning, you dork.”
“Oh,” he said. Then “Oh!” again as a wide smile spread over his face. “Okay, good. I just wanted to…Uh, I hope you don’t mind me stopping by.”
“Not at all,” she chirped. “What’s up?”
“I told you I’d bring you the backhoe, so…”
“Really?”
