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My gaze roamed over the curve of his ass, even though it shouldn’t have, even as guilt, confusion, shame, andheatpercolated in my core.
Leland quickened his pace, and I backed away, disappointed in myself, and at a loss for what was happening inside of me.
He threw his head back, his body going rigid as he uttered something hoarsely, and I’d barely made it to the apartment’s front door without choking on the knot settling in my throat.
By the time Leland jogged down the building’s front steps, I’d worked out three different speeches for why we couldn’t continue this friendship. Yet I allowed him to climb into the passenger seat and toss his duffle bag in the back. He smelled fresh, too clean for the dirty images now replaying in my mind.
All my speeches went out the window when he looked at me innocently, the sun striking his honey-brown eyes and turning them golden from that angle. “Ready?” he asked. I was positive he meant whether or not I was ready to leave, but my brain supplied other options.
Ready for more? Ready to confess why you really asked me to stay last night? Ready to admit why you’d asked the mechanics to take their time with my car?
I had a feeling every word he uttered moving forward would have at least ten different translations to my over-analyzing brain.
I stifled a shudder as those pools of churning honey held me hypnotized. I should’ve said no, that I wasn’t ready for any of it, especially as a familiar feeling warned me that I’d been here, in this exact predicament, before.
“Well?” Leland asked, his mouth kicking up into a slight grin. “Are you ready?”
“Yes,” I breathed, my answer just as ambiguous as his question.
Chapter 6
Leland
“Unbelievable,” Franky hissed from the patio, and I froze with my paintbrush suspended in mid-air. It was hard to make out his form amidst the piles of debris and tools, but movement drew my eyes to where he crouched on the other side of the table saw.
“Was that agoodunbelievable, or a bad one?” I asked, because he’d been in a bad mood ever since leaving my apartment a few days ago, and while I’d done my best to not take it personally by chalking it up to his numerous failed attempts at building something stable, it was kind of hard not to feel like my presence had been the thing ticking him off.
It wasn’t in what he said, but the opposite. As the master of quiet, his silence tended to be chillingly loud in its intensity, a red flag to my instincts, warning me to give him space.
Last night, I’d watched him stare into the still, black water beyond the dock from my bedroom window for over an hour before finding the courage to brave whatever had him so far inside his own head. After creeping up behind him and asking if he wanted me to leave, he’d turned on me, the action slow, making it apparent that he’d known I was there, even though it had taken me minutes to finally speak.
His eyes, the color of a starless night sky, had bored into me, and I’d backed up a step as something resembling pain swirled through their dark depths.“No,”he’d said, the low illumination of the dock lights throwing shadows along his tensed frame.“The last thing I want is for you to leave.”
Then why had it felt like leaving was what he’dneededfrom me?
“The good kind,” he said from the patio, bringing me back to the here and now. I descended the ladder, discarding my brush into a mason jar on my way outside.
“A coffee table,” I guessed, squatting next to him and running a palm over the top of it.
“Careful,” he warned, gripping my wrist with more strength than was needed. “I haven’t sanded it yet.” Franky let one knee hit the ground, his other knee bumping into mine as he examined my hand for splinters. His touch lacked the delicate finesse of someone concerned, but his face twisted with concentration as he inspected my skin. I assumed he didn’t realize his own brawn, or that he didn’t believe he had to be gentle with me.
His warm breath hit my palm, and I instinctively curled my fingers as a metaphorical fist clamped around my heart.
“I’m fine,” I said, or maybe panted, as he released me and got to his feet. Shit was getting weird really fast between us, and I quickly did the math on the last time I’d had sex. Was that the problem? Was the seclusion getting to my libido, which seemed to kick into gear whenever Franky looked at me the way he did now, like he again didn’t want me to leave, but needed me to go?
“It’s a little too high,” he said, sliding his hands into his back pockets, but not before I noticed them flex as if fighting against taking a hold of something. “My measurements of the legs were off, but at least it’s level. Doesn’t look like much now, but it’ll come to life after it’s sanded and varnished.”
“You did it,” I said, my smile growing until it ached, the weirdness from a second ago forgotten as it hit me that we wouldn’t be adding another piece to the furniture graveyard that one of the garages had been turned into. He’d done it. “You fucking did it.”
Franky dragged a thumb and forefinger down the corners of his mouth as he nodded cooly. “Yeah.”
“For fuck’s sake, Franky,” I said, a touch exasperated but mostly amused. “Drop the cool-kid act and be flipping happy. You did it!” I attempted to lift him into the air, but he was all muscle and didn’t budge. “Someone needs to hit the gym,” I muttered, rubbing my lower back.
“Are you alright?” he asked, steadying me by my shoulders. “You can’t pick me up, Leland.”
“No shit. I got carried away in my excitement. What the hell are your bones made out of anyway? Bricks? I’ll be fine,” I said when his concern lingered tightly around the corners of his mouth. “You did it, Franky,” I said again, getting us back to the victory at hand. We stared down at the table in a moment of silence.
An earthquake erupted around Franky’s lips until they parted and gave way to sound. He laughed without restraint, and I watched, reacquainting myself with this side of him after drowning in his tension for days.
