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“Steps,” I agreed, seeing the logic in that. It had helped in the immediate aftereffects of the attack. If it could work for that, it sure could work for this as well, this muddling through until I felt better.
“Exactly. Then pretty soon, you’ll just start doing this stuff without having to think about it, without having to think about why you are doing it. By then, everything will be cleared up. And maybe you will be able to move on to a new house that doesn’t hold the same ghosts.”
“You make it sound easy.”
“Easy? No,” he said, his thumb stroking gently at the side of my jaw. “But you can do it.”
“How could you know that?” I said, rolling my eyes, even as my belly started to do flip-flops at his touch. “You don’t even know me.”
“Not much, no. But I know enough to say you’re going to get through it. You got through eight months of harassment with no help from anyone, no one to lean on. So you can get through this. And now you have me.”
I was in the middle of convincing myself that he didn’t mean that the way I was maybe hoping he did when I watched his eyes flicker down to my lips.
I could barely even process that before his head was lowering down, and his lips were pressing into mine.
Really, it was just a hint of a touch, just the promise of an actual kiss, but I felt it somewhere deep. I could feel myself swaying into him as it deepened, as his hand slid up my jaw, then back around to the base of my neck, holding me still as his lips demanded more, as his tongue moved out and invaded, stroking over mine, as my belly went liquid, and my heartbeat skittered into overdrive.
“I knew something was up with her!” a familiar voice called a few feet away. “Didn’t I say she was acting weird, Kenny?” Oh, God. My boss, Kennedy. And her best friend, Benny. “Homegirl has a booooyfriend!”
I shocked back at that, my hips slamming against my car, eyes shooting open, wide, as Quin looked down at me, then over toward the sidewalk, assessing the situation.
“We tell you everything!” Benny said, moving closer. “Ev-ry-thing. I told you about my bitter custody battle over my baby.” His dog. Technically, his ex-boyfriend’s dog. But there had been a, ah, custody battle since the breakup.
I felt Quin take a step back as I half-turned toward Benny who was closing in on me.
“It’s not what you think.”
“Making out on the sidewalk in front of She’s Bean Around with that sexy piece of man flesh? It had better be what I think. Oh, girl. And look at that car.”
It was right that moment that I realized said car was purring.
Meaning, he was in it and had turned it over.
Even as my head turned to look, he was reversing, and pulling away.
He didn’t even look in my direction.
SIX
Quin
What the fuck was wrong with me?
I had no business texting her at all, let alone asking her out to coffee.
I wasn’t the kind of man who sat and wondered what his client was doing, how they were coping, if they needed anything.
It was always someone else’s job to check-in, to make sure everything was going the way we had told them it had to go.
Yet that was all I could think of after five, when I knew she was likely heading back to that house that no longer felt much like home. I managed to bury the urge under work for a few hours before I couldn’t fight it, and reached for my phone.
When she first walked into the coffeehouse, it looked like she was Atlas, shouldering the world. It was a feeling I understood, that I knew many other people I had come across understood, that I knew from experience would slowly lessen until only a small bit of it was there on your shoulder anymore. You had to survive. Eventually, your brain got the memo and shut that shit down, only to haunt you in rare moments, or in sleep.
It wasn’t my place to want to lift that, not even for a little while.
Yet that was what I had tried to do.
Then I went and kissed her.
It was a good fucking one too, up until her coworkers interrupted.
Which, as I drove away, I tried to convince myself was for the best. A two-minute kiss out front of the coffee place was never going to be enough otherwise. I’d have offered to follow her home. And then I would have told her I would look through the house for her, ease her mind.
Then shit was going to go down.
Whether or not it was smart – or even ethical given the situation – I was interested. Maybe not in settling down and raising a family, but in getting to know more of her. Naked. Preferably naked.
