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“Exactly,” Eloise agreed. “He’s smirky! That’s exactly what he did! He came. He saw. He smirked. He was a condescending witness to my humiliation. And then, as if that wasn’t insulting enough, he saved me a bunch of time and money so I can’t even be mad about it.”
“A bastard,” Chloe agreed with a nod. “But is he a hot bastard?”
“Who knows? It’s hard to tell beneath all the smirking and the irritating attitude.” It was a lie but Eloise decided it was a harmless one. If she admitted what he did to her insides just by standing there, they’d never stop teasing her about it.
“Fair point.” Chloe glanced at her phone and made a disgusted face. “If you’re going to buy that dessert you’ve been drooling over in the menu for the last ten minutes, you’d better do it fast.”
Thankfully, that was enough for them to all drop the subject of her new neighbor. Eloise was still licking chocolate off her thumb as they waited for the elevator, having been forced to eat her melting eclair on their way back to the office. It was a short walk, but summer was coming, and the heat and humidity rose with each passing day.
“Glad to see you found a way to keep that pretty mouth of yours busy over lunch, Ms. Mason.”
Eloise flinched, quickly pulling her thumb away from her mouth and trying to paste a smile on her face as Sarah’s boss stopped beside their little group. The rest of the office might be full of men who did little to hide their biases and their objectification but few of them were that bold. Being pals with the head of the HR department had some pretty disgusting perks.
Dwayne had always brought to mind every stereotype Eloise had ever heard of used car salesmen. He was deceptively attractive for an older man, dark hair swept back from a well-sculpted face with a practiced smile that she imagined he thought was charming.
“Excuse me?” she asked, tipping her head to the side and feigning ignorance as embarrassed heat burned all the way down to her chest.
He stepped to the side slightly until he was close enough to brush against the sleeve of her blouse with his elbow. “Oh, was that inappropriate? You’re not going to go running to HR over a little joke, are you?”
She wished she could, wished it would do any good at all instead of getting her lectured over another apparent misunderstanding. “I?—”
“Ms. DeWitt can tell you I’m a good guy, can’t you Ms. DeWitt?” He took his eyes off Eloise just long enough to look pointedly over at Sarah. “You’d believe your friend if she told you I was a good guy, right?”
Eloise hated that. The way he hid behind a veneer of sweet southern manners and called them ‘Ms. Mason’ and ‘Ms. DeWitt’ while being a sleazy lowlife that made her skin crawl.
“Yeah, Dwayne’s really something.” Sarah’s voice was high and friendly, but she was staring at the floor, her jaw tight and her hands clenched in front of her at the waist.
“I believe everything Sarah’s told me about you,” Eloise assured Dwayne and he smiled placidly, unaware of how many times a week Sarah called him a disgusting fuckface behind his back.
The elevator doors opened, and Dwayne walked on confidently as all four women hung back, each of them uncomfortably aware of how close they would have to be to him once they were inside.
Eloise was the last one on since she needed to be the first one off and she held her body as rigid as she could to keep from bumping the others into Dwayne. She didn’t want to give him any excuse to be closer to them than necessary.
She fled as soon as the doors opened, shooting a quick apologetic look over her shoulder as she went. When Sarah texted her a picture of a steaming cup of coffee a few minutes later, she snorted. Maybe she would be willing to provide an alibi if someone poisoned Dwayne’s coffee.
After everything that had happened that day, she held her breath when she left work that evening, fingers crossed as she turned her car key. The engine roared to life without issue, and she was briefly, improbably, grateful for Ethan and his presence next door. Whatever he’d done, it had saved her a lot of money and headache.
It was a pity he was so … so … difficult.
At least that was what she told herself when she got home and found a new hydrangea waiting for her on the front porch. It was smaller than the one that had been destroyed but the leaves were healthy, and the blooms were a lovely pink. He’d tied a bow around the plastic nursery pot, pink to match the flowers, and there was a small white card attached. The writing on it was hasty and almost unreadable, but she squinted at it in the dim porch light until she was able to make it out.
Sorry about the flowers
-Ethan
Well, that was something.
Definitely better than nothing.
She glanced at his darkened windows several times as she set the pot back on the porch, careful to place it in the best possible place for the right amount of sunlight until she could find time to plant it and dipping a finger into the soil to see if it needed to be watered.
It was a pity that someone with such a handsome face and who seemed capable of the occasional moment of surprising sweetness, had to be so smug. And condescending. And difficult.
Four
Ethan kept his car off her lawn and—more importantly—kept his distance, but she couldn’t deny her curiosity about him grew the longer he lived next door. Apparently, it was harder to hold onto a grudge when he was behaving himself.
She watched him slyly from the windows of her own house, her face hidden behind the curtains as she leaned forward onto her tiptoes to get a better look, and within a few weeks of his arrival, she was sure of several things.
