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ChapterEight
Gideon
“Just try one.”Skye offers me a pastry from a local vegan bakery. She knows I just ate breakfast; she watched me scarf down the biscuits and gravy in her kitchen.
“I’m stuffed.”
“Your fault.” With a shrug, she pushes the pastry at me again. “I told you not to eat. That there would be tons of stuff at the farmers’ market.”
She had asked me last night if I wanted to come with her to the Tower Grove Farmers’ Market. Before I could remind her I’ve been to St. Louis, she rushed to explain that even if I’ve been here, I’ve not been here as a local. That she could show me around a little bit, starting with the farmers’ market.
I take a bite of the pastry just to shut her up. But now she’s watching me expectantly as we walk side by side, waiting for me to go nuts over it. Actually, it is really good, but I don’t give her the satisfaction. I take a sip of my soulless coffee—her description of my plain black breakfast coffee.
It’s nice enough outside that we’re wearing shorts, and I can’t help but notice her legs again. That skirt last Tuesday was sexy considering it was professional attire. Even better with the heels. Today, she’s wearing cut off denim and a plain yellow t-shirt. Rather than the sleek ponytail she prefers for work, her hair’s in that messy twist. Pieces have slipped loose and now frame her face, the breeze making them fly from time to time.
I got hung up on trying to smooth out a rough spot in the introduction of a musical piece on Wednesday night. By the time I left The Hep Cat, it was almost eleven. I was still hashing it out in my head, over and over, on the drive home. I had titled the piece “Transitional” when I started it a few months back. Something in the beginning just isn’t working for me. When I’m stuck like that, I can lose days stewing over it.
I didn’t even think about Skye until I walked off the elevator, but as I unlocked the door, I was hoping for a repeat of the night before. After the sparring about her printed frame and her date, we had ended up reading—not together, but not alone, either. I read seventy-three pages of the Stephen King book she loaned me, while crashed out on the gray loveseat outside my room. Skye must not have liked what she was reading, because she kept sighing, like she was frustrated, as she read her book in the ratty recliner in her living area.
But the lights were all off when I stepped inside on Wednesday. I wondered at first if she was out, but I saw her keys on the counter and realized I had worked so late, she had gone to bed. I ate an apple and read another fifty pages, but it wasn’t the same without her across the apartment sighing at her book.
Thursday I actually got home when she did, but she changed her clothes and left the house for an exercise class. I wouldn’t have pegged her for a fitness person, but she looked pretty fit in her yoga stuff when she left, and she looked really serene when she got home. Her hairline was damp, and her cheeks were pink, and I had the sudden thought about what she would look like after good sex. What she sounded like when she was having sex, when someone was pleasuring her. Disgusted with myself, because Skye was Chloe’s best friend, I took my book to my bedroom and tried to read and finally gave up after reading the same sentence seven times.
Last night, we were home at the same time and rode the elevator up to her floor together. She fixed pasta, so I chopped up a salad, and we did the same reading thing. Only first we read at the kitchen bar together and then after we cleaned up the dinner mess, we retreated to our opposite corners of the apartment. I kind of missed the conversation, but it was nice just hearing her sighs again.
She’d asked me as she was going to bed if I wanted to join her today. I almost said no but changed my mind. I didn’t know St. Louis as a local. It would be fun to see things through her eyes. And if Chloe found Skye so irresistible, there had to be a reason. Couldn’t hurt to have a friend here if Wamba liked retirement and he sold me the store.
“It’s good, right?” She elbowed me out of my thoughts.
“It’s okay.”
She must hear that I’m giving her a hard time in my voice, because she laughs and rolls her eyes.
“So, what do you want to see?” she asks as we walk through the park.
The not so wholesome thoughts I had about her pop into my head. Skye’s pink cheeks and sweaty hair. Picturing her lips parted and panting from my knees at her feet. I clear my throat and look around as if I’m studying the tents at the market.
“Wait. What about the—”
“No.” She’s going to say the Arch. Everyone is always eager to point out the Arch. No matter if you’ve seen it a hundred times.
“You don’t even know what I was going to say.”
“You were going to say what about the Arch.”
She draws back and raises her eyebrows at me. “What do you have against the Arch?”
“Been there, done that.”
She flinches and mouths the wordstough crowd.
“Would you want to squeeze into a little metal cube to go up the tram in forty-some thousand pounds of steel and concrete? Just for the view? If you were me?”
Skye drops her gaze over me, as if I’m the view I just mentioned. She widens her eyes when she gets to my face and shrugs as if it makes no difference to her.
“What?” Was that shrug about me?
“It’s the gateway to the West,” she mumbles. “That’s all.”
