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He chuckled and wiggled his eyebrows at her in response.
“According to your sister, what you engage in isn’t called dating.”
Elio raised his hands. “She’s probably right. What I do is less dating and more hooking up.”
“Ah. Well, I have zero experience with hooking up. And very little with casual dating. So…I’m screwed.”
He chuckled, but she noticed he didn’t disagree. They fell silent for a moment or two, both of them eating.
She took a bite of her baked potato, startled a second later when he reached across the table to wipe a smear of sour cream from her lower lip. She was even more surprised when he licked his finger clean. Everything he did felt so sexually charged. Liza called him her “player” brother, the one women flocked to and threw themselves at. Something he’d just admitted himself.
The thing was, she’d never had that kind of sexy predator attention directed her way.
Until Elio. First with that kiss. And right now.
Nervousness had her talking again before she could think better of it, her rambling breaking the sexual tension simmering between them. Dammit.
“Anyway, I think my cleanliness was a learned behavior,” she said. “My grandma raised me, and money was always tight. She worked as a cashier at a department store during the week, then she cleaned newly vacated apartments for a rental company on the weekends. She took me along when she was cleaning. At first because I was too young to stay home alone, and she couldn’t afford a babysitter. Then, as I got older, I kept going so that I could help.”
“Every weekend?” he asked.
“All the way through high school. We needed the money,” she explained. “You should have seen the way some of the renters left the apartments. Absolutely disgusting. It’s incredible to me how some people can live in filth. Toilets and showers that were black with mildew. Moldy refrigerators that stunk so bad it would take your breath away when you opened them. Torn blinds. Holes in the walls. Cigarette burns in the carpet.”
“Jesus,” Elio murmured.
“We’d clean what we could, then make a list of things that needed to be replaced or repaired for the company. I always swore that when I got my own place, I’d never live like that.”
“It’s no wonder you clean all the time. PTSD. I didn’t even see those places, but now I feel the need to give my apartment a good scrub.”
She grinned. “Grandma always said cleaning is a good way to relieve stress, to distract you from things that are upsetting you,” she said, repeating her grandmother’s thoughts on elbow grease.
“Did cleaning the oven help?” Elio asked, and she could tell it was a sincere question, not him laughing at her idiosyncrasies.
“It did,” she lied, unable to tell him that her stress vanished when he showed up. One look into his cocoa-brown eyes and the anxiety drifted away. She looked at them again now, and all the awkwardness she’d felt when they’d first sat down to eat faded too. Elio was easy to talk to, a good listener.
“But that’s enough about me,” she said before he could press her on that response. “I’m monopolizing the conversation.”
“I don’t mind,” Elio said. “It occurs to me we don’t know each other very well.”
She thought the same thing. “No. We don’t. Which leads me back to my original question. Why are you here?”
Elio fell silent for a moment, and she wondered if he was going to answer.
“I have a lot of stuff on my mind too, work concerns, and I thought I’d come here to decompress. Little did I know all I needed to do was clean my apartment.”
She laughed. “Missed opportunity on your part.”
He shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. You finished?”
She nodded, rising when he did, the two of them carrying their plates to the sink.
Elio washed them while she cleaned the rest of the kitchen.
“So,” she said once they’d finished. “Here’s another question. Are you a clean-up-right-after-dinner guy or one of those who just piles the dishes in the sink until you run out of them?”
Elio chuckled. “Can I plead the fifth?”
“You can, so long as you realize that’s pretty much an answer in itself.”
