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Honestly, I wouldn’t mind so much if she wanted to spend Thanksgiving with me in the apartment—or if she had a mind to invite Delia and Burke and Leonard and Shauna. But I’m not sure this woman is capable of doing anything in a small way. If I tell her yes, I’ll probably have twenty people in my apartment, and the whole place will smell like turkey until the new year. That pink record table will be blasting Taylor Swift or Olivia Rodrigo, and people will be laughing and waving drinks around. I’ll have to seclude myself out on the deck with a bottle of scotch and my laptop—same as I’ve done at every party that’s ever been hosted there. Even the ones that include all of my friends.
“I’m going to persuade you,” Mira says, poking a finger into my chest.
My sex-starved brain likes the idea of her trying—and the feeling of her finger drilling into me while she looks up at me, her eyes bright. Her lips painted red. They’re a softer pink inside, and in that moment, I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than suck on them.
She’s not yours.
“I don’t mind if you try,” I admit. “Butwhydo you want to host Thanksgiving dinner?”
Shauna laughs, cracking the realm we’ve built, just the two of us. I hadn’t noticed her heading back toward us. Other things seep in—the sound of an Amazon delivery truck backing up, the squeaking of a bird, the rush-rush of the fall leaves in the cool breeze. The pain from my throbbing wrist. “Because Josie the Great told her she has to,” Shauna answers. She waggles her eyebrows. “She also said both of your soulmates will be there.”
It’s another bizarre, cryptic statement from a woman full of them. But my first thought isn’t to reject it because it’s ridiculous—I want to reject it because the thought of either of us having a different soulmate is unacceptable.
I’m ridiculous.
Mira has told me nothing more can happen between us, and I need to accept her decision and thinking stupid, grandiose thoughts. So I say, “Okay, then my answer is a hard no.”
* * *
“So what do you think?”I ask Shane after I pull to a stop in the parking lot of Myles & Lee.
He raises his eyebrows, which is enough to clue me in that I’ve done it again—presumed people can follow the network of my thoughts even though they are stuck in my head, visible only to me.
“Is this Byron guy a threat?” I clarify.
He snorts a laugh. “No. I agree with the neighbor. He’s only a threat to the gene pool.” His gaze sharpens. “I’ll have to ask you again, Dan. Why do you care?”
I swear and run my good hand through my hair. The other one is now encased in the wrist protector. “I don’t know.”
“I do. You really do like her, huh?”
“This isn’t part of the plan,” I tell him. “I live with her. It’s not a good idea to mess that up.” I grip my hair. “Shit. I’ve already messed it up, haven’t I?”
He doesn’t know about the elevator, but based on his shrug, he probably knowssomethinghappened. “I’m not good with this stuff, but maybe you should talk to Drew. He lived with his fiancée before they got together.”
“I think I’m mad at him,” I say, realizing it’s true as I say it. We’ve been talking online and playing the game together, sometimes with Mira, but I’ve avoided his calls even though I obviously have to talk to him before the meeting with Big Bear Games.
“For leaving?”
I nod.
“I get that,” he says. “But before now, he’s never done much for himself. You either. You might want to give it a try.”
He gazes at the building, then tugs on his tie a little.
“You’re not in your usual hurry to get back to your desk,” I comment. He even insisted on going for drive-through coffee after leaving the apartment complex. Normally, he would have been sweating bullets until he got back to the office, Friday evening or not.
He shifts his gaze to me. “Something’s going down. I don’t know what it is, but it’s big. Myles had an all-hands-on-deck meeting the other day, and he didn’t include me.”
“That why you’re going to Thanksgiving at his house?”
His expression turns bemused. “When your boss invites you to Thanksgiving dinner, Danny, you don’t make a bulleted yes or no list. You go.”
“I thought you were a partner?”
“Sure, but some partners count more than others, if you know what I mean.”
I don’t need to tell him that I don’t—I’m guessing from the bemused look on his face that he already knows.
