Chapter 10
The next morning Alyssa showered and put on a peach blouse that did wonders for her skin and a pair of swishy pants that, Janet told her, made her butt look fantastic. She added a couple of thin gold necklaces, and when she put on her makeup and the mascara flaked, she redid her whole eye—and this time her lashes didn’t clump. She was having a good hair day too. Sometimes the universe smiled on you.
She texted Nick at 10:07 AM. That wasn’t so early that he was likely to be sleeping, and the “:07” meant she hadn’t set a timer to remind her. She’d spent ten minutes deciding what would be the perfect time to text to indicate that he was not on her mind. She was pleased with the choice.
Alyssa: Hi! I have your design done. Let me know when it works for me to come over and show you.
He didn’t respond immediately. He was probably practicing sports puck, not having an orgy or expanding his network of mistresses to smaller cities like Kalamazoo and Toledo.
She was at her office, desk spread with samples of printed flannel fabrics—ducks and bunnies. She was working on a nursery for a young couple on a limited budget who found out halfway through their pregnancy that they were having twins. That meant the design had to change—two cribs, and now no room for the reading nook she had planned—but also that their budget was tighter. She loved working for clients like this, where she had to get creative. They had low expectations and were grateful for any help, but she wanted it to be beautiful.
She had the impression the man’s mother was an issue too. The design would bolster a young woman’s confidence as she dealt with her first child—children!—in the face of an overbearing mother-in-law. Designing interiors might not seem important to some people, but it could set the stage for relationships. That young mom might find the courage to set boundaries—if only Alyssa could decide if there should be two rockers in the room so both babies could be soothed at the same time. And even if there wasn’t a designated reading area, there had to be space for picture books …
Her phone buzzed. Nick: I’m at the rink, just about to hop in the shower.
Don’t visualize him naked. Don’t visualize him naked. Oh, you visualized it.
Nick: I’ll be home in about forty minutes. Do you want to come over then?
Alyssa: Sure! I look forward to showing you the design.
Nick: Maybe give me 50 minutes. I reeaally need to shower. ??
Alyssa laughed, put her phone down, and began to gather up the things she needed to take to his apartment. Then she grabbed her phone. Should she send a final text? She never knew when she was playing a conversation out too long. Once it degenerated into happy faces and thumbs-up and LOLs—she didn’t want to be the one to send one too many. But he’d changed the time, and that should be acknowledged, surely? So she sent another text.
Alyssa: lol
There. Let him withstand that level of wit and creativity.
Fifty minutes later Alyssa cruised his neighborhood, snagged a parking spot, and slung her go bag over her shoulder. She walked up to the door, rang, and he buzzed her in. He stood at the top of the steps as she came in, wearing sweatpants and a three-quarter sleeve baseball shirt. He was barefoot and his hair was still damp. “You need help with the bag?”
“No, I got it. Thanks.”
He pushed the door open with his toe and let her in. The space still startled her in its blazing white emptiness. How could he live like this? She would have tacked gum wrappers to the wall just to break the monotony of it. “How have you been?”
“Good,” he said. “I’m playing again.”
“That’s great! Actually I heard that from my stepdad.”
He laughed. “He’s a Red Wheels fan?”
“Oh, the worst.”
He raised an eyebrow. “By which you mean ‘the best’?”
“Yes. Yes, that is precisely what I meant.” He grinned. Dang. She really hadn’t meant to insult his profession. But he was standing close and he smelled of the shower, and her mind had already taken its little road trip there. “So,” she said breezily, “normally I would set up my laptop on your dining room table and talk you through it.” They both looked at the empty space beside his kitchen that was meant to be an eating space. “In this case, are you okay with sitting on the floor?”
“Sure.” He started to slide down the wall, then stopped midway in what she thought of as the exercise position from hell. With his massively muscular thighs he apparently didn’t even notice. “You can sit in the chair if you want. It might be more comfortable.”
“No, that’s fine.”
“Actually I feel bad. I probably should have bought a second chair.” He strode over to the brown recliner in the middle of the room, lifted it as if it were a folding chair, and carried it into the dining space, lowering it carefully. “There.” She looked at it, then flicked her eyes up at him. “Oh! You probably need a counter.” He picked it up again, making the sleeves of his baseball shirt bulge, and set it down by the passthrough counter to the kitchen. He stood back and looked pleased with himself. “There! Problem solved.”
“Um, thank you.” She walked forward and set her bag on his kitchen counter. No crumbs, at least. She pulled out her laptop and booted up, then laid swatch samples on the counter. She stood awkwardly by the chair.
“Sit!” he said. “Hey, do you want a drink?”
“Um, water would be nice.”
He opened the cupboard, took out the single clean glass, and poured water from a pitcher he kept in the refrigerator, giving her a clear look at his stacked glass containers of cut fruits and vegetables.
“I feel bad about my diet every time I see your refrigerator,” she said.
He handed her the glass and grinned, then pulled a dirty one out of his sink and washed it quickly. “You like junk food?”
“I’m pretty good, really—but not that good.”
“Yeah, the nutritionist loves me.” He poured himself a glass of water. “My injury was bad enough that I wasn’t sure I could come back. There wasn’t anything about it that was for sure a career ender, but to play at the level I have to play at? I mean, it wasn’t a given. I didn’t feel like I had any margin for error.”
“One cupcake and that could be it?”
“Yep. Felled by the Cupcake of Doom.”
She laughed and tapped her keyboard a couple of times, then looked up at him. “You’ll have to be where you can see this. Do you want …” She trailed off. Was he going to just stand there?
The answer was yes. Nick came around the kitchen counter and stood next to her, still smelling of a shower. “So how does this work exactly?”
“I show you the design. If there are things you don’t like, we change them. We talk it through as long as you want, and when you’re happy, you sign off on it. Then I can start implementing it for you.” He took a sip of water. “Or if you hate the whole thing, I can start over. But you’ll need to tell me what doesn’t work, and why. Ready?” She smiled up at him.
“Game on.”
His abdomen was right by her head. It was extremely distracting, and also it looked very hard, like you could poke it and it wouldn’t give at all. His shirt skimmed over it as he shifted his weight. Was there a socially acceptable way to poke someone’s stomach to see if it was as muscley as it looked? Probably not. Stupid social conventions.
“So here’s the living room,” she said, and brought up a screen showing the design. It looked like a colored-pencil sketch but was so much easier to change. “It reads as a blue space—masculine, neutral but with some color. The furniture is large and comfortable, the kind of thing you can flop on. You can’t really hurt it.” She risked a glance up at him. He was looking at the screen with a completely inscrutable expression. How could he be so bad at poker?
She went on, using her cursor to highlight things as she talked about them—the industrial chic lamps, the steel dining room table. “The kitchen has a couple of stylized vegetable prints—not cheesy—to give you some color on the wall. I wasn’t sure if those worked for you, but you need something there. We can switch out the artwork if there’s something you’d rather have. I was thinking last night maybe you’d prefer photographs.”
“Photographs?” It was the first thing he’d said since she’s started talking him through the plans.
“Black and whites of the city, the ice rink. Paris? A forest? Anything like that would work really well with this space. It was just sort of hard to … get a bead on you.” He didn’t say anything. “Anyway, we’ll put some sort of art there. You can see the kitchen light fixture has exposed wiring. That’s part of the industrial look, but it’s perfectly safe.” She paused, giving him the chance to say something. He took a drink of his water instead.
“Here’s the bedroom. It’s a really dark space, so if you wake up and still have an hour to sleep, you can roll back over. The walls are darker here, and there are room-darkening shades behind the curtains. Those grommet-tops echo the metal accents found in the rest of the space, and they’re really easy to slide on the pole.” She risked a glance at him, then went on. “There are two versions of this bed. It’s king sized because you’re a big guy …” She flushed slightly, very aware of the middle of his body so close to her face. “I’ve shown it here with a riveted steel headboard like what you saw in the dining room table, but …” She clicked over. “There’s also this version with a slightly padded headboard covered in fabric. We can play with what fabric to use, but I’m showing it here in gray flannel.” Nothing from him. “It softens the space a little and could make it seem more bedroomy. Just depends on how you want it to look.”
He didn’t say anything, so she moved on to his bathroom, which echoed the cool blue tones and metal accents of the rest of the space. She finally sat back.
“So. First impressions?” she said.
He chewed for a moment on the inside of his cheek, then took a drink. That was his tell when something was wrong. She was sure of it. It was probably also his tell when he was thirsty. “This is … great,” he said, hesitating a nanosecond before the last word. Not great. Damn damn damn. “It would be a big change.”
She cocked her head up at him. “Well, it would make the space usable. An actual living space. You have enough seating to entertain,” she said, clicking back to the living room with its generous sofas and two arm chairs. “You have a dresser in your bedroom so you won’t have to keep your clothes in garbage bags.”
He nodded. He was still chewing the inside of his cheek.
“What’s the thing you like least about the living room, say?”
He studied the screen for a moment, a slightly pained expression on his face. “This is great,” he said again. “It’s a very nice-looking space. I’ll probably want to think about it for a couple of days, if that’s okay. Let me pay you now for the design work, though.”
He was going to cancel the project. Crap crap crap. He was going to cancel. “One thing I forgot to ask you,” she said, desperate. “Do you have any kids?”
He stared at her, startled. “No. Um …?”
“I just thought if you had a child somewhere …” Boston. The baby in Boston. “… you might want the guest bedroom to function as a child’s space.”
“Oh. No. No kids.” He gave her a funny look, then grabbed his wallet from the far end of the counter, where he seemed to keep it with his phone and keys, and extracted a credit card. “Can I pay you here, or should I call the office where you work, or …?” He stood in his desolate apartment, handsome and muscley and pinched around the eyes, holding a credit card. Was her design that bad?
“I can run it here,” she said. “But Nick, there isn’t anything that can’t be changed. Or if you want to go one room at a time, we can do that too.” I don’t want to lose this commission.
“No, it’s great,” he said with no enthusiasm and handed her the card. He was going to cancel after she left. He would pay her in full and wait a couple of days to look like he was thinking about it, and then come up with some excuse not to go forward. She was sure of it.
She pasted on a smile, took his credit card, and shoved it into the machine a little harder than was actually necessary.
Half an hour later Alyssa was back in her office, realizing she’d forgotten to pick up any lunch, and not sure if she was hungry anyway. The front door buzzed—someone was coming in. Nick? Did he want to talk about the design? Had he figured out what he didn’t like? She jumped up and ran to the front to catch him, almost colliding with Stacey in the hall. Stacey raised a cool, drawn-on eyebrow at her and said, “Expecting someone?”
“Um, no,” Alyssa said. “Did you want to get this?” The agency owner usually wanted her to deal with foot traffic.
Stacey peered around the corner and then walked out, all smiles. “So nice to see you!” she said to the well-dressed elderly woman in the lobby. “Meredith Harriman? From the county board?” The woman smiled, and Stacey ushered her past Alyssa and into a consultation room. “I’ll take care of Mrs. Harriman,” she said, “since I assigned you to the Sorensen account.” She smiled sweetly.
Assigned? Nick had had to walk out to get her as his designer. Bet he regrets that now. And it looked like Stacey was going to lighten her client load as payback. Right now all Alyssa had was the young expectant couple; a newly-divorced man who wanted her to buy some starter furniture because he didn’t have time; and Nick Sorensen, who was supposed to want an entire apartment redone, but clearly didn’t want anything at all.
If he was going to cancel, the least he could do was to be less handsome. And not smell like shampoo and make her think of bubbles running off his shoulders in the shower, water sheeting across his back … It was incredibly rude to be that good-looking while simultaneously not liking her design.
Alyssa was wrong about one thing. He didn’t take two days. Her phone beeped in the late afternoon.
Nick: Hey, I was thinking about the apt, and this isn’t really a good time to go forward with it. Hockey and everything. But thanks for all the work you did! It was great.
Clearly. She didn’t bother to text him back.