12. Avery
TWELVE
AVERY
Me
Hi!
Reid
There she is.
Me
Sorry. I was putting out fires at work.
Reid
You don’t have to apologize. I understand what it’s like to get busy.
Me
Are we still on for dinner tonight?
Reid
We are. Any allergies I should be aware of? Still have a fake aversion to cheesecake?
Me
And shitty men? Yup!
But no other allergies to worry about. Do you want me to bring anything? An appetizer or dessert?
Reid
I’ve got it covered, but thanks for offering. Come by around 6? I’ll send you my address when I’m home from the office.
Me
Sounds good. Should I wear Crocs?
Reid
You should. We can match.
Me
Do you really own a pair?
Reid
Guess you’ll have to snoop around my place and find out.
Me
Are you giving me permission to snoop?
Reid
I’ve got nothing to hide.
I already cleaned up the bodies.
Me
Nothing screams ‘first date’ like murder jokes.
Is it silly to say I’m excited to see you?
Reid
Even after the murder joke?
Me
Yeah, believe it or not.
Reid
Not silly at all. I’m excited to see you too.
I knock on the door to Reid’s apartment at one minute to six, and it swings open.
He’s standing there with spaghetti sauce on his cheek. His glasses are foggy, and there’s a noodle stuck in his hair.
“Wow. Talk about a warm welcome,” I say. “You look like you’ve been through the wringer.”
“I feel like it too. I overestimated my ability to multitask,” he says. “I’m trying to do my mom’s chicken parmesan and failing miserably. She’d disown me if she could see my kitchen right now. It’s a fucking disaster.”
“Do you want some help?”
His eyes sweep over my outfit. They start at the yellow tank top and work down to the denim skirt I paired it with. He lingers on my white sneakers and the anklet I looped around my left calf. When he finds the ribbon I tied in my hair to keep it out of my face, he blows out a rough breath.
“I don’t want you to get messy,” he says. “You look really pretty.”
“I like to be messy,” I say, and his cheeks flush a dark red.
“Come on in.” Reid steps back so I can slide into the foyer. “You can leave your shoes there if you want, or keep them on. Whatever you’re comfortable with.”
I look at his mismatched socks half-hidden under his jeans. There are penguins riding sleds on the left and tiny snowmen on the right. “I think you might be in the wrong season. It’s still pushing eighty degrees outside.”
He glances down and chuckles. “June gave them to me for Christmas last year. I grabbed them in a hurry. I am ready for cooler weather, though. I can’t stand the heat.”
“Really? I love the heat.” I kick off my shoes and set them neatly next to a pair of black Converse. “But that’s the Floridian in me.”
“Were you born and raised down south?” Reid asks, and I follow him to the kitchen.
“I am. I drank orange juice for breakfast every morning and I grew up thinking you had to run in a zigzag line to escape an alligator chasing you. That’s a total myth, by the way.”
“You learn something new every day. You’re probably a terrible driver, aren’t you?”
“Guilty.” I smile. “Will you make fun of me if I tell you I was also Miss Florida?”
He glances at me over his shoulder. “You were?”
“I paid my way through college by playing a princess down at one of the theme parks outside Orlando. I stayed on that path with pageantry.” I shrug and lean against the counter. “It was fun.”
“I would’ve guessed something in modeling or acting. But a beauty queen? That’s impressive.” Reid bends over the stove and stirs a pot of sauce. “What was your talent?”
“Ballet. I started dancing when I was a little girl.”
“No wonder you were so smooth on the dance floor the other night. I can’t find a rhythm to save my life.”
I laugh. “You did just fine.”
“I had a good partner.” He gestures to the sink stacked with dishes and the mountain of paper towels sitting on the granite island. “Sorry for the mess. It doesn’t usually look like this. I, uh, wanted to do something nice for you, and that something turned into an Italian tragedy, almost-burnt cookies, and flowers that have somehow disappeared.”
“This is for me?”
“You said you were going to have a busy week, so I thought you could take a load off for a while. Dinner and dessert are covered. Well. Hopefully. This place might go up in flames in the next ten minutes and the chicken might be inedible. If that happens, save yourself. Don’t worry about me.”
I push off the counter and walk over to him. I kiss his cheek. “Thank you very much.”
Reid sets down the spoon and slides his hands around my waist. “Is this okay?”
“What, the bomb that went off in here?”
He shakes his head. “Me touching you.”
“You touched me plenty the other night.”
That blush is back, and he dips his chin. “I meant touching you when we’re not in a hotel bed.”
“Or a hallway….” I arch a brow, and he grins. “It’s more than okay,” I tell him, because okay seems like a silly word to describe the way my heart is hammering in my chest. “You can keep doing it if you want.”
Reid reaches past me. I expect him to lift me up and set me down next to the half-diced onions on the cutting board. I expect him to hike my skirt up my thighs and drop to his knees. I’m surprised when he hands me a bouquet of sunflowers.
“Found them. These are for you,” he murmurs. “I picked them up at the farmers’ market around the corner. I saw the tattoo on your finger, and I thought they might be your favorite flower.”
“It is my favorite flower,” I say, touching the petals. “These are beautiful.”
“I’ll put them in a vase until you head home. Then they’re yours.”
“Thank you, Reid. That’s really sweet of you.”
He kisses my forehead, then pulls away, cursing when he spies the sauce boiling over. “Could you grab me a paper towel?”
“I think you’re going to need something more heavy duty than that.” I nudge him out of the way with my hip. “I’ll handle this.”
“Are you sure? Your shirt looks really nice.”
“I could take it off if you’re so worried about me staining it,” I tease, and he fiddles with his glasses.
“You, uh, could if you wanted to. But then you might get burnt, and I’ll feel like an asshole. You could also borrow one of mine.”
“As tempted as I am to add to the collection of your shirts I have in my possession, I’ll be fine.” I turn the burner down to low and wipe up the sauce splattered across the cooktop. “How long until everything is ready?”
“Fifteen minutes. Do you want something to drink? I have wine and beer. I also have some whiskey.”
“How about a tour first? I ask. “Can I see your place?”
“Sure.” Reid motions to the space to the left of the kitchen, a large living room with floor-to-ceiling windows and two leather couches. There are plants everywhere, a dozen varieties arranged in a position where they’ll get lots of sunlight.
“Wow. It looks like a greenhouse in here.”
“I’ve always liked plants more than people. These ones are easy to take care of when I’m away for work.”
I walk to the large shelf on the far end of the wall. There are hundreds of books stacked up, everything from nonfiction to thrillers to?—
“Romance?” I ask. “You read romance books?”
“Yeah. Maverick wanted to start a book club with some of the guys on his team, and Dallas and I joined too.”
“And all these men—men who can bench press my body weight and play hockey for sixty grueling minutes—sit around and talk about romance novels ?”
“Once a month. We try to keep it structured, but most of the time, it turns into a huge debate. There’s a lot of yelling. We had to get rid of alcohol because there was almost a fistfight over whether the girl should choose the hero or the villain. Someone ended up with a black eye, and Dallas—who tends to be the most level headed of the bunch—busted his lip.”
“Oh my god.” I stare at him, flabbergasted. “What the hell are you all debating?”
“Everything. What weapon we would use if we were in the story. Which friend in the group is going to be next in the series. Ranking the sexual positions mentioned on a scale from one to ten. Asking ourselves if we’d want a masked man to chase us through the woods.” He clears his throat. “We all signed NDAs.”
“Wow.” I run my finger down the spines. They’re the same books I have on my nightstand, marked up and annotated with some of my favorite quotes and scenes. “I’m impressed. I’m used to people telling me romance books are stupid and I should read something with real substance.”
“That’s fucked up, isn’t it?” Reid says, frowning. “I hate that we live in a world where people like to shit on the things that make other people happy. It’s like with my comic books and LEGO collection. Some of the looks I get in the checkout line are so irritating. I’m not hurting anyone. Let me buy them in peace.”
“You like to put together LEGO sets?” I ask.
He points to the section of the shelf covered in glass doors. “I’ve been doing them since I was a kid. It’s another thing I got into instead of sports. Helps turn my brain off when it feels like there’s too much going on up there. It’s also a nice break from staring at my phone for hours on end.”
“Which one is your favorite?” I look at the skyscrapers and battleships with tiny flags, wondering how much time Reid spent crafting each structure. “I like this medieval castle.”
“That one is cool, isn’t it? I put it together last year. Took me about six hours on a rainy afternoon.”
“Are those actual dragons in the courtyard?”
He laughs. “Yeah. Maverick added them. Said it made it look cool as shit . He’s not wrong.”
“These are all so neat, Reid.”
“Thanks,” he says sheepishly. “There’s a Millennium Falcon set I really want, but it’s hard to track down. They always sell out seconds after they go live.”
“That’s from Star Trek , right?” I ask, and his eye twitches. “Kidding. I know it’s Star Wars .”
“You scared me there for a second. Okay, enough nerd shit. I want you to stick around for the rest of the night, and showing you my comic book collection will send you packing.”
“I thought they’d be out here. Where are you hiding them? I want to see.”
“They’re in my bedroom. Do you really want to see?”
“I wouldn’t have said so otherwise,” I say.
“Just keep the jokes to a minimum, okay?”
I follow Reid through the apartment. There are pictures hanging on the walls, and I get quick glimpses into his life. There’s one of him with a woman who has the same red hair as him.
Another of him, Dallas, and Maverick, their arms slung over each other’s shoulders and wide grins on their faces. There’s him on a football field, pieces of confetti in his hair and more stuck to his forehead.
It’s nice to see him celebrating his friends’ successes.
“Do you have any siblings?” I ask.
“No. Only child. What about you?”
“A younger sister. She’s in New York working in fashion and merchandising.”
“The city that never sleeps.”
“Have you been?”
“More than I’d like,” he says. “It’s not my favorite place in the world.”
“What is?”
“Tough question. Seattle is okay. Atlanta in January isn’t half bad. Denver is decent.”
“You’re quite the traveler.”
“Work takes me places,” he says, opening a door to our right. “I get to go to London next year.”
“I love London,” I gush, and I step into his bedroom.
It’s exactly what I thought it’d look like.
Soft beige walls and a big blue comforter on a king-sized bed. A desk to the right with two laptops and a cell phone on top of a stack of papers. A nightstand with a lamp and a charging cable.
The real centerpiece is the array of comic books displayed along the wall.
Three long, clear shelves are tacked to the paint. Each edition is sitting upright and in pristine condition. Half of them still have plastic wrap on them, and I spot publications that must have cost hundreds of dollars.
“Holy shit. Is that the black cover variant of Venom #1 ?” I ask.
“Okay, seriously.” Reid leans against the doorframe and crosses his arms over his chest. I try not to stare at the way the tendons in his forearms flex, but I’m doing a terrible job. “How the hell are you so knowledgeable on comic books? The average person doesn’t know shit besides the Marvel superheroes, and you’re over here talking about misprint editions. What’s your secret?”
“I had a crush on a guy in high school who loved them,” I admit. “I made it my mission to know everything about collector’s editions, characters, and storylines so I could impress him. He turned out to be a massive douche, and I ended up falling in love with all the worlds out there. Now I read them for me.”
“Is it too soon to ask you to marry me?”
I laugh. “Sorry. I have a five-date minimum before?—”
I’m interrupted by the shrill sound of the fire alarm echoing down the hall. I jump a foot in the air at the noise and cover my ears. Reid groans.
“I think we might have a situation on our hands,” I yell.
“How do you feel about Mexican food?” he yells back.
I grin. “Sounds perfect.”