6. Lillah
CHAPTER SIX
LILLAH
I closed my front door and pressed my back against it. My hands were shaking, and my heart was beating so hard I could feel it in my throat and behind my eyes.
Cooper was sitting in the hallway, watching me with his head tilted. His ears were forward, his tail still, his whole body oriented toward me like a satellite dish tuned to my frequency. I stared at him and he stared back, and for a solid thirty seconds neither of us moved.
"Don't look at me like that," I said.
My voice didn't sound right. It was too thin, too stretched. "I went over there to tell him to turn the music down. That's all."
Cooper blinked and continued to stare at me.
"That's all, Cooper."
He didn't believe me. I could tell by the way his tail thumped and then went still again. Cooper had emotional intelligence that most humans couldn't touch, and right now he was looking at my flushed face and my shaking hands and drawing conclusions. I could tell.
I pushed off the door and walked to the kitchen, my socks sliding on the hardwood. I pulled a glass from the cabinet and filled it with water. My mouth was dry, and I drank half of it standing at the sink, staring out the window at the dark backyard where the motion-sensor light had clicked off.
He kissed me.
Marshall Hayes, the dog poop guy, the iced coffee catastrophe, the inconsiderate neighbor who threw parties on weeknights, had backed me up against his house and kissed me.
And what made it worse was that I had kissed him back.
I gripped his shirt, pulled him closer, and opened my mouth and kissed him back like I'd been dying to kiss him, which I hadn't.
Except.
There had been a moment, in the coffee shop, when he'd been holding out napkins with a look on his face caught between guilt and panic, when I'd noticed his hands.
Big hands, long fingers, his knuckles slightly scraped the way most athletes' hands always were, and maybe for half a second, before my anger caught up to me, I'd noticed them.
I set the glass down too hard, and water sloshed over the rim, pooling on the granite. I grabbed a dish towel and mopped it up.
My lips were still tingling. I could still feel the pressure of his thumb on my cheekbone, the callused pad of it rough against my skin. The weight of his body leaning into mine. The warmth that came off him.
This was not happening. This was absolutely one hundred percent not happening.
I had moved to Boston to start over. To build my career.
To heal from a man who'd spent two and a half years dismantling me piece by piece until there was nothing left but an outline of a person who used to know who she was.
I had moved to prove to myself I could exist on my own without anyone else steering the wheel.
I had not moved here to make out with an athlete on his front porch.
God, an athlete. Of all the men in all the neighborhoods in all of Boston, my body had responded to another athlete. As if I hadn't learned my lesson the first time.
I leaned against the counter. My therapist was going to have a field day with this.
Dr. Chen would sit in her chair with her legs crossed, her pen resting on her notepad, and she'd look at me and say something like, "Tell me what you felt when he stepped closer.
" I would have to tell her the truth, that I'd felt two things at once.
One was real and one was a response to a pattern I couldn't seem to break no matter how hard I tried.
I went upstairs, washed my face with cold water, brushed my teeth twice because the taste of beer was still in my mouth and I needed it to be gone.
I changed into a sleep shirt and climbed into bed, pulling the comforter up to my chin even though the room was warm.
Cooper settled on my bed at my feet, circling twice before lying down with his customary groan, laying his head across my legs.
I stared at the ceiling, at the fan spinning.
The problem wasn't that he'd kissed me. Men had kissed me before. Some had been good at it, some hadn't, and I'd moved on from all of them without losing sleep.
The problem was how my body had responded when he did.
I'd been afraid for a fraction of a second when he stepped into my space.
That old response that Brett had wired into me, a man getting close meant something was about to go wrong.
My shoulders had tightened, and my stomach had dropped, and my body had done the thing it always did, the thing Dr. Chen called a "protective activation.
" My entire system preparing for impact.
The fear left faster than ever before, and something hot and dangerous took its place. It started in my chest and spread down to my stomach, to my hips and legs. My body recognized that he wasn't a threat, not in the way Brett had been. Marshall being close to me had felt different.
My body had responded before my brain could catch up.
Hands reaching. Mouth opening. Hips shifting toward his.
That was the problem. My body had decided without consulting the part of me that knew better, the part that had built ten months of careful distance between herself and any man who could take up too much space in her life.
I rolled onto my side and pulled the blanket tighter. Outside, I heard a car start, then another. The party was winding down. Soon it was quiet.
I thought about the way he'd looked at me. He wasn't drunk. The alcohol had filed away whatever kept him in check. What showed was raw, honest, and more dangerous than the exterior. Under that was curiosity, interest, and heat he couldn't deny, so he dove in to see what I was going to do.
"You like me," he'd said.
I hadn't denied it.
But what was I supposed to say? No? That would've been a lie, and I was a terrible liar.
Always had been. My face gave everything away.
Mila had told me a hundred times that I'd be terrible at poker.
I could have said yes, but that was a different kind of dangerous, one that would have opened a door I wasn't ready to walk through.
The truth was worse than either option. I didn't like him, but I also didn't know him.
I knew his name and his address, and that he played hockey.
I knew he ordered iced coffees, and that he had a jaw that could cut glass and hands that knew exactly where to go.
That wasn't liking someone. That was noticing someone.
But the way my skin had felt under his thumb. That wasn't noticing. That was something else. Something I didn't have a word for.
I didn't sleep well. I woke up twice, once from Cooper getting off the bed and once from a sound outside that turned out to be the maple tree rustling in the wind.
Both times I lay there in the dark, my mind looping back to the porch, to the kiss, to the way his hand had felt on my face.
The callus on his thumb, the warmth of his palm, the way he'd held me.
By morning, I'd decided that it wouldn't happen again. I'd told him it wouldn't, and I meant it. The kiss was a mistake I blamed on the wine and the loneliness.
I had common sense, and plenty of it. I had survived Brett and a move across the country with everything I owned in the back of a car. Common sense had gotten me here, and common sense was going to keep me safe.
Morning came faster than I wanted. I got up and made a strong black coffee and let Cooper out into the backyard, where he did his business in his usual corner over by the hydrangeas.
He came back inside with grass on his paws, looking for his breakfast. I fed him and then sat at the kitchen table with my laptop and opened the design software and looked at the Henderson kitchen mockup, and then the boutique hotel proposal that was due Friday.
Work was waiting, and I needed to focus because that was all that mattered right now.
I turned my attention to my computer, drank my coffee as I went over things, and didn't look out the window until eight thirty when I glanced up from my laptop and saw Marshall walking toward his car in track pants and hoodie, a gym bag over his shoulder, his hair still damp.
He got into the truck, backed out of the driveway, and drove away.