Chapter 11
Ava
It was quite refreshing waking up on a Sunday morning…
not hungover. When we all talked the other day about supporting Logan on his first night out and not drinking, I wasn’t on board at first. My feeling was he had to learn to live in a world full of alcohol and people who drank.
The more I thought about it and realized he was depending on us as his support system, I saw the value in that.
But it didn’t mean I had to be a total princess while supporting his sobriety.
“Ava?” the voice next to me said.
“Yeah?”
“You’ve been in la-la land, I’ve been talking to you,” Macie said. More like whined.
We’d gone out for breakfast since we were both up early. Another bonus to not drinking. We sat at a small corner table waiting for our order to be called. It was a small café where you ordered your food yourself and picked it up at the counter, but it was so delicious.
“Last night was fun,” Macie said, the exasperation in her voice as if she’d said it a few times. “Wasn’t it?”
“Yeah.” I nodded. But I wasn’t in full agreement.
“You looked like you might hook up with one of those guys you were dancing with,” she said, her eyes wagging at me. “They were freaking hot. Why didn’t you go home with either of them?”
I laughed. She had no idea, but there was no way she could have.
“What?” she asked.
I couldn’t admit what I’d been doing last night with those guys.
Yeah, I could’ve gone home with either. They weren’t too happy when I walked away uninterested, but they’d served their purpose.
I’d used them simply to make Logan jealous.
My guilt was already getting the better of me without her giving me her two cents.
“Macie.”
Our food was ready. Thank God.
“I’ll get it,” I told her.
As I placed our trays on the table, Macie went to fix up her coffee at the coffee bar. While waiting for her return, I desperately tried to think of a way out of talking about last night.
My phone pinged with a text as Macie returned. Looking at it, I was surprised to see who it was from.
Logan: Where are u we need to work on our project today
“Who is that?” Macie asked as she started eating.
“Logan.”
Her eyes lit up.
“He wants us to work on our project and he’s looking for me.” He was right. We did need to get to work on it, time was dwindling. Our first attempt didn’t go well.
My attempt at making him green with envy last night backfired on me. Instead, he fell into the arms of another. Although he didn’t hook up with her, what he did was even worse.
He didn’t take advantage of her. He gave her his bed. He slept on a couch two feet too short for him.
He proved to be a perfect gentleman.
And I wasn’t prepared for that.
“Do you need to go?” Macie asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m not going to jump when he texts. We’ll get there when we get there.”
Macie’s brows furrowed and her mouth twisted. She obviously didn’t like my response. I was back to being a bitch again, but it was my only defense when it came to him.
“Well, I think you should at least text him back, Ava,” she said. “You two have to start getting along, don’t leave him hanging like that.”
I wanted to tell her about my grand gesture last night.
About the look on his face as I covered him from head to toe, making sure to tuck him in.
And how, as he looked at me like that, it pulled at every muscle in my chest, making it hard to take my next breath.
But I couldn’t. Because if I did, I think I’d admit to her, and myself, something I didn’t want to admit.
“Yeah, OK. You’re right.”
So I shot him a text.
Me: Out for breakfast, be home later
Yet I also knew we needed to work on this assignment. My incessant desire to annoy Logan contradicted with my need to excel in my classes. Sophomore year was when business students declared their major, and finance was competitive. My GPA needed to be the best it could be.
So instead of enjoying my spinach and feta omelet, I found myself shoveling it in my mouth.
“So we’re rushing now, are we?” Macie asked.
“Well, we do need to work on it, I just hate that it has to be with him.”
But the look she gave me told me she thought I was full of shit.
When we returned to the house, it was quiet. The dim sunlight shining through the slider and the window over the sink was the only light coming in the rooms. Becca didn’t seem to be home, but Logan’s truck was parked out front. He must’ve been upstairs.
“What are you doing today?” I asked Macie.
“I have homework. There’s a girl in my one class who actually lives a few buildings away. We planned on meeting up today to work together.”
I felt the coldness of the refrigerator as Macie put her leftovers away.
As I watched her head upstairs and stood by the island, I was frozen in place, contemplating if I should go to Logan’s room or not.
It would be just as easy to camp out on the couch, put on a show, and wait for him to come find me.
But then he’d give me shit, and I really didn’t want that. To be honest, I was tired of being the bitch I’d been to him. He wasn’t a bad guy, from what I’d seen. I didn’t give him a chance. Instead, I judged him on one incident from his past.
That one incident had implications with me he didn’t understand.
Christ, this was all so complicated.
I turned and trudged up the stairs. Once on the second level, I stopped at his door. It was quiet on the other side, some soft music making its way through. I knocked.
“Yeah.”
Opening it, I peeked inside. He was spread out on his bed, making the queen-size mattress look smaller than a twin. He was massive.
Maybe that was part of why he made me nervous. He towered over me by well over a foot. Throw in the thick, corded muscles and he could be scary.
He jumped from his bed when he saw it was me, as if nervous I was in his room.
“Hey.” His voice had a tremor in it.
“Hey.”
As he stood next to his bed, his hands flexing and twisting at his side with anxiety, I focused on his clear eyes as they looked down at me.
His sleeves were pushed up over his forearms, which showed those noticeable veins running across them.
It matched a pronounced vein in his thick neck I’d never noticed before.
As immense as he was, he was a dichotomy. His size didn’t match his personality one bit. He had the body of a man, but the eyes and look of a sad little boy.
“I’m home,” I told him.
“Yeah, OK, I’ll meet you downstairs and we can get to work.”
My room was dark, but I didn’t bother with the light since I only needed my bag. Once downstairs, I set myself up at the kitchen table. It wasn’t long before I heard his lumbering footsteps overhead.
There were tiny droplets of sweat on my forehead. I turned to look at the thermostat, convinced someone must have raised it, but it was set at the agreed temperature of sixty-eight.
No reasonable explanation for me to be sweating.
Maybe it was my increased heart rate causing it.
Why was I so nervous? It was me who was usually in control of these situations. I made sure of it. But Logan Somers had me off my game, and I definitely did not feel in control.
“Hey,” he said as he took the seat across from me.
I didn’t respond. All I did was pull up the document we needed in order to begin working. We had so much to do and only a little over a week to do it. Maybe the little truce I introduced between us last night would do us some good with our project, at least for the week.
Eventually the conversation flowed between us.
At least about the work ahead of us. We seemed to be doing fine as project partners, which was a pleasant surprise.
He was creative and had a better mind for this advertising crap than I did.
We went with a local, college related company, and I liked the ideas he suggested.
We were about two hours in when I suggested we take a break.
“Want anything to eat or drink?” I asked him. Rummaging through the cabinets, I pulled out a bag of chips.
“Chips?”
The condescension in his tone didn’t surprise me, he was a gym rat.
“Yeah, chips.” As I turned toward him, I munched on one close to his face. He pulled away, his face scrunching in disgust.
“Tink, it’s barely after noon.”
There was that fucking nickname again. I thought maybe, just maybe, he could call me by my real name for once. Yet even when we were getting along, I guessed I wasn’t worth enough for him to do that.
“Whatever,” I said. “I’m not a freak about what I eat like you. Not many are.”
Logan opened the refrigerator and had his head deep inside. I had to work hard to not stare at his ass bent over in those gray sweatpants. He turned around quicker than I expected, the ingredients in his hands to make one of those protein bowls he always ate.
“Listen,” he said, “I eat chips. But not before I feed my body something it needs first, that’s all.”
I continued munching loudly on my greasy thins of potato goodness as he prepared his food.
He glided through the kitchen like a master chef, like someone who was much more proficient in that room than anyone else our age.
He was slicing chicken breast one minute, then spinning around to the sink to rinse some kind of bean in a colander.
He danced back to the fridge to pull out lettuce, wielded a knife and chopped it like a professional.
He added seasonings and sauces and all kinds of fixings that made my mouth water.
Within minutes, he had a bowl I would have paid sixteen dollars for down the road at the local Mexican restaurant.
Once he returned to the table, my wide eyes couldn’t leave the bowl in front of him, and he caught me staring.
“Want some?” he asked.
“No.” But I did. It looked delicious. “How did you learn to do that?”
His mouth already had more food in it than should fit as he chomped away. He stirred up the contents of the bowl as he chewed, the aroma hitting my nose. It made my stomach growl.
He heard it.
Next thing I knew, he was getting another bowl from the cabinet and scooping some of his deliciousness into it. He plopped it in front of me, fork and all. No words. Then he sat down to his food and resumed eating. Once he finished another mouthful, he spoke.
“I used cooking as part of my therapy while I was home last year. It calmed me. It forced my brain to only think about the task in front of me, and not the other bullshit it wanted to focus on. It helped.” Looking my way, he gestured toward my bowl with the tip of his fork. “Eat it, tell me how it is.”
I worked hard to get a little bit of everything on the fork: garbanzo beans, corn, chicken, lettuce, avocado, to name a few. It had to be one of the most mouthwatering dishes I’d ever eaten. I felt some sour cream on the corner of my mouth and reached for a napkin at the center of the table.
Right as Logan did.
Our hands touched.
And just like the time his hand slid across my back when I got into his truck, my skin ignited. From a simple touch of his finger.
I didn’t want to pull away.
As it turned out, he didn’t either.
Our hands remained on the same napkin, our eyes low, looking at our hands. Neither willing to look at the other. After what felt like forever, Logan gripped my fingers gently, moving them, and lifted a napkin.
He handed it to me.
“Thank you.”
With a nod, he resumed eating. As did I.