16. “You’re doing this on purpose, aren’t you.”
“YOU’RE DOING THIS ON PURPOSE, AREN’T YOU.”
YASMINE
It started with tacos.
He showed up at my door with a grease-spotted paper bag and said, “Migas. Still hot.”
I didn’t ask how he knew I’d be home, and he didn’t insult either of us by pretending he was just in the neighborhood.
A week later, he was back because my door stuck and he just happened to have WD-40 in his truck. A lie we had both agreed, without discussing it, to let stand.
Then he was back because CeeCee needed the bookshelf anchored to the wall. That one was mine.
Then because I made a pie and wanted him to try it.
Sometimes it was ten minutes. A quick fix, a cup of coffee, a conversation that ended at a reasonable hour and left nothing messy behind. Other times he stayed two hours, and I opened the door already knowing his shirt wasn’t making it back out the way it came in.
I opened the door anyway every time.
We didn’t talk about it.
We also didn’t stop.
Spice Cabinet : Project Hale
Ava: Emergency meeting. Ricochet’s. 7 PM. Wear something presentable.
Tabby: this about Hale again?
Annie: it’s always about Hale
Annie: [I’m sick of this grandpa meme]
Ava: Fine. Potstickers after? I’ll buy.
Annie:
Yasmine:
At Ricochet, the emergency meeting turned out to be a group hang with an extra chair and a woman named Michelle sitting beside Hale.
Ava introduced her as a friend of a friend, new to town, just joining us for drinks. She said it casually enough that a stranger might have believed her. None of us were strangers.
Five minutes after we sat down, my phone buzzed in my lap.
Ava: This is the one.
Ava: She is perfect for him.
Tabby: you said that about the dentist
Ava: The dentist was a rough draft
Annie: I’m just here for the free food. you promised potstickers
I sipped my drink and studied the condensation ring on the table. Across from me, Hale looked patient and open, if mildly doomed.
Michelle was polished MBA energy, shoulders back, laugh practiced but not unkind. She asked about long-term vision before the appetizers came. She had opinions about work-life integration. She used the word synergy without apparent irony.
Hale smiled. He nodded. He asked her questions, because he wasn’t cruel, and that was just who he was. But he did not bite. I watched him not bite, said nothing, and finished my drink.
The next morning, Ava took it personally.
Spice Cabinet : Main Chat
Ava: What thee actual fuck, Hale.
Annie: LMAOOOO
Tabby: I liked her
Ava: Feedback from Michelle is you are “emotionally evasive.”
Tabby: I mean.
Hale: Maybe you’re not as intuitive as you think you are.
Ava: Excuse me?????
Ava: I am, in fact, extremely intuitive.
Ava: I brought you a polished, educated, gainfully employed woman with a pension plan and a skincare routine.
Annie: she has a point
Tabby: I mean. you’re intuitive, but Hale is also a deeply weird man.
Ava: I NEED BETTER FRIENDS
Annie:
Tabby:
Yasmine:
Hale: I’ll do better for the committee.
Hale: also it’s kind of weird that you were all there.
Ava: It was a group thing. It was meant to take the pressure off of a one on one.
Hale: If you say so
Ava: Fine.
In between the setups, there was my apartment.
Low lights. CeeCee asleep on the couch, the TV murmuring some late-night infomercial about miracle blenders. The hum of the refrigerator.
His hands braced on either side of me at the kitchen counter, low enough that if CeeCee stirred, we’d have half a second to look innocent.
His mouth at my neck, not kissing. Just breathing, hot against my skin, the scrape of stubble sending shivers straight down my spine.
We always let it go further, just never to a bed. As if that left us some plausible deniability about what this was.
There was laughter sometimes, the quiet sort you swallowed because the walls were thin. Like the time he whispered something filthy about rope and blindfolds. I bit my lip to keep from gasping, nails dragging faint lines down his forearm.
Other times, there was urgency, the kind that left no room for thinking.
Him lifting me against the kitchen wall. My thighs wrapping around his waist. The slow, deep rock of him inside me, too controlled to be fair, until I was whispering please against his mouth and he finally gave in, one hand covering my lips to muffle the sounds I couldn’t help making.
And there was the quiet after. Him still half-tangled with me, sweat cooling, his heartbeat steady under my palm.
By the second week, I knew his knock without looking through the peephole. Noticed that and didn’t examine why.
Ava: HALE.
Annie: oh no
Tabby: what happened
Hale: I swear to God I’m not doing this on purpose.
Ava: She was a pediatrician. A literal saint. Coached youth soccer on weekends.
Tabby: you said you wanted someone nurturing???
Hale: I do.
Ava: Then why did she leave early.
Hale: She asked what I do for fun and I said “read.”
Ava: AND??
Hale: Then she asked what I read.
Tabby: …
Hale: It escalated.
I choked on my water reading the thread.
He told me about it later, forehead pressed to mine, laughing under his breath about the look on her face when he got to Audre Lorde. The way she’d tilted her head like she was recalibrating.
We were in the back seat of his truck that time, parked in the shadows of my building’s garage. My legs were draped over his lap, his hand sliding up my inner thigh while he talked.
“I thought you liked smart women,” I managed, voice breathy.
“I do.” He leaned in and took my mouth slow, sucking my bottom lip between his teeth until it pulled a sound out of me. “Just not one who’s trying to grade me.”
I didn’t say anything to that. I filed it with everything else about him I wasn’t looking at directly.
He pushed his hand fully into my panties, fingers stroking me with lazy confidence. I covered his hand with mine, holding him there, guiding the pressure as a soft whimper slipped out.
Another week. Another perfect match.
Ava was incandescent with renewed purpose.
“She’s cultured,” Ava insisted. “She’s competitive. She hosts game nights. She ran a half-marathon last month and somehow that’s not the most impressive thing about her.”
The date lasted ninety minutes.
Ava: HALE!!!!!
Tabby: not the exclamation points
Annie: what now
Hale: She couldn’t play spades, Ava.
Ava: That is not a dealbreaker.
Hale: For the culture? Come on.
Tabby:
Annie: he has a point actually
Ava: I am done. I quit. I formally resign from this position effective immediately.
Hale: Swear to God I’m not sabotaging this.
Ava: You are impossible and I need a drink.
Hale: I’ll buy.
Ava: fuck you.
Hale: Nachos too.
Ava: …fine.
Apparently, that settled it.
Meanwhile, he was in my apartment, or I was in his truck, or we were lingering at my front door at midnight with no good reason to still be standing there.
The nights blurred into doors clicking shut, me gasping into his kiss before I’d even said hello. Or dropping to my knees in my living room, taking him into my mouth while he gripped the back of my head and whispered curses and praise in that low rumble that sent heat pooling low in my belly.
He didn’t ask me where this was going. I didn’t ask him why he kept saying no to women who were, on paper, exactly what he should want.
But I noticed.
The way he didn’t follow up after the dates. The way he let Ava rant and absorbed it and didn’t try harder. The way he always, somehow, ended up back at my door.
One night after, when CeeCee had already retreated to her room and left the couch to us, with his hand resting warm at the back of my neck, I asked, “You’re doing this on purpose, aren’t you.”
“Maybe,” he said.
That felt more dangerous than if he’d laughed it off.
Outside, Whitlock Hills moved along like it always had. The shops closed at seven. The back roads went quiet by ten. People were born here and stayed here and died here and called it a life, and meant it, and weren’t wrong.
My brother left two messages in one night, slurred, angry, then weepy, and I deleted them without listening all the way through. My mother’s calls went to voicemail. CeeCee got rounder by the week, and somehow steadier. I thought often about what it cost her to choose herself.
And Hale kept showing up.
Week after week. Fix after fix. Lie after lie that we had both agreed to let stand.
Like this was the only date he actually intended to keep.
I noticed that too.
I was almost done pretending I didn’t.