5. Collie #2
“Don’t get me wrong, I think you’re doing great. You’re healing, and that takes time. But you haven’t really started your next chapter,” I said. “That’ll happen when you unpack your boxes, turn this place into a home instead of a crash pad, and start dating again.”
“I fully intend to. I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.” He got up, sticking his feet into his slides as he said, “Speaking of wine, I’d love some right about now. Can I pour you a glass?”
“Sure.”
He left the room, and I grabbed the food I’d brought with me and hurried after him. The cat, who’d been sitting in the doorway throughout all of this, hurried after me in turn.
Miller half-filled two juice glasses with white wine from the fridge and handed me one. I said, “Cheers,” and raised it to my lips, but I didn’t actually drink any, because I hated the taste of wine. He needed a drinking buddy though, so he didn’t need to know that.
When he didn’t say anything for a minute, I decided to lighten the mood with, “Show me your alleged tomato plant.”
He grinned at me. “Alleged? You don’t think I grew that tomato?”
“Seeing is believing.”
“Fine. Come with me.”
We cut through what would probably be a wonderful den someday, and he opened the back door and flipped a switch to turn on an outdoor light. I followed him outside and murmured, “Oh wow.”
The deck he’d mentioned was only about six feet wide, but it spanned the entire building. There was a single folding chair to the right, and to the left was a bushy plant covered in green tomatoes. But what captured my attention was the overgrown backyard.
“I remember you saying something about a yard, but I had no idea this was back here,” I said. “There’s no sign of it at all from the street. And look, all the houses have them! It’s like a secret oasis that only the residents know about.”
I left my glass on the railing, and as I hurried down the stairs he called after me, “Be careful. Those slippers might live up to their name.”
I looked down at the pair of dog heads on my feet. “By… Scooby Dooing?”
“By slipping. They probably don’t have any traction.”
I reached the yard and turned to him. “Oh, look. I made it down ten steps without dying.” That earned me an eye roll.
There was a cracked concrete path running right down the center of the yard, with a bunch of weeds on either side of it. “There’s so much you could do with this,” I said, as I followed the path to an equally cracked concrete patio.
Miller carried his wine down the stairs and took a seat on the second-lowest step. “Like what?”
“The first thing I’d do would be to buy a swing set.
I had one as a kid, and I really missed it when I moved into the apartment with Aunt Sue.
That’s just me, though. What you should do is grow a bunch of tomato plants.
You obviously have a green thumb, judging by your big, leafy friend in the pot. ”
“I don’t need that many tomatoes.”
“Sure you do! You could can them.”
“I’m really not going to do that,” he said, “since I’m not Laura Ingalls Wilder, I don’t live in a little house on a prairie, and this isn’t the eighteen-hundreds.”
“People still can stuff.”
“I’m not the canning sort.”
“Well, then how about being the tomato guy? That could totally be your thing, taking baskets of fresh tomatoes to all your neighbors. They’d love you for it.”
“That still sounds like something Laura Ingalls Wilder would do.”
“It could also be something Miller Anderson does.”
“Generally speaking, I don’t want to bond with my neighbors—except for the lesbian couple across the street, they’re awesome. But they already like me without having to ply them with fruit.”
I turned to look at him and said, “Oh no. Please don’t tell me you’re one of those people.”
“What people?”
“Ones who call tomatoes fruits.”
“That’s what they are.”
“Technically, yes. But come on. If you went to make a fruit salad, would you ever in a million years add tomatoes?”
“No, but what does that prove?”
“That’s they’re—oh shit!” I tripped over a crack in the patio and landed on my hands and knees. Miller came running, and as he helped me up, I said, “This doesn’t prove you right, because I didn’t slip. I tripped, and that could have happened no matter what I was wearing on my feet.”
“Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine.”
When I started back down the path, he pointed out, “You’re limping.”
“I banged up my knees a little.”
“Want me to carry you?”
“No, both because I’m fine, and because your shoulder probably still hurts.”
“How are your hands? And don’t just tell me you’re fine again.”
I looked at my palms, which were a little scratched, and brushed off some gravel as I said, “I’m hunky dory.”
He caught up to me and said, “Let me see.”
I hid them behind my back, but then I decided I was being childish and held them palms up. Miller took my hands in his and examined them in the light spilling from the back of the house. When he met my gaze, he asked, “Why are you grinning like that?”
“Because you’re as much of a caretaker as I am. I appreciate that in a person.”
“Let’s go inside and get this cleaned up, so it doesn’t get infected.”
“Okay.”
He followed me up the stairs, but I only made it halfway before I tripped again. I yelped when I caught myself with my scraped up hands, and he muttered, “That’s it.”
With that, he spun me around and threw me over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, while I exclaimed, “You’re going to hurt your injured shoulder!”
“That’s the other shoulder. This one’s fine.” He plucked off my slippers one at a time and chucked them into the yard. I tried to protest, but he said, “Nope. Those things are a hazard.”
“They’re not, though.”
“I’ll buy you a new, less dangerous pair.”
“But I like Scooby.”
“Like him from afar. He’s been set free, turned loose in the wild like a rehabilitated raccoon.”
We bickered all the way to his bathroom, where he finally put me down and produced a ridiculously huge first aid kit. I asked, “What did you buy that for, Armageddon?”
“It’s good to be prepared.”
“You’re prepared, alright,” I said, as I held up several rolls of gauze. “If the slippers had killed me, you could have mummified my entire body.” He tried to frown at me, but a grin slipped through despite himself.
I dropped the gauze back into the kit and hiked up the legs of my sweatpants. My knees were discoloring and were definitely going to bruise, but I hadn’t broken the skin, so I let the pant legs drop again.
After I washed my hands, I took a seat on the edge of the tub. Miller knelt down in front of me and went to work applying antibiotic cream to my scraped up palms, followed by a weird patchwork of bandages.
While he did that, I studied the sweep of his dark lashes, and the cute little line of concentration that appeared between his brows. Then my gaze dropped to his full lips. I wondered if they were as soft as they looked. I’d really like to find out…
He interrupted my train of thought by sitting back on his heels and saying, “You’re all set. Want some ibuprofen?”
“Nah. I’m—”
“Fine?”
“Yes.”
“Are you really, or are you just saying that?”
“I’m close enough.” We both got up, and for lack of any better ideas, I asked, “Want to watch a movie or something?”
“Sure.”
He used the monitors in his office as a TV, so we got comfortable on opposite ends of the couch.
He scrolled through pretty much all of Netflix, and whenever he stopped on something, I said, “Seen it.” After doing this about twenty times, he turned to look at me, and I added, “But I can watch it again.”
He started to play the movie, and I said, “It’s really surprising when the killer turns out to be her sister.” Miller shut off the movie and stared at me. “But you knew that, right? This movie came out, like, fifteen years ago. I thought everyone knew that.”
“Or maybe we could just talk, instead of trying to watch a movie,” he said.