Chapter 27 Inside?
Reed slides his hands from my face and steps back. My insides have dissolved into a collection of soap bubbles.
Whoa.
I would jump out of a plane with him after eye contact like that.
We needed a condom for that eye contact.
I could be pregnant.
Maybe I am.
We can’t rule it out. Life finds a way.
Celibate thirty-year-old woman conceives human child via eye contact.
Maybe this is how Jesus happened.
I gave him an out to break up with me for naked stalking . . . and he responded with eye-sex.
Reed’s palm moves down the ridges of my spine and settles in the curve right above my ass as he steers me the remainder of the way toward his home in charged silence.
The heat of his hand sears through the Sherpa blanket.
That incandescent feeling from the wedding is back, thrumming through my veins.
The sex goblin from the lake has been roused.
This feeling is so foreign. I didn’t have it with any of the five daters from earlier this year. It never used to happen with Ted. Or Maddox back in college. Or my high school boyfriend of three weeks and two days, Wendell. Those guys gave me butterflies.
But I never daydreamed about their weight on top of me, their hands pulling off my underwear, scruff scraping down my body, their teeth on my thighs.
I never wrote smutty fan fiction about going home with any of them after the night we met.
This is a new level of attraction that I’ve never mingled with.
Reed’s existence has kicked open the door to a whole new (sultry) room in my brain.
I stand firm on my assertion that this man is an oxymoron. Reed says he’s overrun with trust issues, but he seems to trust me? He presents as guarded, but when I press him the slightest bit, he’s vulnerable.
“This is it.” Reed pulls me from my thoughts as he gestures to the house I crouched in front of fifteen minutes ago. I follow him into his open garage and shuffle around the Mercedes.
I startle as the garage door shudders closed behind us. Reed pulls open the door to his dark house, and I startle again as he flips on a hall light. Apparently, I’m currently one unexpected noise away from accidentally jumping out of my body.
If there is a next time that I see this man, then that next time I need to be chill as ice. Chill as detritus floating aloofly through space. Sexy, put together, wearing cute clothes—wearing clothes, period.
I step inside. A staircase leading to a second floor sits to my left, and a long hallway lined with art pieces looms straight ahead.
“So, how have you been, Rikki?” Reed says a few feet down the hall.
A quiet laugh whistles through my teeth. “Um, chaotic. You?”
Reed smiles over his shoulder. “Same.”
“Is this your mom’s house?”
“It’s mine. Oliver and I moved in at the end of January. She’s visiting from Jersey.”
“You own this house?”
His smile stretches. “Should I be insulted by your flagrant disbelief?”
I bite back a grin. “No . . . question mark.”
He laughs. “You rent?”
“Reed, I’m a writer-podcaster who lives directly outside of New York City. Of course I rent.”
Reed laughs again, advancing down the hall. “We were renting, but we had a great business year, so we decided to take the leap and invest.”
He seems incredibly relaxed now that we’re in his home. I trail him, waddling in my blanket-dress, slowing to inspect the art pieces. They’re all made of bottle caps?
There’s a two-foot-tall portrait of a Yankees hat made entirely of bottle caps. A Hamilton the musical logo made of a mix of painted and organic bottle caps.
My jaw falls open when I reach an enormous, extreme close-up of Ed Sheeran’s face, wearing thick, black-framed glasses made entirely of art-ed bottle caps.
I swing my gaze to Reed. He’s ten feet down the hall, waiting in front of a door. “Reed, what is this?”
“That’s Ed.”
“Why is Ed here?”
“He’s one of the greatest songwriters of our generation, Rikki. It would be weird if he wasn’t here.”
A smile rips across my face as he disappears into the room he was hovering in front of. I shuffle after him, coming to a halt in the doorframe.
His room.
It’s spacious and full of warm wooden furniture. It smells like cedar, oakmoss, and musk. Like him. Reed’s ducked into a walk-in closet off to the right.
I slink against the doorframe. “Where did you get a bottle-cap portrait of Ed Sheeran?”
“I made it,” he calls from inside the closet. “I do bottle-cap art. It’s a hobby. Not as edgy as streaking, but it helps with my anxiety.”
He made it? That was like real art.
I gape at his back. He’s in dark-blue straight leg jeans today with that black button-up. “I have so many questions, I don’t even know where to start.”
He glances at me over his shoulder. “I told you I was a lot.”
I purse my lips as a giddy whorl gushes outward from my heart. It’s typically women who get labeled a lot. Men are allowed to be eccentric, chatty, loud, and strange, and they’re called fun. People will say they’re hilarious—they’re an interesting character. Women with the same traits: a lot.
I’m obsessed with him identifying as a lot.
I curl my toes into the plush navy-blue throw rug under my feet that matches the dark-blue lines shooting through the plaid red comforter on his bed. This room is cozy.
The bed is perpendicular to this wall, jutting out to divide the floor.
On his nightstand, atop a small stack of novels is .
. . a weathered, annotated, well-worn copy of the book I recommended to him the night after the wedding: Elizabeth Ross Falls for Ryan.
My mouth splits into a smile. He wasn’t lying about it being a favorite.
Past his walk-in closet, a door is open to an en suite bathroom.
There’s a TV mounted on the wall across from the bed with a deep-cherry wooden dresser set underneath it.
Gallery walls spatter the space on either side of the screen, and two overflowing wooden bookcases span the left wall of the room, flanking a window that faces the front of the house.
My eyes catch on The Minute review of Broken and Bruised hanging to the left of the TV. A flock of birds swirls around my heart and flutters down into my gut.
“For you.”
I turn back to Reed. He’s emerged from the closet, and he’s executing a tiny bow as he extends a stack of folded clothes.
Ah yes, I momentarily forgot I’m a sweaty mess in a Sherpa blanket.
I lock myself in Reed’s bathroom, toss the journal and clothes on the counter next to the sink, and stare into the mirror, inhaling deeply as a wave of repressed shock surfaces in my chest.
I’m in LA.
I appeared here.
My journal can . . . bend space?
To evaporate home, I need to take a picture with him at Santa Monica Pier?
Does this mean the universe has actually stepped in to assist me with my love life?
I glance at the journal again. The garter’s back around it. I squint at the lacy white leg-scrunchie. Could this have been triggered by the . . . garter thing?
Did the universe step in the night of Babe’s wedding, and I’m only just now realizing it ’cause I didn’t open the damn journal for a month?
Has this sort of shit been happening to women everywhere since the dawn of garter-tradition time?
Is catching the bouquet and having a random slide a garter up your thigh at a wedding some sort of mystical horny rain dance to herald in Aphrodite so she can help you secure a soulmate?
There’s a shower behind me in the mirror. It’s one of those fancy-looking big rectangular glass ones with an elaborate showerhead. I pull open the door and flip on the water.
I fold Reed’s Sherpa blanket, hop in, and let the hot water cascade right into my face.
Reed’s mom is here.
I already forgot that I’m definitely intruding.
It’s nine something Pacific time. Santa Monica Pier closes at eleven.
I need to get us out of this house stat if I want to get home tonight.
I have card orders to fill for the Etsy shop tomorrow, and I haven’t done any prep because I spent my free time this evening collecting enough milk to support a Clifford-size cat.
All my shit is in Hoboken. I can’t stay here in any capacity without a phone. My purse and ID and everything a human needs to live in society is in Hoboken.
We’re twenty minutes from Santa Monica Pier.
I just need to get Reed there, take a quick picture, and we can both go on our merry way.
He can get back to family time. I can get home and spend the rest of the night parsing out what in the fuck this all means.
Maybe Reed and I can plan an actual hang and spend time together sooner?
How do I tell him I can now bend space and come back sometime this weekend or the next if that’s preferable?
Aesop Coriander Seed Body Cleanser is arranged neatly among Aesop shampoo and conditioner on one of those metal hanging shelves. I take my time getting clean, deep breathing, reveling in the aromatic steam. It smells like man heaven: The soap is woodsy and irresistible.
When I’m done, I realize I didn’t ask for a towel.
I smear away the steam fogging up the glass shower walls and home in on the used navy-blue one hanging on the back of the bathroom door.
I tug it from the hook and snuggle in. Reed’s if the forest took human form and sat in the sun on the beach for hours reading a book scent is all over it.
I sift through the clothes he pulled for me. There’s a pair of black boxers, an NYU T-shirt, NYU sweatpants, and folded underneath it all—a thin, well-worn, long black coat. I suck in a sharp breath as it flops open.
A trench coat.
I tug the loose gray T-shirt over my head. I twist the bottom of the shirt and knot it so it’s more fitted, and I look at least a smidge cute. I roll the sweatpants a couple times so they fit better.
Reverently, I slide on the coat. The sleeves fall to my mid-palm, and the bottom brushes my calves.
It smells like fresh laundry, it’s surprisingly comfortable, and the journal fits easily into one of its enormous square pockets.
I glance at my reflection. I look like a jock who traded jackets with the town flasher.
Steam rushes out behind me as I step back into Reed’s room. He’s sat on the corner of the bed, feet planted, turning his phone over in his hands.
His eyes slice up to mine, and the usual jolt shivers down my spine. His lips tip up. “The trench looks good on you.”
I lean sideways against the doorframe. “Thanks, it’s really helping with my trauma.”
He smiles, offering up his phone. “Did you need to call someone? Do you want me to drive you somewhere?”
As I see it, I have two options here:
(1.) Pretend to call Whitney.
Or
(2.) Attempt to charades my way through explaining that I teleported here from the other side of the country using the magical normal-looking leather journal I got in my goody bag at Babe’s wedding.
“Yeah, actually, is it okay if I make a quick call?”
Reed nods, unlocking his phone. “Of course.”
“Thank you.” I take his iPhone, wander back into the bathroom, and punch Whitney’s cell into the keypad. I hit send and immediately hang up. Then I murmur into the phone awkwardly for thirty seconds before walking back into Reed’s room and handing it back.
“All good?”
I nod. “Yeah . . . Do you think you could possibly give me a ride down to Santa Monica Pier? My cousin’s down there for the night.”
He blows out a low laugh. “She really left you here in the streets and drove all the way down to Santa Monica?”
I snort. “She’s also a lot.”