my head. “No idea.” I’d continued sorting through the documents in the house, but hadn’t found any mention of a car collector or race car driver in the past inhabitants. Some mysteries remained to be solved.
Since Michael had had the cable installed, we’d taken to watching movies in the evenings in the parlor, where we’d recently installed a flat screen and a couple very comfortable couches, along with an area rug, a coffee table, and a couple lamps. We figured if we were going to live here for six months, we couldn’t sit on the floor or folding chairs the whole time. Michael brought a few things from his house, and I picked out a couple too.
Each night we’d take a glass of wine and sit together, watching the big screen and enjoying each other’s company. But it was becoming increasingly hard to just sit—something was growing in the air between us.
“We’ve been here six weeks now,” I pointed out as we settled one night, the movie ready to play in front of us.
“Yeah?” Michael said. “It’s gone fast.”
It had. The house, and Michael, had become my happy place. I still went home for Sunday dinners and helped Mom at the Tin, and even Lottie seemed to have accepted the strange new arrangement. She’d laid off pushing me about living with a Tucker, and I wondered if it was in part because she had been spending more time with a Tucker, too.
The house, and even the ghostly sounds and occasionally terrifying happenings, felt like my home now. And Michael—well, I wasn’t sure exactly what he was, but I knew he was important to me.
I’d spent a lot of time pushing away and denying feelings I had about him that were not partnerly or appropriate to home-improvement buddies. But as the weeks went on, and our friendship grew, it became harder and harder. Especially when we sat close on the couch at night.
I wondered sometimes what he was thinking, why he didn’t make a move, or try to at least. But I knew his life was complicated, with Shelly and Daniel. And despite the chemistry I often thought I felt when he touched me, when our eyes met—I forced myself to accept that most likely, I just wasn’t his type. If Shelly had been his type, well, she and I were very different.
23
Half Cat Strikes Again
Michael
Addie Tanner was exactly my type, and it was killing me. We spent so much time together, working and relaxing inside the old house, that every moment had become a kind of exquisite torture. She was gorgeous and funny, confident and smart—and I knew that a woman like that would want little to do with a small town guy with no prospects for anything better. I mean, yeah, if we sold the house and the car, we both stood to make a decent amount of money. But that wasn’t the kind of success I thought a woman like Addie looked for in a man. Her last relationship had been with a world-class violinist, for fuck’s sake. (One who also sounded like a world-class ass.)
And though there were very few minutes spent in her company where I wasn’t thinking about how gorgeous she was, how smart, how completely perfect—I knew I couldn’t act on it. This was a temporary situation, and she was headed back to the big city, back to her incredible life. I knew she’d called her boss to make some kind of arrangement, and she’d mentioned using the proceeds from the house sale to set up a new apartment in New York. She wasn’t planning to stay here, and certainly not with me.
“This movie is legitimately awful,” she said from beside me one night as we watched a romantic comedy that was so predictable, I was starting to feel like maybe I should write movie scripts.
“Wait,” I said. “Any minute his mother is going to burst in and there’s going to be a huge misunderstanding about why she’s in his room.”
Addie’s feet were in my lap, and my hands were rubbing up and down her shins, feeling the firm muscle and smooth skin there. This wasn’t unusual—we’d become close physically too. But I was pretty sure she didn’t realize how hard it was for me. And I mean hard in every sense of the word. Most nights we’d say goodnight and I’d tell her I needed to take a shower before turning in. I’d wait until she was done in the bathroom and then