like a giant step toward the cliff I’d been hovering around for weeks. The image of her on her bed, whiteboard in hand, I love you scrawled across the front, flashed through my mind. It shouldn’t matter, and yet it really, really did. I had fallen for her once. Hard and fast and completely. I didn’t want to watch her fall for someone else. More importantly, how was I going to be around her on a daily basis, eat her food, listen to the sound of her laugh or catch the scent of vanilla on her hair and not fall again myself?
I’d had my reasons for ending things. Good ones. But watching her, itching to touch her, if even just to wipe the smudge of sauce off her cheek, made me wish I could forget why I’d left in the first place.
While I finished up the dishes, Isaac came back into the kitchen. “So tomorrow morning, while Dani is running with Steven, I need you to help me out. You busy?”
I placed the plate I was holding back into the sink and grabbed a dishtowel. “You finish the dishes and I’ll help you out in the morning.”
He hesitated a moment before moving to the sink and picking up the discarded dish. “Hasn’t Dani been doing the dishes?”
“It’s the twenty-first century, Isaac. She shouldn’t have to do the dishes. She’s cooking for us. This is the least we can do.”
“Fine. I’m sorry. I’m helping. And don’t make it sound like I don’t care about her. That’s what I need your help with in the morning.”
I raised an eyebrow and he gave me a sheepish grin.
“I bought her some furniture. They’re going to deliver it tomorrow morning while she’s out on her run. Help me set it up?”
Chapter Nineteen
Dani
Steven was waiting for me in the garden when I went out for my run. The newness of his sneakers and the headband he wore across his forehead both screamed beginner, but I was hardly in a position to judge. I was much less an athlete than I was someone who appreciated the head-clearing therapy running proved to be.
“Good morning,” Steven said, pulling one ankle up behind him in a quad stretch.
“Hi,” I said. I pulled out my headphones but then hesitated. Steven didn’t have any. Would it be rude for me to wear mine? It’s not like we’d be taking a leisurely stroll around the battery. We were going to be running. No way I could talk and breathe and run all at the same time. Not without hyperventilating. “I hope you don’t mind,” I said, holding up the earbuds. “I figure we won’t be able to talk much anyway, right?”
“Oh, yeah, sure,” Steven said. “I totally get it.”
Still, I could see the hesitation in his eyes. So he did want to talk. The realization made me nervous. I hadn’t known Steven very long and had spent very little time with him one-on-one, but the energy around him buzzed with a certain something that made me fairly certain he wanted to ask me out.
I walked up the narrow path that led around the house and to the sidewalk, wondering if there was a way I could head him off. Earbuds would only protect me for so long. We hit the sidewalk and turned toward the water. A cool breeze blew off the Ashley and Cooper rivers that wrapped around the city before converging in the bay and flowing out to the open ocean. The air held a slight chill, but it was still pleasant, even for the early hour. Could I claim I was still on the rebound? Nursing wounds from my last break up? It occurred to me that I didn’t even know if the other guys knew that Alex and I had ever been a thing. Isaac might have told them, but knowing Isaac, I doubted it had ever come up. For all his faults, Isaac was maybe the least prone to gossip of anyone I knew. Celebrity news held zero appeal. Even stuff pertaining to people he actually knew personally didn’t interest him. He was much more a live-and-let-live kind of guy. I’d always admired that about him.
Either way, it felt weird to tell Steven I was still getting over my ex when my ex was one of his roommates. I picked up my pace. Maybe I was wrong, and Steven really did just want the exercise?
Four blocks in, it didn’t matter either way. I’d almost forgotten Steven was behind