She had to wear tap shoes. Which were currently in her house. Across from Chip. Whose dreams may or may not have been destroyed. By her.
“But what do you think?”
Bree’s toes halted halfway through a scrape across the worn hardwood. “Oh,” she began, trying to replay the conversation she had missed. “I quite agree.”
His face was deadpan. “Really. You agree.”
Bree felt herself hesitate, as though she was one foot away from stepping in a trap. Her metaphorical foot lingered over the hole. Felt the draft. Pulled back. “Well, not always. You’d know much more than me. So . . .” She cast her eyes around, searching for anything to talk about. They floated across the dimly lit room full of flickering white votives, white linens, and waiters sliding around couples while carrying trays of Cajun-fried crawfish tails and crème brûlées. They landed on his sharp suit, impeccable, as it always was.
Why had Chip been wearing that suit that day? He never wore suits. A crisp dark blue that showed off the amount of time he spent in the sun out with his dog, biking through the pines between earth and sky. His neck looked particularly tanned. Especially—she swallowed, burning with fresh embarrassment—as he jerked at his tie in frustration, staring at that houseboat, stranded behind the wheel.
“Here we are,” the waiter said, setting down bowls of soup she had no memory of ordering. She looked down at the mystery soup, seeing what appeared to be noodles, and picked up her spoon.
“Bree, is there something you’d like to talk about?”
She realized she was grimacing over her soup.
She looked up.
Theo sat there with his hands folded, a smile playing on his lips. The kind of smile she had a feeling psychiatrists used to coerce conversations out of patients. Slowly, she put her spoon down.
Should she tell him she had been in the middle of a neighborhood war? That there had been a cease-fire? That she had botched it by bringing in a zoo?
He’d think she was crazy.
Maybe she was.
No.
Yes. Absolutely. Positively. Was.
Bree pursed her lips as if thinking.
“I can’t think of anything,” she said at last, then reached for her water glass. As she picked it up she meant to deflect with some fascinating conversation point, but her eyes fell on a man at a table on the other side of the room, raking a hand through hair that looked about a month overdue for a trim.
Like Chip’s. She’d never quite noticed before she stood beside him on her porch that evening. He had smelled of sawdust and coffee grounds when he shocked her to the core and put his arm around her, pulling her deep into his side. Cocooning her from the outside world for a few brief, safe moments.
She had processed and reprocessed that gesture well past midnight.
“Is there . . .” Theo paused significantly. “Somewhere else you need to go?”
Bree shook her head, picking up her soup spoon.
Of course not. She was here. Dipping her utensil into something—she wasn’t sure quite what—made of coconut milk and cumin.
“Perhaps someone else you’d like to be meeting tonight?” Theo pressed.
“No.” Bree dropped her spoon in the bowl. “Of course not,” she said, forcing herself to meet his eyes. “I can’t think of anything nicer to do tonight than this.”
That was true. Theo was one of the most pleasant men she knew.
Theo’s brow dropped, his onyx eyes saying silently, Then what aren’t you telling me?
She pressed her lips together, but her resolve withered under his patient stare.
“It’s just . . .” Bree reached for a bread roll. “Just . . . I may have been involved in an adolescent war on my neighbor and crossed a line.”
There. She’d said it. She was a child.
“You . . . are in a war. With your neighbor,” Theo repeated, a smile beginning to rise. He was looking at her like the parent of a kindergartener listening to his child’s complaints about the rainbow erasers being sold out at the book fair.
“You don’t understand,” Bree said. “I’m not talking mature, adult-level, hate-your-neighbor stunts. I’m talking spending hours scouring the internet to subscribe him to every bizarre magazine on the planet. I’m talking about running up an eBay bid for 250 live eastern subterranean termites to place on his property.”
“You have . . . an eBay bid running for 250 subterranean termites?”
Bree shrugged defensively. “That one was just a backup plan.”
He settled back in his chair for a moment. Pensive.