“Two and a half months from now. The week after Sloan’s wedding. I’m not anemic anymore,” I added.
“Good. I wish I were already there to take care of you.”
“Oh yeah? Are you going to buy me pads when I need them?” I asked wryly, knowing this errand was an affront to his very manhood. Men were so dramatic about buying feminine products. I never understood what the big deal was.
“Now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
I rolled my eyes with a smile. “Lucky for you, there’s only one need I want you to take care of. I’m climbing the walls.”
He laughed. “As long as you’re not climbing anybody else.”
My mind flickered traitorously to Josh.
Tyler didn’t have anything to worry about. I didn’t cheat. Never had, never would.
Cheating was a completely avoidable scenario as long as you operated with the barest amount of common sense.
Like not putting yourself into vulnerable situations, such as hiring a hot fireman-carpenter to spend hours working in your garage.
Josh would be an endurance test of my willpower.
“Look, Kris, I gotta go. I’ll try to call you again in a few days. No more stressing. I can’t wait to see you. And I’m gonna tear you up when I get there,” he added.
Now he had me in a better mood. Of course, how much he could tear me up depended entirely on where my wacky cycle was at the moment. But I liked the offer. “I can’t wait.” I grinned.
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
We hung up and I surveyed the chaos I’d pulled from the fridge. Stuntman sat in the middle of it, looking up at me. His little white chin looked like the beard on a nutcracker.
This is fine. It’s all going to be fine.
But I spent the next three hours scrubbing the kitchen just the same.
FIVE
Josh
Two days after our fender bender, I knocked on Kristen’s door. Yapping started on the other side. I’d just gotten off my shift, and I had a heaping pile of building materials in the bed of my truck. Brandon let me raid his garage for power tools. Thank God. This job was temporary—I didn’t need to be buying shit.
Kristen opened the door, wearing a pink robe and a green mud mask. “Hey. Come in.”
Stuntman Mike bounced off my shins. I reached down to pet him, and she stopped me. “Don’t. He bites.”
“We’ve already met. He let me hold him at the station,” I reminded her.
“He’s got a misplaced sense of ownership over me and his memory is stored in a brain the size of a peanut,” she mumbled. “Wait a few minutes until he calms down. Then it’ll be safer.”
I looked down at the little fluff ball. He growled and wagged his nub of a tail at the same time. I followed her into the house and leaned down and gave Stuntman Mike a pat while she wasn’t looking.
A teetering stack of FedEx boxes sat piled by the front door. The coffee table was covered in carefully organized piles of paper. A laptop sat in the middle of it with a beer next to it, still cold. The glass bottle was perspiring. “Already drinking, huh? It’s breakfast time.”
“I had a Pop-Tart with it,” she grumbled.
I snorted.
Her house was clean. Sparse, but clean. Smelled a little like bleach. There was a huge vase of flowers on her credenza. From the boyfriend for Valentine’s Day, I guessed. I hated that holiday. Just an excuse to spend money on overpriced shit. I was glad I was single for it this year.
“Here’s the garage.” She opened a door off the laundry room.
A tiny lacy black thong hung from a hanger over the dryer at eye level. I looked at it longer than was probably appropriate.
I hadn’t been with anyone since Celeste. I’d been too busy and worn out from the new job and the move. And to be honest, I’d been enjoying not having to deal with a woman. It was a reprieve.
It had been my experience that all women, even the ones you’re only having sex with, are on some level exhausting. I wasn’t in any particular hurry to get back to it.
I came up behind Kristen and peered into the garage over her shoulder. It was cavernous and mostly empty except for a few containers stacked against the far end and a newer black Honda parked in the last bay. She hit a button on the wall and sunlight shafted under the opening garage door.