have happened?”
“What kind of man do you take me for?”
A dangerously tempting one.
He smiles, and ah, yes. He knows exactly how I feel. I’m sure of it.
He’s not fooling me.
This friendship is starting to get messy. You can’t flirt and text and touch as much as we do without crossing some lines. Doesn’t he realize that?
I decide to put a stop to this conversation by sending him over to the ladder I asked Lenny to bring down. We have work to do. Today’s story time is winter wonderland themed. My dress is ice blue and I have a snowman clip in my hair.
I want to hang paper snowflakes from the ceiling for the kids. They’ll flip, and fortunately, Ben is game. He takes off his jacket and sets down his coffee before he climbs right on up. I hand him a couple of snowflakes connected to strings and then step back to watch him work.
His shirt rides up as he stretches to attach the first one, and I catch a few inches of his toned torso. I nearly lick my chops. Good thing he’s too busy to notice.
“Is that good?” he asks, in reference to the snowflake.
I mumble something inaudible then scurry back to my table. I’m glad I have a solid objective to get back to: arranging a pile of snowballs.
“Do you have plans later? Andy wants us all to watch a movie at his house.”
“Us?”
“You, me, Arianna, Kevin, Eli.”
It seems I have no choice. I’ll be spending the evening in Ben’s company, suffering, keeping my dirty thoughts to myself.
“And I told him to pick something scary,” he continues.
I glance back over, glad to see his shirt has fixed itself. Thank God.
“Why?”
So I’ll be forced to cower in fear? Sidle up close? Hide my face against his chest?
His brow arches. “Because you want to be bad, Hart. Blood and gore go hand in hand with that, don’t you think?”
So it has nothing to do with us touching. Fine.
I turn around and return to my task. We work in silence and I wonder if I should bring up the boyfriend search again as a way to test the waters between us. It’s an underhanded tactic, maybe even a little childish, but it’s the only tool I’ve got, so I’ll use it.
“I’ve been wondering,” I start. “How has the search been going for my nice guy?” He grunts, but I trudge on. “You know, since Andy rejected me…I keep expecting you to find someone to take his place.”
“I’ve been too busy at the firm to think much about it.”
His tone sounds stiff.
“Oh?” I start to arrange the name tags. “That’s understandable. You know what? Maybe you could find someone to invite to Andy’s tonight,” I suggest sweetly, as if getting my hopes up. “What better way to get to know someone than in a group setting?”
“Wouldn’t work,” he says brusquely, shutting the door on the subject.
I frown.
“Why?”
“The numbers would be all off. Andy has two couches and two chairs in his living room. With seven people, someone would have to sit on the floor.”
“So we’ll just bring in a chair from the kitchen.”
“Hand me another snowflake, will you?”
Ah, so he’s just going to ignore me then. Wonderful. It’s as if the whole topic bores him, which makes sense. He’s never been in my shoes. He’s never had to go years starved for affection, yearning to know what it feels like to just…
I resist the urge to groan and yank my hair.
He was right earlier—I did think he was going to take advantage of me in that hallway. I wanted him to!
“Madison. Snowflake.”
Right. I grab some off the table and walk over to the ladder so I can pass them off to him. My shoulders are sagged. My smile is wiped clean.
Even on my tiptoes, our hands barely touch. He stares down at me with a grim expression.
“Just…not tonight, okay?” he asks, his eyes imploring me to drop the subject. “Let’s just hang out with the group and we can figure out that boyfriend stuff later.”
I hate that he wants to shelve the topic. It might not be a big deal to him, but it is to me.
I thought we were getting somewhere. I thought I was going to back him into a corner so he’d be forced to come clean one way or the other. Instead, he chose a third route, one I didn’t even see coming: total indifference.
15
Ben
A warm front is moving into Clifton Cove today, the first of the