that he wouldn’t take their calls.
****
Nate sat in his garage, inside his car, long after the overhead light for the garage door opener turned itself off. What the hell had happened in Claudia’s apartment, and what did it mean?
The engine was off and the only noise was the intermittent knocking of his cooling engine. Closing his eyes, he inhaled the scent of old French fries in his car and couldn’t help seeing again the scene that kept flashing across his brain.
Claudia’s lips had settled on his, and her hands had locked around the back of his neck. He’d done his best not to step into her and take everything he could, everything she might have been offering. It felt wrong to be that close to her, and yet so right—in a bunch of ways.
What was she doing, anyway? Was this her acting out over Edward being an ass? Why would she have tried to kiss him? And there was no mistaking that it had been a kiss. It hadn’t been an accident, but he had no idea why she was trying herself out on him.
He thumped his head against the back of his seat and wondered what the living hell was wrong with him. It would mess up everything they had between them for his long-ago crush to flare up now and ruin the way things were. He groaned in frustration, trying to ignore the fact that his pants were still way too tight.
And it was a crush—he was almost sure. He’d thought about her over the years and wondered what it would be like for them to be together. He was a man, after all. He always shut down that kind of thinking as soon as it started, though, since it was pointless and frustrating. It would never happen, and most of the time he didn’t even want it to happen, since it would change their friendship from comfortable, and always there, to possibly volatile and probably unmanageable. Not to mention completely over if it didn’t work out.
The knocking of the engine stopped. Complete silence enveloped him, and he realized he was getting cramped just sitting in the car, not moving, with his head pressed back and his pants straining at the seams.
He got out of the car and slammed the door behind him. Jamming the key into the lock on the door leading into the kitchen, he barely resisted twisting the metal hard enough to break it off in the unoffending lock. All he wanted was to live a simple life and hang out with Claudia, hang out with her kid, who was funny and a kick to be around. Do his construction work and come home every day to eat and sleep, and get up to do it all again the next day.
Sure, it might not seem like the most exciting life, but he was fine with that. In fact, he preferred it to the way things used to be before he moved out of his parents’ house and got his own, with its peace and quiet. He liked being able to go out and do things and still be able to come home to silence if that was what he wanted.
He entered the kitchen, and that silence seemed to sit on his chest like a two-by-four. It pressed in on him from all sides and breathed down his neck with huffing gasps. The house was dark and would stay that way until he turned on lights. It would stay quiet until he turned on the stereo or flicked on the TV or rattled pots and pans in a kitchen that wasn’t nearly as warm or welcoming as the one in Claudia’s apartment two miles away. It lacked the life and vitality of said apartment that was half the size of his place.
“Dammit!” He threw his keys onto the counter and reached for the light switch. But with his hand hovering over the switch plate, he hesitated. He stood there frozen.
Had he already thrown something away by not responding to Claudia? Did she think he didn’t want her because he’d run like a coward? What exactly did she want from that kiss?
He had tried to put it down to hormones, or possibly Peter being back, as he drove home. Why else would she have kissed him when she never had before? But then he thought about the fluttering eyelashes from the other day and her getting so close to him over the last few days. Was there