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Silence fills the line. I know what she wants, but I just can’t tell her. Maybe if some time passes, I can sink back into the fantasies that he’s utterly perfect in every way. Putting any truths out there will make that impossible.
“Tell me all the details,” she insists.
“I couldn’t go through with it,” I lie. “It would just be too weird, you know?”
Madison sighs on the other end of the line.
“Adalynn,” she grumbles. “How did he take it?”
“He umm… I did it by text. I figured it would be too weird to do it face-to-face.”
“You mean you’d jump his bones if he showed up there all horned up and ready for action?”
I huff. “Something like that. I’ll talk with you later,” I tell her, faking a yawn. “I have an early day tomorrow.”
I hang up before she can try and give me more unsolicited advice.
I should’ve started a timer for this hip prop thing, but I didn’t. I wait another twenty minutes before climbing off the bed. There’s nothing sexy about waddling to the bathroom with a towel smooshed between my legs, but I guess it’s on par with how the rest of the night was going.
As if the night isn’t bad enough, my smoke alarm is going off when I get out of the shower.
I forgot about the lasagna and burned it to a crisp.
It’s after eleven when I finally get to bed. It’s after two in the morning when I cry myself to sleep.
Chapter 13
Cash
I know she probably thinks I lied last night when I skipped her family meal, but Chandler needed some time off, and I offered to take his shift instead of calling in our reserve officer.
Technically, we could both be off at the same time and the county would cover for us, but that would mean fielding a call with the sheriff bitching at me. I’ve had enough disappointment in the last couple of days.
None of that matters. The issue right now is how awkward it’s going to be when we see each other again. I guess, in a way, I am avoiding her.
I knew this would happen. I knew that we wouldn’t match up in the bedroom, but I let hopes, wishes, and dreams guide me into saying yes to this wild-ass plan of hers. She regretted it before it even started, I think, and it makes me a horrible person for not pulling the plug.
I’m trying to figure out what I’ll say to her the next time we meet when fate puts a test right in front of me with her car being parked outside of That’s Another Story, the local bookstore owned and operated by Sage Douglas.
I could easily just drive on by, but that’s not what we do. I’m off work, and with it being so late in the afternoon, she’s closed the bakery for the day. We don’t have many days where our schedules line up. We make time for each other in the evenings, but there’s seldom a time we see each other before the sun goes down.
I pull my truck up across the street, the angled lines of the parking area dictating where I can park.
I know exactly where she likes to hang out in the store, but that doesn’t stop Sage from pausing her conversation at the register with another customer to point me in that direction, as ifshe knows exactly why I’m here. She’s right, of course, but I hate being seen as predictable.
The far back corner of the store has turned into what Adalynn has called a perfect reading oasis more than once. She loves it here so much, she tried to turn her spare bedroom into a little reading nook, but she said it just didn’t give off the same vibe. I’ve spent countless hours unsuccessfully trying to find a candle that smells like a bookstore after she complained that her reading area at home was lacking that very thing.
The sight of her doesn’t shock me. She’s sitting in a high-backed chair, legs crossed, with a book held out in front of her. I spend a moment just watching her. It’s something I don’t get to do very often because more times than not, she knows I’m close long before I come into her line of sight.
Right now she’s so entranced with the story she’s reading that I think an alarm could go off and she wouldn’t even notice.
Her cheeks are flushed, but the room isn’t warm. It’s a little on the cool side, honestly.
I drop my eyes to the front of the book but it’s too far away for me to read the title.
The night before last, she looked unimpressed. She couldn’t even make eye contact with me when before then, she always looked in my direction. The look she has in her eyes right now as her pretty pink tongue sneaks out to wet her lips is what I was hoping to see when I stood in front of her naked.
She’s turned on. Whatever she’s reading is making her hot.
