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Footsteps padded in the distance, then the door swung open, revealing a barefoot Sophie in shorts and an oversized Guns N’ Roses T-shirt, which hung loosely over her shoulders.
“Alex, what are you doing here?” she said, running her fingers through her messy hair, making it worse, while her eyes were wide as they glanced over my shoulder to my car.
“I know. I’m sorry for just showing up like this, but I was in the neighborhood.”
A flicker of surprise crossed her face, followed by a skeptical rise of her eyebrows.
“Really? All the way from Santa Rosa?”
I nodded, fluttering my eyelashes as innocently as possible. “Feel free to kick me out.”
She reached for both sides of the doorway and I thought she might actually do it. But then she stepped out of the way. “Well,considering you’re not actuallyinmy house, I can’t exactly kick you out. So come in, and I’ll decide if I want you to stay or not.”
“Fair enough. I’ll just take a seat and make myself comfortable,” I said, crossing the living room and settling down on the couch. If she wanted to kick me out, she’d have to lift me up herself.
Sophie stepped into the room and folded her arms over her chest. Her eyes were sharp, her full lips pressed thin. “You know this isn’t exactly how I wanted to spend my Friday evening.”
I noticed the cup of tea resting on the coffee table, steam wafting off its surface, and a set of AirPods beside it, resting on a book about meditation. Coupled with the scent of sandalwood incense in the air, it would make sense that I had interrupted something. “Would you rather I left so that you can get back to your meditation?”
Sophie seemed surprised by my observation, but she said nothing and instead took up a seat beside me, keeping at least two feet between us.
“Is it helping?” I asked when the few seconds of silence felt unbearable. It wasn’t so much the silence, but the way Sophie was staring at me made my skin feel as hot as the sun—it was as if she was studying me like one of her patients, working out the kinks, figuring out which parts she could trigger for the better.
“What?” she asked, bringing her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. She leaned her chin on her right kneecap.
“The meditation?” I replied.
A light flickered in her eyes. She shook her head. “Not at all. I feel no more relaxed than when I started. If anything, I feel tenser than before, like one of those wind-up toys you played with as a kid that just keeps spinning in circles.”
“I don’t have the patience for it either.”
“Most orthopedic surgeons don’t,” she said, so dead seriously, it could’ve been a fact.
“What do you mean by that?”
“It’s just not in your character.” She shrugged. “You’re all so busy playing god, thinking you’re better than everyone else, that you won’t ever sit down and reflect on your inner self.”
A very untrue assumption, but I wasn’t going to correct her, not while I was still on probation. One wrong word and she could show me the door.
“So, you know my type well then.”
“I may have dated an orthopod fresh out of college,” she admitted, her cheeks flushing pink. She broke her gaze free from mine and rested it instead on her knees.
“Oh, do tell,” I joked. Past relationships were a dead no on any sort of date, but our circumstances were different. And this wasn’t a date.
She laughed, her head tilting back as her eyes pinched shut. That was the first time I truly noticed that Sophie’s eyes closed whenever she laughed.
When she gathered herself again, she said, “Let’s just say he had very little patience for anything and got bored quickly. We could be sitting on a picnic blanket in the park with this amazing platter I made, staring up at the Milky Way, and he’d suddenly shoot up and announce he wanted to go for a drive.”
“Picnics under the moonlight?” I asked, raising both brows.
She shrugged. “I’m a simple girl.”
“I doubt that.”
“It’s true.” She grinned. “I like flowers and picnics and massages and sometimes, if someone really tried, they could convince me to go for a hike up the mountain.” “Well, don’t worry, I won’t be trying to convince you to hike anywhere.”
She laughed again. Eyes closed. Shoulders shaking.
