Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight) (36 page)

What was the worst that could happen? He could hang up on her. And the best that could happen…

Remembering the way they’d kissed still had the power to rev her up—tightness in her chest, heat between her legs. Eleven months later. She activated the phone app, found Miles.

She was pretty sure Owen’s reaching out to her hadn’t been at Miles’s suggestion or even with Miles’s knowledge. Which meant that her call wouldn’t be expected, and it might not be appreciated.

But it also meant that she hadn’t invented what had happened that night between her and Miles. Someone else—Owen—had seen it, too, and believed in it enough to reach out to her.

Regardless, she couldn’t keep going on bad dates without at least giving this a shot. The situation deserved that much. Miles deserved that much.

She
deserved that much.

She tapped the number and held the phone to her ear.

It rang three times, and then a voice at the other end of the line, low and clipped and male, said, “Hey.”

“Miles?”

“Yeah.”

“This is … the woman you kissed at midnight at that New Year’s Eve party?”

There was a long silence at the other end of the phone. Much longer than the amount of time she’d spent waiting for Owen to send his next tweet. Much longer than the amount of time it had taken the seconds to fall off the New Year’s Eve clock as she’d waited to find out if Miles’s mouth would deliver on the knots of anticipation in her stomach.

“My name’s Nora,” she said, because he still wasn’t talking. She took her phone away from her ear and looked to see if he’d terminated the call, but the minutes were ticking up. He was still there.

“Hi, Nora,” he said finally. His voice was deeper than she remembered. She wasn’t good at pinning people’s ranges, but she suspected his would be considered a true bass. “This is … unexpected. Do you mind if I ask how you got my number?”

“From Owen. He found me on Twitter and told me to call you.” She felt bad about outing Owen—no good deed goes unpunished—but she didn’t want Miles to think she was a crazy stalker. Even if she kinda was.

“Figures.” There was a hint of a laugh behind it, so she guessed Owen would live another day.

“I didn’t think about why I was calling, exactly. I just called.”

“Okay. I can live with that.”

He said “I can live with that” like it was a good thing. Like he was happy to have her on the phone, for whatever reason. That was the thing about him, she decided. He didn’t talk a lot. He said very little, when it came down to it. But he made things count. He said them as if he meant them. And when you’d been with a guy who meant nothing he’d said for the last nine months, that was worth something.

“Can you talk for a little while?”

A long hesitation, enough time for her to worry about what would happen if he said no. That would be it, right? She’d stalked him, and if he hated the idea, that would be that. No more
Miles. No more fantasy of finding him and—

She wasn’t sure what happened next in the fantasy, after she found him.

“Yeah.”

Relief, light in her head and chest. And then…

Okay, smarty-pants, you’ve got him on the phone. What are you going to do now?

“It turns out you know my friend Stacey Heany.”

“Yeah?”

It stood to reason that he didn’t have a much more expansive talking style on the phone than in real life. But that last “yeah” had sounded deeply suspicious. She hadn’t wanted to get his back up. She wanted to put him at ease. She wanted to make him grin the way he’d grinned in that photo on his Facebook page.

“She said you were a straight-ahead guy.”

She had time to get nervous before he spoke. “Did she?”

If the sound of his voice was any indication, she wasn’t doing a good job of putting him at ease.

“I just—I thought it would be good to make sure you weren’t a psycho.”

He laughed, and a ripple of relief went through her. “That’s reasonable.”

“So … I don’t know. Where are you? Are you home? What’s home for you?”

He laughed again, a deep rumble that sent a tingle from her ear down her jawline. “I’m standing in my kitchen.”

“A house?”

“Yeah. A bungalow built in 1918, outside of Cleveland.”

That was more detail than she’d expected, and she instantly changed her picture of him so he was no longer in a modern bachelor pad in an unremarkable apartment building.

“Kitchen needs to be redone,” he added.

She laughed. “You think about this a lot?”

“All the time. There are cracks in the tile backsplash. The range is thirty years old. The dishwasher barely works. I play dishwasher roulette with it every night, because the display panel is broken and I hate the idea of committing it to the landfill, so I don’t really know what kind of wash I’m selecting.”

The details felt terribly, wonderfully intimate. She liked picturing him standing over his
dishwasher, a little exasperated and yet for some reason nursing it along, oddly fond of its quirk. Even the fact that he ran it every night said something about him, that he was orderly in that particular way, that he bothered with dinner and dishes despite being a bachelor—

She
hoped
, anyway, that he was a bachelor. And not happily married with four children. She thought of the scene in the George Clooney movie
Up in the Air
when Clooney finally decides he wants to commit himself to the woman he’s been seeing on his travels and shows up at her house, only to discover that she has a family she’s been hiding from him.

“You’re so trusting.”

Those had been Henry’s words after she’d pulled up webmail on her laptop, where he’d accidentally left himself logged in, and, unavoidably, she’d read an email he wrote to the woman he’d been screwing behind her back. Once she’d extracted the truth about the affair and how long it had been going on, she’d demanded what anyone in her shoes would have:

“How could you do that?”

And Henry, willfully ignoring the intent of her words, had instead answered the practical question. “Honestly, Nor? It was like taking candy from a baby.”

He
could
do it because she’d
let
him. Because she’d been trusting and blind, an ostrich with its head in the sand, someone who’d check to see if “gullible”
had
been removed from the dictionary, someone who fit every cliché of naïveté that flashed through her head as she lay in bed at night and vowed never to be such an idiot again.

She wasn’t being an idiot now, was she?

Pursuing a man she hardly knew because of a drunken kiss?

Okay,
clearly
she was being an idiot. But she was an idiot with her eyes wide open this time, which was why she’d messaged Stacey. She knew there were potential pitfalls here, and she wouldn’t let her heart get ahead of her head. She’d guard herself more carefully. That was the lesson she’d learned from the Henry brouhaha. Because she’d be pissed if she’d felt all that hurt, borne all that loss, cried all those tears, for no reason.

But, at the same time, she’d be pissed if Henry had made it impossible for her to give this a chance, too. If he’d taken away from her one of the things she liked best about herself: The way she always gave people the benefit of the doubt. The way she believed the best of them until it was proved that the trust was misplaced. Which it rarely was. Because, with the exception of Henry, people tended to become the people you believed them to be.

“You’re single, right?”

He let out a pained laugh. “Oh, yeah.”

Straight ahead, totally. No BS
. The echo of Stacey’s reassurances. “I figured. But, you know, there are guys”—
my ex-hole, for one
—“who wouldn’t hesitate to pick someone up at a party even if they were with someone else.”

“I know. I’m not that guy.”

She believed him. Sort of. Even with Stacey’s word, she believed him only provisionally. She required further evidence.
Thank you, Henry. Fuck you very much
.

“You live alone?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you in your house?”

“Apartment. Davis Square. You know where that is?”

“No.”

“Somerville. My kitchen needs to be redone, too. But it’s not my problem. It’s my landlord’s.”

“I miss being able to foist everything off on my landlord.”

“It’s a grass-is-greener thing. I wish I could hammer a nail or paint a wall or fix a toilet without asking for permission. Not,” she amended quickly, “that I’m actually handy.”

“I was going to say, if you fix toilets, you’re my dream woman.”

She knew it was a joke, but her face got warm, anyway.

“I’m going to attempt to retile my kitchen this weekend.”

“That’s impressive.”

“You might want to withhold judgment on that till we see how it goes. I’ve been attempting a lot of house fix-up projects lately. Some have gone great, like replacing the vanity in my master bath. Some have gone not so great, like attempting to deal with the old caulk in my tub.”

He pronounced “caulk”
cock
, and she had a Beavis and Butt-Head moment, which she kept to herself. And a quick set of visuals that she pushed out of her mind.

“When I was prying out the old moldy stuff, I was in the tub, covered with crap, swearing at the top of my lungs, for, like, three days straight.”

It was probably wrong—hopelessly un-feminist and objectifying—that she wished she’d gotten to see that, a dirty guy working hard to fix things.

“The re-caulking”
—re-cocking
—“went better.”

She was sure it had.
Heh
.

“And when you’re not lying in tubs covered in grime and swearing? I saw on Facebook that you’re the executive director of a nonprofit getting kids access to meals? Pretty cool.”

“I’m taking some leave right now.” Something tight in his voice alerted her that this was not his favorite topic.

“Needed a break?”

“You could say that.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

“Maybe. Not right this second. It’s a long story.”

“I’ve got time.”

Silence. She could feel it stretched out, too taut, between them. “What about you? Where do you work?”

Okay, she got it; they wouldn’t go there. Not now, not yet. But it was hard, because she wanted it all, every gory detail: the moldy caulk, the sweat and effort, the dust in his eyebrows, what he ate for dinner before he put the dishes in the balky dishwasher, every emotion that had led to his uneasy decision to take time off from his job. She wanted all of him, poured into her ear in his low voice, into the quiet closeness of this moment, so different from the rowdiness of the party. And yet not so different, because somehow even then they’d been insulated in their intimacy, the noise far away, outside them.

“I teach,” she said.

“What grade and subject?”

“Sixth-grade science. Middle school.”

“Jesus. You’re hard-core. Going where no ordinary teacher will go.”

“No, I love it. Love science, love that age group.”

“What’s your favorite project?”

“What?”

“Your favorite science project you do with them.”

It was such a
real
question. Once most people found out she was a science teacher, it was
all they needed to know. They had a frame of reference for what a science teacher did, they all remembered their own awful science teachers, and they weren’t interested in finding out what it was like from her perspective. That was the thing about most people. They were happy to stay up at ground level, where things were safe and clean. They didn’t want to know you.

“You can’t beat Elephant’s Toothpaste for sheer fun.” She smiled, thinking about it. “You mix it in a giant test tube, and it foams up and shoots out like toothpaste from a tube. Hydrogen peroxide, yeast, and dish soap, and if you get some food coloring involved, you can make it look like Aquafresh. I like to do it when the fifth-grade parents come to school for information night, at the end of the year before they have to send their babies off to middle school. They’re all worried, tight-faced, and then I do this experiment and
whoosh!
Bright colors, and fun, and instantly reassured parents.”

He was quiet, so she filled the empty space. “In general, I like anything that gets the kids excited. I like them to leave class and go tell the other kids what they did. I know I did my job right if they’re talking about it in the hallway afterward, and not in a ‘Ms. Hart sucks’ way.”

“I can see that. I can picture it. I don’t know you that well, but—”

But I want you to
, she wished she could tell him.
What do you want to know? I’ll tell you anything. Everything
.

“—it makes sense you’d be good at that. You have so much energy, and you’re funny and warm.”

It was like a gift. He couldn’t have said anything that pleased her more. It was who she wanted to be, how she wanted to see herself. The person she was always trying to send out in public. The person who’d been unable to get out of bed for days and days after Henry’s assault on her confidence, even though she’d sent a ghost of her former self out to do her job and function in the world.

“Are you the best teacher in the school?”

Oddly, she blushed. “I do get good evaluations.”

“You’re modest. They love you, right?”

“Most of the time, except when we do the personal-health unit—aka sex ed. Then I get the riled-up parents who think we should stick with abstinence education. But even with the parents getting ticked off, I really enjoy that section. We do it co-ed, and all the other science teachers
hate
it. The dread builds up all fall—the kids get squirrelly, the parents bitch. But I like
it. We have great discussions, and by the end they’ve mostly stopped acting like Beavis and Butt-Head.”

Unlike me. I will apparently never outgrow that streak
.

“Co-ed, huh? And you cover all the usual stuff with them?”

“What factors go into choosing birth control. The advantages of abstinence. When and why you should sleep with someone.”

“Huh.” He chuckled. “Out of curiosity, since I have the expert on hand, when
should
you sleep with someone?”