Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(106)

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.