“I gotta go,” he said, all in a rush—and it was then that she knew something had really gone wrong. Something had happened in the last thirty seconds to make him shove his notepad back into his bag as though everything had caught fire, and though she didn’t want to imagine it was the nakedness she had to believe it had something to do with it.
He thought she was a prude. Or a Jesus freak. Or maybe even something worse.
“Really, I—” she started, but he didn’t give her time to finish.
“It was nice to meet you, Evie.”
Of course, it was only after he’d vacated the premises—her fumbling for the right reassuring words to say, all the while—that she realized something even more insane than his abrupt departure.
He knew her name. But she didn’t know his.
Chapter Two
She didn’t expect him to be there the following Wednesday. In fact, she promised herself she wouldn’t even go out there and check, because really she didn’t care in the slightest about him. He thought she was a prude who wanted to be protected from naked people.
And also a lot of embarrassing things had maybe happened in front of him, so perhaps the whole thing was just better left untouched.
She certainly thought so, until she saw him by the fence. And then her heart did this stupid little dance in her chest because her heart had obviously gone insane, and the urge to immediately run out there made a complete fool of all the promises she’d just made.
She had to stand very still and compose herself for thirty seconds before opening the patio door and casually walking out. Anything less and he would know. He would get that she wanted to see him and speak to him again, even though most of her didn’t even understand why.
Explaining it to him would surely prove almost impossible. Especially as he didn’t even register her presence at first. He just stood leaning on the fence in the Ryersons’ yard, face turned away, until a great clot of embarrassment welled up in her throat.
He was waiting for the Ryerson kid. He wasn’t even waiting for her! She’d just assumed, and now she had to rush back inside before he saw her and started thinking of her as some sort of floppy, lovesick idiot.
God, didn’t he understand? She could never be lovesick. She could never be anything like that. She didn’t even know how to behave like a normal human being, never mind anything that did something as stupid as fall in love.
Only then he turned and tugged one of the earphones she hadn’t seen out, and his face seemed…warm. Pleased, she thought again, though she knew she was going to have to think of another word for that expression.
It wasn’t pleased, exactly. It was…something else.
“Evie,” he said, and inexplicable goose bumps broke out all over her arms. He had been waiting for her. And he’d waited in the Ryerson’s yard too, as though he wasn’t allowed in this one.
Not yet, anyway. Not until she gave him permission to come through the wooden barrier between them.
“Hi,” she said. Mainly because her mouth had filled with cotton and her brain had disappeared somewhere around his first charcoal-soft gaze.
“I just wanted to…” he started, but didn’t finish. As though maybe he was having trouble making actual sentences too. As though he was like her, in some small way, and for the rest of any time they spent together they were just going to have to speak in monosyllables and the occasional grunt.
But maybe that was all right, because she felt almost certain she knew what he meant. I just wanted to make sure you were okay. And in reply she thought something mixed-up and weird—I am now.
“Didn’t mean to run out on you like that,” he said after a moment, and she thought automatically of that one bare body part in his notepad. Thought of the word prude, painted all over her.
“You know, I really don’t care if you draw naked people.”
He raised an eyebrow. Licked his lips with a tongue that looked smooth and fat and somehow…interesting.
“Yeah, I just thought—”
“I mean, I get how I seem.”
Like a nun, she thought. Like a nun in a tower made out of chastity belts.
But he protested almost immediately, and when he did his shoulders went back. His mouth hardened somehow, so that the words came out solid and sharp.
“You don’t seem like anything, Evie—that’s not what I meant. I just didn’t want you to think…I don’t know.”
He sighed, shrugged.
“Like you were suddenly showing me naked pictures?”
She almost got a rueful smile, for that. It told her she’d guessed correctly, before he even answered.
“Right.”