Touch(36)
Fuck. Well, he’d been fretting earlier that his life had been too unchanged. So much for that. Wasp’s nest, meet stick.
“Okay. Yes, sir. I’m meeting him tomorrow. We’ll get started.”
“Excellent.” Uncle Ben stood and extended his hand across his desk. The meeting was over.
oOo
He didn’t know why he’d ridden by Manny’s apartment. It wasn’t even on his way back from the harbor. But his head had been too full of things to think about, and he had just sort of gravitated to Cormorant Street. She was just getting out of her little piece of shit car, and she walked back to her hatch and opened it. It seemed she had some crap to unload.
Luca pulled in behind her, and she turned around. She smiled at first, but then it faded, and she put her hands on her hips, watching him suspiciously as he killed the engine on his Duc.
“Hey, little bit. You want a hand?”
Her eyes followed him as he approached. She looked cute, her black hair loose and straight, those bangs brushing her eyelashes over her piercing baby blues. She wore a short white skirt and thigh-high pink stockings with white polka dots. Yellow Converse sneakers. And a green t-shirt with a peace sign in the center, made of darker green sequins.
Whoa. Her fashion sense was…not what he was used to. She was dressed like a tiny punk clown. And still, she looked wicked hot. He really liked those thigh-high things. Even pink with polka-dots.
“Are you fucking a lot of girls?”
He’d been about to make a comment about her attire, but that question knocked whatever he was going to say clear of his head. “Please?”
“Right now. Are you fucking a lot of girls?”
“Right now?”
“Not right this second, dork. I mean…like…I don’t know what I mean. My mom said—”
“Wait. Your mom said?”
“Yeah. Dottie. She said because you were kissing that girl yesterday morning you would probably hurt me, because you’re probably fucking a lot of girls. Well, she didn’t say it like that, but I’m pretty sure that’s what she meant.”
Okay, now his head was too busy sorting all that shit out to have the energy for words. She’d seen him with Lynne, somehow. On the beach, maybe? She’d talked to her mom about him, in some detail. He was not the kind of guy a girl told her parents about. Certainly not after one fucking date. And hey, cool, her mom already hated him. Awesome. Though why that should matter, he wasn’t sure.
There were two cardboard boxes in the hatch of her Honda. He stacked the lighter on top of the heavier, picked them up, and walked toward her building.
They apparently needed to talk.
~ 8 ~
Luca picked up her boxes and walked away, headed toward her apartment building. Manny slung her canvas bag across her shoulder and slammed the hatch closed, then followed him.
He still hadn’t answered her question.
He was waiting for her at the top of the steps, on the porch. When she got up there with him, before she opened the door into the building, she asked, “Well? Are you?”
There was a line down the middle of his forehead, so she’d made him mad. Or confused. Sometimes those looked a lot alike.
“Can we talk about this inside?”
“Yeah.” She held the door open for him, then trotted up the stairs past him and unlocked the door to her apartment.
When he came in, he lifted the stack of boxes at her. “Where do you want these?”
“Um, just over there.” She indicated the space next to a bookcase. He set the stack down with a thump.
“That bottom one’s heavy. What you got in there?”
A whole trove of new treasures, and she’d been looking forward to putting some Joy Division on her turntable and spending the rest of the night finding homes for everything. “Just some new stuff for my place. My folks took me to the Providence Flea today. It was fun.”
“New stuff? For your place? More?”
Something about his tone made her angry. She thought he was making fun of her. “Yeah. So?” She hung her bag on the hook by the door and turned back to him, putting her hands on her hips. “What’s it to you?”
He put his hands up, like he was showing her he was unarmed or something. “Nothing. Sorry. If you got stuff you like, then that’s awesome.”
Wait. Luca was in her apartment again. How had that happened? “Why are you here?”
He chuckled and gave her a look she couldn’t read. “Well, I guess I’m here because you asked a question that needs more than a quick answer. But I was just passing by and saw you getting out of your car, so I stopped.”