“I’m fine. You don’t have to.”
“You don’t sound fine. Your voice is shaking.”
“If I got freaked out every time someone tried to kill me on an L.A. freeway, I would never drive anywhere. I might as well become a nun.”
Cash walked toward the door to the garage. “You’re married. You can’t be a nun.”
“Or hide in a basement and wear tissue boxes on my feet. Whatever. You get my point.”
Cash walked into the garage and unlocked the door to her black sports car. “Pull over. I’ll come get you.”
“I’m really fine. Not a scratch. Your rental agency will have nothing to ding you for. I’ll be home in ten minutes, according to my app.”
“Are you sure?” Her voice sounded breathy, like she was breathing more easily.
“I’m sure. Just have a drink ready for me when I get home, work-husband.”
He waited in the garage until she drove in his rented, dark blue Porsche Cayenne—an SUV because he had decided to go with something larger, sturdier, until he was ready to buy a new car—opened her car door, and escorted her into the house.
Inside, he poured two fingers of his favorite Irish whiskey in a glass and handed it to her.
She said, “I’m really fine. It was just a close call. If you don’t have a close call at least a couple times a month, you’re driving like a little old lady from Pasadena. Those brakes are nice and broken in, now.” She drained the whiskey in one throw and held out the glass for more.
He obliged, dribbling the whiskey into the glass.
Every impulse in his body was to step forward and wrap his arms around her, hold her and make sure that she was all right, but he refilled the tumbler with liquor because that was all that he could do.
JUST TICKLING
Rox sat on the couch with him, her laptop weighing on her legs. The battery on the left side was getting hot on her thigh.
Cash was still sore, his arms scraped up, and his eyelids were still lavender and yellow with bruises. That white bandage taped to his cheek reminded her of his car flying through the air and his blood splashed on the air bags and spreading over his car’s seat.
But watching television and working on contracts at night was becoming unbearable. Sitting on the couch with him, so near him, feeling the heat from his body trickling through the air-conditioned room and detecting the faint scent of his cologne when he moved, was familiar and yet utterly foreign.
It was nudging at their boundaries, the boundaries that had allowed them to work together for three years with no problems.
When they traveled for work on planes, they chose a movie together and then synchronized tapping the start button so that they could laugh at the jokes together or jump at the scary parts at the same time.
One time, he had gotten the giggles so badly at a madcap comedy that she had had to pound him on the back while he coughed as the plane was landing.
Another time, they had watched one of those scary serial killer movies where a guy was running around killing all the pretty young women and using their body parts for unspeakable horrors, and Rox had gotten so psyched out that all men had looked like creepy, creepy killers to her for about twenty minutes, except Cash. That time, when they had gotten off the plane, Rox had practically pinned herself to his side, though she didn’t put her arm around him nor let him tuck her under his arm. That was too much for work colleagues. Their rollie suitcases had nudged each other as they hurried down the tunnel to the terminal. Every time she had looked up at him, he had been watching her and blocking the crowd around her, keeping her safe.
But now, sitting in his windowless television room, deep in his house, she was uneasy.
It wasn’t that she didn’t feel safe. She felt perfectly safe with Cash. She always felt perfectly safe with Cash.
She wasn’t sure that he was safe with her.
Sure, they sat side-by-side, facing the television.
Sure, they were just watching a funny movie that was a romantic comedy, probably. She wasn’t actually watching it much.
Sure, the leading actor kind of looked like Cash, with his brilliant green eyes and strong cheekbones and jaw but, quite honestly, the actor’s abs weren’t as defined as Cash’s ripped torso.
Not that the lumps of his abs were clearly pronounced under his snug blue tee shirt or anything.
Not that she was looking at those masculine lumps of muscle.
Not that any heterosexual female could help but sneak a look at the mounds of his firm flesh that shifted under the thin, blue fabric of his shirt every time he breathed.
If the man sitting next to her had been anyone but Cash, she would have had fantasies about leaning over, lifting his shirt, and licking the bricks of his abdominal muscles.