“Yeah, well, I don’t know if you can call it driving. The cop estimated her speed at no more than ten miles an hour.” He stared at the twisted metal panel in disgust. “Just enough to screw up my door, but not nearly enough to do me the favor of totaling it out.”
“How much will it cost to fix?”
“More than it will to get another door from the junkyard and give it to the high school tech ed class to install as part of their final exam. But that’s a few weeks away, so I’m stuck with it until then.” Testing the door handle, he tugged on it a little, then decided to leave well enough alone. Better that it was stuck closed than open and unable to latch. “Would you be okay with climbing over from my side? Or you can sit in back and I’ll be your friendly neighborhood chauffeur service."
She laughed as they walked around and he opened his door for her. "I think I can manage,” she said, ducking into the car to start her crawl to the other side. “I won’t make you service me today.”
No sooner had the words left her mouth when she froze in place, hands on the seat, and her perfectly rounded ass poised in front of him. “Okay, that is so not what I meant to say.”
Bracing his forearms on the edge of the roof, he leaned in and used his bedroom voice. “You sure, T? Maybe you’d like to pick a different day to make me service you.”
Her head turned to look at him over her shoulder with wide eyes and her lips parted. He fisted his hands to keep them from reaching for her ass and pulling it back against his hardening cock. The thought of seeing her in this position in his bed, back arched and begging him for more… Fuck fuck fuck.
Tony knew he had to erase the innuendo—make it into a joke to wipe it off their slate, just as he’d always done—if he wanted to keep her friendship and spend time with her. And given the choice, he’d always want her in his life as something, rather than nothing.
“Still so easy to tease.” Grinning wide, he winked at her. “Thought the big city life would have toughened you up. It’s nice to see I was wrong.”
She gave him a dramatic harrumph and finally settled into the passenger seat. They buckled up and he turned the car toward the bypass highway. "You look beautiful, by the way," Tony said, glancing at her briefly before returning his attention back to the road.
"Thanks, you do too. I mean, not beautiful, but you know. Like, buff and stuff.” Tony hitched a brow in her direction and tried to keep the amusement from his face. Unsuccessfully. Her cheeks filled with a dusky rose color as she cleared her throat and predictably changed topics. “So, where are we going?"
"I thought since you've been gone so long it's probably been a while since you've had a cream puff as big as your head."
She gasped and without looking, he could hear her wide smile when she spoke. "Pine Cone."
"Pine Cone,” he said with a nod. “Hope you're hungry and ready for a massive sugar high."
"Absofuckinglutely."
Woman after his own heart.
* * * * *
Trish couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone to Pine Cone. It was a truck stop restaurant about fifteen minutes away with great food for cheap prices. But they were famous for their cream puffs and chocolate éclairs as big as your face. Literally. They were so damn good.
Trish walked through the door that Tony held for her—something Nick had never made a point to do—and waited at the hostess podium to be seated as the “sign” crafted with notebook paper and a Sharpie instructed. Tony stood next to her, looking over a menu.
Trish had spent the entire car ride studying him from the corner of her eye. She couldn't get over how much different he looked from the friend in all her graduation pictures. He’d still had a boyish appearance about him back then. But the next time she saw him, he’d grown several inches and left all boyish traces behind. That had been shocking enough on its own, and now he’d bulked up—big time—so that he almost looked like an entirely different person.
No, that wasn’t true. It was still clearly him. He had the same hooded eyes that saw more than they should. The same smile she found comfort in, no matter what was happening in her life. Between his body finally getting the Time to Grow memo and whatever he did to pack on the muscle, the finished result looked damn good on him.
As did the faded jeans that hugged his ass and his concert T-shirt that pulled nicely over his chest and stretched from his biceps when he bent his arms. His coloring was a palette of browns, which sounded like a description for an ugly tweed jacket from the seventies, but looked delicious on him. She and Tony were both Italian, but him more so than her, and it showed. His hair was medium brown and curled a bit at the ends from being too long. The color of his eyes reminded her of hazelnuts, and his skin was already tan from playing baseball and soccer.
Yeah, okay, she may have done some social media stalking after she got home last night. But is it really stalking when people post it for all the world to see? She liked to think not. Besides, she had a lot of catching up to do on the goings-on of her old friends. When she started dating Nick, her Facebook days slowly diminished over time until she eventually stopped checking her account. He hated social media and said it was a waste of time. But then, anyone he ever knew or cared about still lived in the same neighborhood with them, so he didn’t have a need for it.
Tony didn’t appear to use his account much, but his mom and sisters tagged him in a ton of pictures. His timeline was one big scrapbook of his life, told through the lenses of others’ cameras. Everything from him playing soccer and baseball, to coaching little kids, to playing with his nieces and nephews.
The latter ones in particular had tugged on her heart a little too hard for her liking. Her biological clock had been sounding a lot more like a ticking bomb for the last couple of years, but Nick promised they’d have kids as soon as they moved out of the city. Too bad she didn’t know at the time that he had no intentions of moving, making kids a moot point.
At thirty years old, almost all of her friends had gotten married and started families years ago. It made Trish feel like an old spinster who should hit up the local animal shelters to start obtaining members for her future horde of cats. And wasn’t that the most pathetic thing ever.
Finally, the hostess led them through the restaurant, and somewhere in the world a record must have scratched. Every customer in the place stared openly at her as she walked by. But they weren’t meeting her eyes; their focus was on the rest of her body. Her clothes? She hadn’t worn anything racy, and without checking, she was fairly certain she hadn’t strapped her bra on the outside of her sweater dress. She felt like one of those celebrities on the red carpet who had unfortunate wardrobe malfunctions and ended up on TMZ.
As they slipped into the booth in the back of the restaurant Tony smiled and said, “You sure know how to make an entrance.”
“Yeah, what the heck is up with that?” she asked in a hushed voice. “Do I have toilet paper hanging out of my leggings or something?”
“You really don’t know?”
Her brow furrowed in response. She hadn’t a clue.
“Okay, but don’t take offense.”
“When someone says that it’s because the other person is guaranteed to take offense,” she said wryly.
“Seriously, it’s not bad. It’s just that you look...different.”
“I haven’t even changed my hair in years. Plus, none of these people know me.”
“No, not different from before.” He nodded slightly to the dining area, indicating the customers. “Different from them.” Then he peered down at his shirt and plucked at the material. “From us.”
“Wait, are you saying they’re staring at me because I’m not in a pair of old jeans and a T-shirt?” He shrugged as though to say what else did you expect? “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?”
“There’s nothing wrong with what you’re wearing. You look amazing, Trish.” His eyes warmed her from the inside, and the tiny lift at one corner of his mouth didn’t hurt either. �
��You just went and got citified on us, that’s all.”
“What-a-fied?”
“Citified. You adapted to the ways of the big city.”
“That’s not a thing.”
He arched a brow. “Looks like it is from where I’m sitting.”
“I suppose in a month when it’s hot and humid I’ll be expected to wear Daisy Dukes and a plaid shirt knotted between my boobs.”
Tony’s face turned stone serious. “Dear God, I hope so. Tell me what I have to do make that happen.”
Trish faked a disgusted sound and threw a few sweetener packets at him. He laughed, blocking his face from the sugar shrapnel. The waitress showed up with coffee and took their orders. As soon as she left, he started arranging their forks and knives in the middle of the table into what the newest generation called a hashtag, and a wave of giddy nostalgia swept over her.
“Oh my God, I don’t think I’ve done this since high school,” she said, gathering half a dozen pink Sweet-N-Low packets then handing him a few more of the white sugar packets to add to the ones he’d recovered from her attack. She placed one of her packets in a corner space.
He set a white packet in the center spot. He clearly hadn’t gotten any better at Table Tic-Tac-Toe. “How else did you pass the time in a restaurant?”
She thought about that for a moment and almost didn’t tell him. Now that she was on the outside looking in, she recognized how disconnected her life had been the past decade. For a city of eight million people, New Yorkers were incredibly isolated people. No one made eye contact while walking down the street or struck up a conversation with the person next to them on the subway. More often than not, they had their heads bowed, looking down at their phones, a book, or newspaper. Trish could describe the people she saw every day during her commute to work by their hair color, a favorite hat, or coat during the cold months. But she rarely saw their faces.
Trish shrugged and placed another marker. “Not with anything as fun as beating you at Table Tic-Tac-Toe.”
“You know I let you win, right?”
“Whatever gets you through the night, DiAngelo.”
He chuckled. "Nice to see you and Rhi are still as feisty as ever together."
"Yeah, we're still really close. I don't know what I would've done if she hadn't insisted I move in with her for a while." Trish lifted her coffee with both hands and sipped, reveling in the bold strength meant to help truckers stay awake at all hours of the night. It wasn’t for delicate palettes, that was for sure.
"You can't stay with your mom?"
She clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle the laugh trying to shoot coffee out her nose. After carefully swallowing, she said, “I could, but we wouldn’t last more than a few days before driving each other insane. I love my mom, and it’s been nice being able to see her whenever I want these last few weeks, but we do best in small doses together.”
“I guess some things never change, then,” he said with a smile.
“No, I guess they don’t.”
They continued to play their game—Trish won three times out of five—and caught up on the goings on in each other’s lives. Everything that didn’t have to do with relationships, anyway. They shared stories about their families, jobs, and friends, pausing when their massive cream puffs arrived so they could moan around their first bite of pastry heaven.
Okay, so she was the only one who closed her eyes and moaned like a woman starved. When she came out of her mini-foodgasm a few seconds later, Tony and a few of the men at surrounding tables were frozen in various stages of eating, staring at her like she’d just flashed them her boobs. She felt the flush of embarrassment ride all the way to her hairline and cleared her throat awkwardly before taking a long sip of her water. Thankfully, the men had recovered and went about their business by the time she set her glass down.
All except Tony whose heated gaze held her in place with an unseen force she couldn’t explain. She’d never seen him look like this before. Like a deadly cat, hunting his prey and content to stalk it for however long it took, to strike only when she would be at her weakest.
Then, as quickly as it flashed over his face, it was gone in the next instant, replaced by his charming smile and reassuring wink like she’d imagined the whole thing. When nothing like it happened again for the duration of their breakfast date, she decided her mind had played a trick on her. Whether it was a hallucination from the massive sugar rush or her desperation to have a man see her as desirable for the first time in years, she didn’t know. Nor did it matter. The last thing she needed was to get involved with anyone, much less someone from her hometown.
But Tony’s friendship was comforting and kept her mind off things she’d rather not think about. So until she left again, she’d enjoy that whenever he offered, and she hoped he offered often.
CHAPTER THREE
IT'D BEEN A FEW weeks of spending time with Trish. School was out, which meant Tony now had a lot of free time, so whenever their schedules allowed, they found something to do together. They went for runs almost every morning. She dragged him against his will to the mall. He retaliated and made her go fishing. They met for coffee, went to the movies, and took her sister’s boxer puppy to the dog park.
It felt like how they were in high school.
At the same time, it felt nothing like that.
Tony told himself over and over again that he was imagining things. That her lingering touches weren’t very lingering at all. That the way she sometimes peered up at him through her impossibly long lashes with a half-grin didn’t mean she was wondering what if or what would it be like. That the times he caught her staring at his mouth didn’t mean she wanted him to kiss the living hell out of her.
Yeah, he told himself all that. And then the devil on his shoulder—also known as his dick and was nowhere near his shoulder—reminded him he wasn’t an inexperienced kid misreading signs. Whether she knew it or not, on some level, Trish wanted something more with him. How much more, he couldn’t say.
Maybe just some kissing.
Maybe kissing and heavy groping.
Maybe, just maybe, she wanted everything.
It was that infinitesimal possibility that made him hard more often than not. He wondered if he should seek medical help if his erection lasted longer than four hours even if he’d never taken any pills. It couldn’t be healthy. It sure as fuck wasn’t comfortable.
But no matter how much he thought she might want more or he ended up with a perpetual state of blue balls, Tony wouldn’t be the one to make the first move. Not because he was unsure of himself or his seduction skills. If Trish were any other girl, he would’ve made his move the first time he caught the hint of her interest. He’d rather get rejected than not try, though he couldn’t think of a time where that’d happened. Not because he was God’s gift to women, but because he wasn’t a douchebag who initiated things where they weren’t welcome.
But Trish was different. He cared a hell of a lot about this woman, and she was still fresh off a bad break up he knew nothing about. No way was he going to ruin what he had with her over an unwanted kiss. Having her as a friend was better than nothing at all. So if she wanted something more, she’d have to at least give him a crystal clear signal.
Tonight, he’d brought her to the old drive-in. It always showed a double feature and had been a favorite place of theirs to go over the years. He borrowed his dad’s pickup truck and parked facing backward in the grass lot. After making a cozy lounging area with a few thick comforters, they propped themselves up with several pillows and laid side by side in the bed of the truck.
It was early June and the perfect time of year for the outdoor theater. When the weather was still decently warm at night, but not too buggy where they had to douse themselves in disgusting sprays. The cloudless night sky was an endless blanket of stars that they’d studied and pointed out constellations in before the first movie began.
The first movie had been a comedy, one they’d both wanted t
o see and laughed so hard that their sides hurt. The second was some kind of drama neither had heard of. Since there were no jokes or high-speed chases or massive explosions, Tony didn’t deem it worth his attention.
He’d rather watch her watch the movie. And, yes, he realized how creepy that sounded in his head, but the reality wasn’t that bad. From her vantage point—her head resting where his shoulder met his chest—she’d have to twist around to even see his face. So he studied her absently and systematically pick at the polish on her finger nails. Saw her bare feet rocking on her heels like metronomes until something in the movie made her tense up and she curled her toes in tight. And he especially loved watching the different emotions play out on her face.
“Ugh, such a typical man thing to do,” she said to the jumbo-gigantic screen. “What an asshole.”
“As a man, I should probably ask for clarification so I can defend my gender.”
“Aren’t you watching?”
Oh, I’m watching. Just not the same thing you are. “Must have zoned out. Fill me in.”
“He’s breaking up with her because he doesn’t think he’s good enough for her. But instead of being honest and telling her that, he says shit to hurt her so she won’t want to be with him.”
She sounded like it hit a little too close to home. Tony wondered what exactly her ex said to her when they broke things off. Did he do the same thing or was it just seeing any kind of break up that set her on edge?
He wanted her to talk to him about it. He wanted to know how the prick hurt her, but he also wanted her to get it out. According to Rhianna and Erin, Trish never talked about it and changed the subject if they brought it up. She was letting it eat at her from the inside, and the longer she waited to purge that shit, the harder it’d be to get rid of.
Tony thought about how to respond. Maybe play devil’s advocate and see what happens. “He thinks he’s being noble by sacrificing what he wants for what’s best for her. He only wants her to be happy.”
Ask Me Again Page 3
