by Serena Bell
When Hattie and Capria heard that Trevor and I had split, they brought meals and wine and chocolate and lots of hugs. The first thing Hattie asked when she showed up at my door was, “Are we celebrating or mourning or a little of both?”
“D, none of the above: righteously pissed and nursing wounded pride,” I told her, and she laughed and hugged me again, and said, “I remember that phase, too.”
I’d had no idea that divorce came with such a wide spectrum of emotions, everything from crushing grief to raging anger.
These days, the big emotions are still lurking in the background, but I’m starting to want my old self back. Fearless, bright, happy Elle, the one who took contentment for granted. I see signs of her, peeking in around the edges, and I want to issue an invitation.
Part of me thinks if I can be a big enough girl to go to Trevor’s wedding—to be his partner in parenting and as much of a friend as two exes can be—maybe I’ll find that woman again.
Hattie has drifted toward the window. “I hope your new neighbor fixes that place up. It’s such a dump. Oh, cute. Madden and the other boy are playing some game with a football and a Wiffle ball bat, and Madden is laughing.”
“Score.”
Madden’s been having a tough time since the separation. He misses seeing his dad on a daily basis. Sometimes he’s angry—snapping at me for no reason or being sullen—and sometimes he’s sad, moping around, unable to settle into any activity. I do everything I can—board games, movies, outings—but some days are just bad. I’ve been hopeful that having a new neighborhood friend his age might help bring him out of it. Cheering up Madden is part of my campaign to reclaim my life, too.
“It’s supposed to be a single dad, right? Single dad and kid?”
“Yeah, that’s what I heard. Haven’t seen the dad yet, though.” I head toward the window to peek out at Madden.
“Oh. Oh, my.” Hattie’s voice swoops.
“What?” I nudge her over to make room.
“You need a hot wedding date, right?”
Two very hot guys are moving furniture into the house next door. One is tall and broad-shouldered, with a full beard and mustache—very mountain man. The other is boy-next-door handsome, with rumpled light-brown hair and one of those perfectly proportioned male bodies—not too tall, not too short, not too muscly, not too skinny.
“Well, hello. You think one of those guys is my new neighbor?”
“There was another one, too. You just missed him. Tall and dark. Your type.” She leers at me.
“Shut up.”
She’s still staring out the window. “You ever think about calling that guy?”
She’s referring to the totally-out-of-character rebound sex I had right after the divorce papers were signed. I picked him up in a bar, which is so not my thing, but my friends had convinced me it was time to get back on the horse, and they were right. The guy I hooked up with was tall, dark, and broody, as unlike my ex-husband, Trevor, as it’s possible to be, which may have been why I said yes when he offered to buy me a drink. And why I kept saying yes.
“He made it very clear he doesn’t go back for seconds. And besides, I was such a dork that night, there’s no way I could face him again.”
“Too bad.” Hattie knows: the sex was amazing.
I frown. “It was just the circumstances. The things that made him hot as a bar pickup wouldn’t translate to real life. He’d probably turn out to be a jerk.”
“They always do.”
“Amen to that, sister.”
Moment of silence for ex-husbands…
Hattie snaps her fingers. “I have a brilliant idea. Let’s bake cookies and you can take them over tonight. Then you can meet your new neighbor…and wedding date.”
I have to admit, it would be nice to have a date to Trevor’s wedding. My showing up with a hot date wouldn’t even ripple Trevor’s pond, but showing up by myself—or chickening out completely—would just feel wrong. And even if Trevor doesn’t give a crap what I do with my sex life, I want him to at least confront the fact that I still have one.
Sort of. Aside from that one act of rebound sex, it’s been a barren year. But the rebound sex did make me determined to get back in the saddle. It reminded me that sex is too good to give up, even if I do plan to quit counting on men for anything other than orgasms.
“Anyway, regardless, we should make your new neighbors cookies. I mean, what’s the alternative? You want to sit here and stare at that invitation?”
“Hell no.” The less time I spend thinking about Trevor’s wedding, the better.
“So? Let’s bake.” Hattie drops the curtain.
We’re elbow deep in cookie dough when I hear the back door flap open with enough force to smack it into the opposite wall. I sigh. Madden. I’ve asked him a million times, but he’s not the best at being careful with stuff. I’ve mostly learned to take it in stride.
“Mom! Mom! This is Jonah! He’s moving in next door!”
The two boys, muddy from the knees down, explode into the kitchen. Jonah’s got longish dark hair that hangs in his face and brilliant blue eyes and looks vaguely familiar, like I know him from Madden’s school. Eve—my Realtor friend—didn’t know where they were moving from, so it might be somewhere in town.
“Mom, can Jonah sleep over here tonight? He likes to play Battlefront and baseball and football and I’m going to teach him how to play my Jukem and Minecraft card games. And can we watch Cars 3 and will you make us popcorn?”
That might be the longest and most enthusiastic speech that Madden has made since Trevor moved out, and there’s no way I’m saying no.
“Sure, if it’s okay with his dad. Hi, Jonah. It’s really nice to meet you. Welcome to the neighborhood. I’m Madden’s mom. You can call me Elle, as long as your dad is okay with you using first names with grownups. And this is my friend Ms. Rivers.”
“Hi,” says Jonah politely. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“Come on come on come on, let’s go play Jukem,” says Madden, and he and Jonah exit the kitchen in a flurry. I call after them, “Shoes off!” but it’s probably too late. That’s okay; I need to vacuum anyway.
“That was so stinkin’ cute,” Hattie says. “How crazy is it, how fast they make friends? A sleepover, and they’ve just met.”
She smirks at me, and I throw a wad of paper towel at her.
Chapter 3
Elle
After Hattie leaves, Jonah and Madden are playing peacefully in Jonah’s new front yard, so I pack up a foil-covered plate of cookies and carry it over to Mrs. Wheeling’s house. Mrs. Wheeling is eighty-nine years old and has more energy than I do. When I show up with the cookies, she is making a lasagna for the family of a friend who recently died.
“Our new neighbor opened the jar of sauce for me,” she informs me. “I didn’t really need the jar opened, but I was trying to take his measure. He seems like a nice man. And it won’t be the worst thing in the world to have a man with biceps like that mowing his lawn out there.”
That’s Mrs. Wheeling for you.
“Which one is the new neighbor? There were three guys out there earlier.” I try very hard not to sound too interested, because Mrs. Wheeling will for sure pick up on it if I do. She was very kind to me for about a week after Trevor left, but ever since then, she’s been doing more to try to get me laid than either Hattie or Capria. I was totally unsurprised, the first time I was in her bedroom, helping her reach something on a high-up closet shelf, to discover that her two small bookshelves are filled with romance novels. And not the ones with white picket fences and beaches on the cover, either. The kind with heroes with bare torsos and swim trunks hanging so low they reveal glistening hip-dip.
“The Heathcliff one,” Mrs. Wheeling says, and my traitorous stomach swoops. I do so appreciate the merits of tall, dark, handsome,
and broody. I have no intention of indulging myself in neighbor sex—too messy—but Mrs. Wheeling might have a point about the value of good-looking men on display in the yard. “Are you bringing him cookies, too?”
I nod.
“An excellent opening move.”
“It’s not a move,” I say. “It’s a gesture of neighborly warmth.”
She narrows her eyes at me. “You believe whatever you want to believe. Have you seen his biceps?”
“I haven’t,” I admit.
“You have a treat in store.”
“You could bring him cookies,” I tease.
“They’d call me a cougar,” she says, beaming with delight.
I ask after Mrs. Wheeling’s son in eastern Washington and daughter on the East Coast, and her grandchildren (who are too far away), and then I say goodbye.
“Have fun delivering cookies.”
I love Mrs. Wheeling.
When I reach the new neighbors’ yard, Jonah and Madden latch on to me like I’m the Pied Piper, even though they already had two cookies each at my house. They know that in all likelihood they’ll be able to sucker Jonah’s dad into giving them two more.
Even though I have Jonah with me, I knock on the front door. The Penske truck is gone—returned, I assume—and there’s a truck parked out front, a Ford F-150 four-door. Trevor used to say he was going to buy a Ford F-150—the two-door model—for his midlife crisis car. Too bad he didn’t buy one instead of sleeping with his ex-girlfriend.
One of these days, I won’t feel sick to my stomach when I think about Trevor’s betrayal. But today is not that day.
I think it hurts so much partly because it wasn’t just “someone else.” It was a very specific someone else, the someone else I’d always been afraid he really loved. It was as if I’d convinced myself the unpleasant events around me were only a bad dream, then realized I was awake after all.
But that was then, and I’m doing everything I can to get past it.
I catch my breath, square my shoulders, and shake it off.
Jonah opens the door and yells over his shoulder, “Dad!”
I can see a narrow wedge of the house, including the staircase, so my first view of my new neighbor is of his bare feet as he descends. Then the hems of his jeans. Then his thighs. Okay, yeah. Mmm. And then—
Even though I really don’t think you can tell that much about what a guy is packing under his jeans—because of the whole bluffer thing—I am staring. And maybe he’s bluffing, but…
That’s why it takes me a beat too long to meet his eyes (embarrassing), which is why I hear his intake of breath just a split second before I see his face.
Oh, shit.
My face goes flaming hot, and I’m not sure if it’s from shame or lust.
The guy standing in the doorway is Tall, Dark, and Broody. The Original Tall, Dark, and Broody, as in my rebound sex guy.
Dark eyes. Dark hair. Strong jaw, shadowed with late-day stubble. A body so built he fills my field of vision, a broad chest swelling under a soft cotton T, and those spectacular biceps, which deserve every ounce of Mrs. Wheeling’s praise.
The next set of images are memories, a wash of sensation as vivid as a dream in progress: him looming over me just before his mouth seals mine in a kiss, his body crowding mine against the brick wall of the alley outside the bar, the heat and size and thickness of him like a drug I can’t get enough of. His mouth, tasting of scotch, and his tongue, soft as velvet, stroking all my tender corners so by the end of the first kiss I am already thinking of all the places I want his touch. His callused hand pushing my skirt up, finding and tearing my underpants, his fingers sliding headlong through my slickness, the one he slipped into my core thick enough for me to clench around, but his thumb on my clit still nimble enough to bring me off in the space of ten heartbeats.
It’s possible I make a sound, nowhere near audible enough to be a moan or a whimper, more like a huff of surprise.
“Dad! Dad!” Jonah says. “Can I have a sleepover at Madden’s house?”
Tall, Dark, and Broody’s eyes haven’t left my face.
“Well,” he says. “We meet again.”
Chapter 4
Sawyer
When Lucy was alive, shit like this just didn’t happen.
The last time I saw this woman, she was leaning against a brick wall with her skirt hiked up and her eyes closed, trying to catch her breath. A few minutes after that, I was in my car, driving away, feeling the mix of relief and remorse that has accompanied every encounter I’ve had since Lucy’s death. Also, feeling like an asshole for more or less running away after sex.
Now I’m standing in the doorway of the new rental, and she’s flanked by her son and mine, who are apparently, inconveniently, already best buds. She’s holding a foil-wrapped plate in her hands, which she thrusts out. “I made you some cookies. I mean, because you’re the new neighbors, not because you and I—”
She stops, obviously realizing that there is nowhere good that sentence can go.
When I spotted her across the room at Maeve’s, she was the prettiest girl in a room of pretty girls. She’s still that pretty. She’s small (which made it easy to lift her up against the wall and—), maybe five foot four, with California-girl shiny, straight blond hair, and a heart-shaped face with blue eyes and a beautiful wide mouth (which feels even better than it looks; her lips really are that soft and she does this thing with her tongue, urging mine on), which is painted with pale-pink lipstick (but that night was bright, glossy fuck-me-dead red). And she looks really uncertain today, which I would think was because of the awkward situation except she looked that way that night, too (except when I was inside her, cupping her head to keep her from banging it against the alley wall, when her face was all unlocked, bold pleasure).
She is so not supposed to be on my doorstep. She was supposed to be a one-night-only fling.
She takes a deep breath and starts over. “Welcome to the neighborhood. I’m Elle Dunning.”
I raise my eyebrows. She told me her first name the night we met, and I haven’t forgotten. But I guess we’re going to pretend that whole thing didn’t happen. Which is good. The last thing I want is to have stranger-fucked my new neighbor. And enjoyed it. A lot.
Jesus.
“Sawyer. Paulson.” I take the plate of cookies she’s still offering me. “Thanks.”
I suck at words. Just—I suck. I have a lot of them in my head, but they never come out when I need them. It’s ten times worse with women, too.
“Madden and I are very happy to have you and Jonah here, and we just wanted to let you know that if you need anything, we’re right next door.”
She is perky in that plastic, faux-chipper way that women put on when they’re trying to make a good impression, and I realize that if this were the first time I was meeting her, I would think she was wound way too tight.
I know from personal experience she is not uptight. Anything but, at least not when it comes to sex. She’s willing, responsive…
Speaking of tight, my jeans are feeling a little uncomfortable.
“Madden invited Jonah to sleep over and I said it was fine with me if it’s fine with you. The boys seem to be getting along great. Which is terrific! I’m super glad! We’re very happy to have another boy Madden’s age in the neighborhood.”
“Dad, can I? Can I?”
“I—”
“Please?”
“I guess so.” I’m busy trying to think what Lucy would do in this situation—invite them in? Exchange phone numbers? Would she let Jonah sleep at a house of people he’d just met? Where the hell is the sleeping bag? Jonah’s pillow? His pajamas?
Of course Lucy wouldn’t be in this situation, ever, and neither would I, if Lucy were still here.
“Jonah can borrow some of Madden’s stuff,” El
le says brightly. “We have lots of things; he’ll be just fine.”
She’s breathlessly cheerful. The night we fucked, she was like this, too, filling all the space between us with words. She would have talked more, except eventually I stopped the words with my mouth. I can’t do that now.
Though it’s tempting.
And an unbelievably shitty idea.
“So, um—yeah! Anyway, we’re right over here if you need anything, and, um, let me give you my cell number so you can text if you need Jonah back in the morning.” She takes her phone out and I have a vivid flashback to that night, when she grabbed my phone out of my hand, snapped my photo, and texted it to her friend so that—her words—if I left her body in a ditch, the police artist’s job would be easier.
It had made me laugh, a laugh I could feel in my chest but that hadn’t quite made it to the surface. Laughter, like words, often got stuck partway out since Luce’s death.
Now I take my phone out and we exchange numbers—I punch mine into her phone and then she texts me.
“Got it. Thanks.”
There’s an awkward silence.
“Right,” she says brightly. “So, um, really nice to meet you. Glad to have you in the neighborhood, and all that. See you around.”
And she’s gone, the boys trailing her, already plotting something to do with popcorn and a movie, and I stare after her, realizing I said maybe four words to her the whole time.
“ ’Bye,” I say to the empty air.
Chapter 5
Elle
It’s him.
And—once again, I babbled like my mouth was on autopilot and my brain was disengaged.
It’s something about him. It’s because he doesn’t talk. He’s just this big, silent presence, and I feel like I have to provide all the words to fill the empty space.
