by Noelle Adams
This time when her eyes lifted, she held his gaze. “I’d like to.”
“So why don’t we try?” He took a deep breath and forced himself past another wave of resistance. He was here for six months, and this tension was going to get old if they didn’t take care of it. “I promise not to touch to you again… unless you want me to.”
He couldn’t help but add the last part since something inside him howled in outrage at the finality of his promise.
He wanted to touch her again. Of course he did.
But he also really liked her.
He might be able to seduce her back into bed—he was pretty sure he could—but that wasn’t what she really wanted. And it definitely wasn’t worth the angst that would follow if they fell into bed with different goals in mind.
“So you want to… to be friends?” Her expression was genuine, almost hopeful.
He nodded. He wanted a lot more than that, but life didn’t offer what you really wanted. He’d learned that a long time ago. Better to just go with the flow, ride the tide, let things happen to you. This was happening now, so he let it. “Yeah. If that’s okay with you.”
“I’d like that.” She smiled at him. “I’m sure eventually I’ll stop thinking about having sex with you.”
He almost choked in his effort to hold back the loaded comment he wanted to make in response. Then he remembered his sauce, so he turned back to the cooktop, glad for the distraction.
He’d gotten himself together with a firm, mental lecture about controlling his ridiculous lust when he turned back to pick up his glass of wine and smile at her. “Friends it is. No touching. No talk about sex.”
His heart gave a silly little skip when she smiled back at him, and he felt a low rumble of that down-deep anxiety.
Why was he feeling this way?
Why was he acting this way?
He’d turned a corner in his life two years ago, and now he was on a different road.
He didn’t act… earnest. Not anymore.
He cleared his throat, sipped his wine, and turned back to his sauce. “So what was happening with work today?”
“It wasn’t anything terrible. We’re just on this big rush project, and I’m not sure how we’ll get it done in time. Everyone’s all stressed out and snipping at each other, and my boss…” She sighed.
“Your boss what?”
“He doesn’t seem… happy with me. Because I can’t keep up with these deadlines. I’ve only worked there a few months, and I don’t want him to have a bad impression of me so soon.”
Lucas frowned. “I can’t believe you’re slacking or anything.”
“I’m not! I’m working my ass off.”
“Then if you can’t meet the deadlines, then they must not be realistic deadlines.”
“They’re not,” she admitted. “They’re crazy. I don’t think anyone could meet them.”
“Then it’s his problem. Not yours. Is he really an asshole like that?”
“No, he’s not an asshole. He’s usually a pretty nice guy. But he’s just… I don’t know… driven. He gets focused on something, and that’s the only thing that matters. His sister—she manages the office—she’s been telling him to back off and be more realistic about what we’re capable of doing. But I don’t want to disappoint him. If he wants me to meet these deadlines, then that’s what I want to do.”
Lucas shook his head, checking to make sure the pasta was done before draining it. “You can’t work yourself into a heart attack to please an unreasonable boss.”
“He’s not—”
“If his expectations are impossible, then he needs to change his expectations. He needs to change. Not you.”
She gave him a tired smile. “Yeah. That makes perfectly good sense logically.”
“But…”
“But it’s not always that easy to make yourself do it. Not when you want to do a good job.”
“You are doing a good job. Aren’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
She made a face at him, as if she were briefly annoyed by his pushing. Then she admitted, “Yeah. I’m doing a good job.”
“So what’s your problem?”
“My problem is I don’t like people to be disappointed in me. Especially people I like and respect as much as my boss.”
“I told you it was his prob—”
“I know what you said,” she interrupted, a kind of fierceness to her tone that he liked. “And I get that you don’t give a crap about people’s expectations for you. But I do. Even if those expectations are unreasonable, I care about them.”
He stared at her for a moment, their gaze strangely deep. It felt like he understood her in a profound way and that she understood him too.
Then he broke the gaze. “You’re going to have some of this, aren’t you?” he asked, gesturing to the cooktop.
Her lips wobbled irrepressibly. “I’m not sure how I can say no now, after I’ve been sitting here smelling it for the past ten minutes. I didn’t know you were such a good cook.”
He felt a foolish swell of pleasure at her words. But his voice was dry when he said, “You better taste it before you start handing out compliments.”
The pasta turned out really well. They ate together at the island, having a second glass of wine. After a while, Steven and Michelle emerged, and they had some pasta too.
They hung out there in the kitchen for a long time, and Lucas forgot that he’d been planning to go out and find a bar that evening.
He didn’t end up going out at all.
BY SUNDAY AFTERNOON, Jill stopped putting on an act and keeping her distance just because Lucas was living with her.
For the whole first week, that was how she’d felt. Like she was putting on an act. Like she had to think about what she was doing, how she looked, how she sounded, because he was watching her.
But it was too hard. It wasn’t her nature. And it made her stressed out in her own home. Her friends had been right. She needed to get to know him as her roommate. After their dinner on Friday, she felt better about him, about everything.
And by Sunday she let down her defenses.
This was her real life. Her home. She had to live in it, with or without Lucas Bradford.
She worked most of the day on Saturday, trying to catch up on some of her deadlines, but she knew she couldn’t work on Sunday or she’d be exhausted and bleary-eyed at the beginning of the new week.
So she slept in late, had breakfast, then asked Lucas if she could use the tub in the hall bathroom so she could take a bath.
He was on his way to work out—the man was some kind of machine, going to the gym almost every day—so he didn’t care if she used the tub. She had a long, leisurely soak, and then went to do some errands and have lunch with Michelle and Chloe.
She was feeling good when she came home. She wanted to hang out in the living room and watch TV, but Lucas was already there. Her first instinct was to go hide in her room, but she fought against it. Instead, she got her nail file and polish and brought them into the living room.
Lucas was stretched out on one of the couches. He’d showered after working out and was now wearing sweats and a worn Hawkeyes T-shirt. He had a sports channel on the television, but he didn’t appear to be watching it.
He appeared to be asleep.
She sat down in the big chair and realized he wasn’t asleep when he glanced over at her.
“Are you watching this?” she asked, gesturing at the TV.
“Nah. Change it to whatever you want.”
Relieved that he was easygoing about the television, she switched over to a cooking channel.
She liked to watch cooking shows on Sunday afternoons.
He appeared perfectly amenable to that, and his eyes focused on the celebrity chef who was making some sort of towering sandwich on the screen.
Jill started working on her nails.
Lucas was still stretched out on the couch�
�his body lean and hard and undeniably gorgeous, even in his sloppy clothes—and his eyes moved between the television and her work on her nails.
“Do you do your fingernails every Sunday?” he asked. He didn’t appear to be teasing. He seemed genuinely curious.
“Usually.”
“Don’t a lot of women go to have them done somewhere?”
He’d been engaged, she remembered. She wondered what that woman had been like. She thought it was cute he was still pretty clueless about things like manicures. “Some women do. I like to do mine myself. I like to make them pretty.” She glanced over at him, wondering if he thought she was silly. “I like to make… things pretty.”
“You fixed up the apartment real nice.”
She flushed slightly since Lucas appeared to really mean it. “It wasn’t all me.”
“You’ll never convince me that Michelle and Steve did much to fix this place up.”
“No. Certainly not Steve. But Michelle, Chloe, and I fixed it up together when we first moved in here. We got all the main furniture and stuff.”
“You’re the one who keeps it looking so nice though. I’ve been here a week, and I do have eyes in my head, you know.”
She smiled at him. “I like things to look pretty. Homey. You know?”
“Yeah. I know you do.”
There was a strange resonance in his tone, and she couldn’t quite understand it. He wasn’t judging her though, so she didn’t let it bother her.
They sat in silence for a while, watching the cooking show. In a commercial break, Lucas said, “I haven’t seen Steve all day.”
“He and Michelle got into another fight this morning, and he left. I think he’s just hanging out on campus.”
Lucas gave his head a little shake. “Have they always fought this much?”
“No. They were all lovey-dovey at first. It’s just been the past couple of months.”
“Are they going to make it, do you think?”
Jill felt a little twist in her chest, the way she always did when she thought about the possibility of Michelle and Steve breaking up.
She hadn’t really wanted Steve to move in when he had, but she loved him now. He felt like family. Michelle was one of her best friends though, so Jill’s loyalty would always be first with her.
It was going to be so hard—if Michelle and Steve broke up.
She really hoped they wouldn’t.
“Is it that bad?” Lucas asked, evidently reading something in her face.
“I don’t know. They’re fighting a lot. Michelle seems to be getting really… tired. I don’t know.” She swallowed hard, focusing her anxiety on making her pinkie nail perfect. “I hope they’ll figure things out.”
“What’s the main problem with them? Do you know?”
“There’s not one main thing, at least as far as I can tell. Steve is really stressed out at work, and he doesn’t want to do anything else when he’s not working. But I don’t think that would be enough to… I don’t know. It was different last year, before Steve got his PhD. When they were both grad students, it was different. They had more flexible schedules and—I don’t know—they seemed more in sync.” She finished her hand and waved it around to dry the polish. “They fell really fast. They met and were practically living together in less than a month. So maybe it’s just normal life stuff—catching up to them.”
Lucas was looking at her from the couch.
She added softly, “I don’t want them to break up.”
“I guess that would blow a hole into your nice settled life here.”
She sucked in a breath but then saw that his eyes were gentle. He wasn’t mocking her.
“I wasn’t just thinking about myself.”
“I know you weren’t. But they’re your friends. It would affect you. Obviously.”
“Yeah.” She pulled off her thick socks and started on her toes.
She worked for a while, and when she glanced up, she saw Lucas was still watching her. Her hair was in braids, and she was wearing purple leggings with books on them and an oversized T-shirt. He wasn’t likely to be leering at her when she looked like this, so it was unnerving that he was still watching her.
“What?” she asked, meeting his eyes.
“Nothing. Just watching the toenail progress.” He gave her a lazy smile.
“Don’t you get bored?”
“What? On a Sunday afternoon? Nah.”
“Not just right now. Overall. Since you’re not really working. Don’t you get bored?” She was genuinely curious and made sure her tone didn’t come across as judgmental.
“No,” he said with another smile, turning onto his side so his whole body was facing her. “I got bored when I worked. I don’t get bored now. If something gets old, I stop doing it. I move on.”
“You ride the tide. I know.” She made a face. “I would get bored. Hanging around and doing nothing.”
“I do things.”
“You work out. You occasionally cook something. What else do you do?”’
“I do what I want when I want to do it. Anything I want.” His eyelids were heavy, his expression warm and relaxed. “You should try it.”
“No thanks. It’s great that you’re doing what you want to do, but I wouldn’t want to do that myself. I like work. I like having a real home. I like… life. I’m not living for vacation.”
His expression flickered slightly.
“I didn’t mean to insult you,” she said quickly.
“I know you didn’t. I wasn’t insulted. I get what you’re saying.”
She sighed as she inspected her toenails. “My mom was kind of like you. Always moving. Never wanting to get into what she called a rut. But because of that, it always felt like we were drifting, like I didn’t have any… any ties to ground me in the world. She never had roots. She still doesn’t understand them.”
“Is she not happy with your choices?”
“She’s happy that I’m happy. At least that’s what she says. But I think she’s kind of disappointed in me. She thinks I’ve become part of the establishment and won’t ever be free. But I don’t want that kind of freedom. It doesn’t feel free to me.” Jill sighed, wondering how she’d rambled on into this kind of intimate confession on a Sunday afternoon. “She doesn’t understand roots.”
“I do understand,” Lucas said softly.
She met his gaze and held it for a minute.
“I understand roots,” he said, almost like he was taking to himself. “I just don’t want them.”
For no good reason the last words felt like a kick in the heart.
She had to keep reminding herself about who he was and who he wanted to be.
He wasn’t like her. He wasn’t looking for the same things.
If he had been, he would have been exactly what she wanted in a forever man.
But he wasn’t.
And he never would be a forever man.
There was a guy who worked in the office suite below her that she’d been chatting with in the mornings and evenings. He seemed like a nice, stable, fairly cute guy, and he definitely appeared interested in her.
He was the kind of guy she needed to focus on.
Not Lucas.
Never Lucas.
She wasn’t foolish enough to believe Lucas was likely to change, and she wasn’t needy enough anymore to simply take what was offered when it wasn’t what she really wanted.
If things had been different, she would already be crazy about Lucas.
But things weren’t different.
And she wasn’t.
Five
TWO FRIDAYS LATER, Jill had a date.
Lucas wasn’t happy about it either.
They’d been getting along well for the past two weeks, and Lucas was generally happy about his living situation. He’d been training himself to refocus any time sex crossed his mind in her presence, and he’d even been managing about half the time not to imagine having sex with her when he was in his bedroom al
one at night.
He’d been as good as he could possibly be, and it would be nice if that meant he would be rewarded.
Instead of rewarded, he had to deal with Jill fluttering around getting ready for her date on Friday evening. Then he had to watch her leave with the guy and brood about what they might be doing.
She hadn’t even met this guy online. She knew him from her work building or something. She knew what he looked like. She knew how he acted. And she wanted to go out with him.
The date wasn’t likely to be a flop.
The guy had come to pick up Jill at seven, but Lucas had only caught a brief glimpse of him. He’d had long hair and dark-rimmed glasses and a hipster vibe. Jill probably thought he was a good match for her.
She’d probably have a good time.
She’d probably go out with him again.
She’d probably decide she really liked him and make him her boyfriend.
Lucas knew enough to realize things would be better that way—it would be safer for him and dispel a lot of the tension he couldn’t help but feel around her—but he didn’t like the idea of it.
He didn’t like it at all.
After she left the apartment, he left too, going to a bar he’d found last week with a decent bartender and not filled with swarms of college kids. But he didn’t have a good time.
He talked to a couple of women, and they had seemed interested in him, but he couldn’t muster enough interest or energy to make a move on them.
Eventually he went back home, sitting in front of the television by himself, watching sports and drinking beer and wondering when Jill and her date would come home.
If they came back here and ended up in her bedroom, Lucas wasn’t sure what he would do.
Being friends and roommates with Jill was just fine. It was all he could have since he didn’t want what she wanted. He could live with that.
But knowing she was having sex with some other guy in this apartment was more than he could live with.
How the hell had he gotten into this situation in the first place?
He usually slept with women and moved on. He liked it that way. He’d have some vague, pleasant memories of his time with them, and it would never trouble him again.
This was different.
This was… hard.
