Flirting with Forever

by Cara Bastone

  She stepped back from John, one hand firmly on his shoulder. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said in a clear, low voice.

  “Ms. Trace,” the older detective said as he rose up from his seat at the table, his eyes bouncing back and forth between Mary and John. “I have everything I need from you right now. I’ll be in touch with you tomorrow.”

  “Thank you so much for everything,” Mary said, stepping away from John and following the detective to her front door.

  They exchanged words that John didn’t listen to. He was still fighting his way through a full-body buzz from where she’d tossed herself against him. Didn’t she know she was precious cargo? She shouldn’t go slamming herself into unexpected men, like a ship on the sea. He traced a hand down the line of his chin to his throat, where her hair had been pressed. That hair was a hell of a weapon. Nothing had ever felt better or more dangerous against him.

  She appeared in the doorway to the kitchen, and his fog immediately receded, because those were tears in her eyes.

  “Mary.”

  “Oh, John,” she said with a shudder, crossing the room to him again. This time, he dropped his messenger bag aside and met her in the middle. His hand came to her hair as her nose pressed hard into his sternum. “It was so terrible.”

  “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “Maybe later,” she whispered. She looked up at him then, and John’s heart stumbled. He’d been foolish to think that tears would dull Mary’s light. If anything, the high emotion on her face almost heightened it. It was like the sun catching droplets of rain from the side, each drop its own gorgeous prism.

  He talked himself out of tracing away the teardrops with his thumbs. Too risky. “Are you all right?” He had to know.

  “I’m okay. Just shaky. And exhausted. I barely slept last night anyway. And then as I was drifting off, I heard them—” She took a deep breath. “My bones feel like they weigh a hundred pounds.”

  “You should take a nap. I could go out and bring back something for us to eat.” He was being presumptuous assuming he could stay with her for dinner, but she just nodded.

  “Okay. Yeah.”

  They separated from the hug and she took a few steps toward her bedroom. She paused and peered down the hallway. “Actually, I think I’ll come with you to get the food.”

  He blinked at her and she was back at his side. He’d never seen her flit quite so fast. He understood all at once. She was terrified to be here alone. And he didn’t blame her. Her door was kicked in and she probably hadn’t lain down on her bed since she’d bolted out of it after hearing the break-in. She wasn’t eager to curl up alone in her unlocked house and he didn’t blame her.

  “Mary,” he said after a second. “Maybe I could drop you somewhere. You could stay with someone tonight? Fin? Via?”

  She was shaking her head. “No. No. They have Kylie and Matty. Enough on their plates. Their lives. I don’t—” She shook her head even harder. “Maybe a hotel instead.”

  He thought of Mary alone in a huge hotel room. Somehow, even though he knew that the class of a fancy room would suit her better than his humble apartment ever would, the idea of her being alone tonight wasn’t at all palatable.

  “Come to my place,” he told her, without taking a second to think about all the ways that invitation could be misconstrued.

  Her brow furrowed.

  “It’s nothing fancy, but it’s clean. And you’d have company. And I don’t have kids or a life. I mean, I have a life, but nothing you’d be interrupting. I have to get brunch with my dad tomorrow, but frankly, I’d be thrilled if I had an excuse to cancel. And first thing tomorrow we’ll get someone to fix your door so you won’t have to worry. And you could just have a break. Be in a different part of the city and relax. Not that Bed-Stuy is, like, an amazing vacation destination, but still, it might be nice to—”

  “Okay.”

  He blinked down at her. “Okay?”

  “Okay, I’ll come. Let me just grab a few things.”

  “Okay, you’ll come to my place?”

  Now she was the one blinking. “Well, am I invited or not?”

  “Invited.”

  “So, let me get my stuff.”

  He picked up his messenger bag and arranged it over his shoulder for something to do. Mary was coming to spend the night at his place. Huh. He’d thought for sure she’d say no. It hadn’t been an empty invitation, but he really hadn’t thought there was almost any possible way she’d say yes. But she was packing a bag that very second. With things she’d need to spend the night with him.

  Well, not with him. But at his house and—Oh, crap. He had a freaking studio apartment. How had this slipped his mind?! A bed and a love seat, that’s all she wrote. Not even a blow-up mattress. He pictured himself in some nineties rom-com where he and Mary would end up sharing his bed “platonically” only to wake up spooning and in love.

  Yeah, right. He might wake up spooning and in love. And with a knee to the nads. Crossed off the list, remember? He pulled out his phone and quickly texted his next-door neighbors. They’d let him stay over once before, when his mother’s heat had been out and she and Cormac had stayed in his place. Hopefully they could put him up again, or he’d sleep on the floor.

  “Ready?” She had a small overnight bag on her hip and a sad half smile on her face as she stood in the doorway. It was the half smile that did away with his reservations and worries. If she needed company and a place to stay, John was going to serve it up to her on a silver platter. No, a golden platter.

  “Ready.”

  They walked to the train side by side after making sure with the cops downstairs that it was all right for her to leave and that they were going to secure her shop tonight. On the walk, Mary called her employees, gave them a quick rundown of what had happened and explained she wouldn’t be needing any help for the weekend. They sat quietly side by side as the subway screeched and accelerated and slid into stop after stop, each one accentuating just how far they actually lived from one another. Two different dimensions.

  John didn’t let these thoughts get him down as the two of them jogged aboveground in his neighborhood. She was in flats, which he realized now, she rarely wore, because he could look down and see the top of her head. He felt an expanding tenderness for the fact that her hair was messily twisted into a bun. She’d managed to make it look fashionable and delicate all the same, but she’d also been frazzled and tired enough to leave parts of it messy.

  This, more than anything, illustrated to him just how trying this day had been for her. “All right,” he told her. “Let’s see. We’ve got crappy pizza, mediocre burritos or insanely good Cuban.”

  “I think the crappy pizza sounds good, since you sold it so well.” She crossed her eyes at him. “Just joking. I choose Cuban. Can we get it to go?”

  He nodded and the two of them walked the few blocks in silence. He could practically feel her fatigue spiraling off of her like heat from a light bulb left on too long. It was still a bit too early for the dinner rush, so they were in and out with their to-go bag pretty fast. John was grateful that this place was too expensive for him to regularly patronize because there was no one working there to recognize him with this gorgeous blonde ray of sunshine. There was no one to rib him about who the pretty girl was, to reveal loudly and obnoxiously—the way they would have done in the burrito shop—that he never brought pretty girls around here.

  John clung to the fact that the man who’d farewelled them at the Cuban joint had barely acknowledged John and Mary. The man’s eyes hadn’t goggled at the idea of the two of them having dinner together. Maybe it wasn’t so outrageous.

  They walked back to his house, and John’s heart started to bang. “It’s a walk-up,” he told her in a voice a little more cracked than normal. He took a deep breath as he started up the stairs to his apartment.

/>   All right, John, he coached himself. You cannot be ashamed of your home. You worked hard to make it here. You live on your own in a clean apartment. She knows you’re not a Rockefeller. Don’t do yourself the disservice of apologizing for your life. There’s nothing to apologize for. She wants to be here.

  He took another deep breath and didn’t linger in front of the door. He merely unlocked it and let her into his life.

  * * *

  “OH, NO, YOU DON’T,” John growled as he bent down in front of his door and scooped something up from the ground.

  Mary was relieved to hear that his voice was back to a more normal pitch than it had been for the last few minutes. She’d begun to wonder if he’d been regretting bringing her here. Mary wanted nothing more than to just get inside his house and crash.

  “Oh,” she laughed as John straightened up and stepped in the door, holding it open for her. He had a wiggling, black-and-gray-striped ball of fur in his arms. At first glance the cat looked to be struggling, but when Mary looked closer, she saw that the little beast was actually just wiggling farther into John’s arms, attempting to get comfortable in its throne. “I didn’t know you had a cat!”

  “You’re not allergic, are you?” he asked immediately. “Crap, I should have mentioned.”

  “No! I like cats.” To prove it, Mary leaned forward and scratched the kitty under the chin. To her delight, the cat tipped its head back, luxuriating.

  “Oh, good.” John kicked the door closed behind them and then set the cat on the ground. “Well, this is Ruth. She’s a little...forward, so feel free to ignore her if she’s getting on your nerves.”

  Ruth? He’d named his cat Ruth? For some reason, this information made helium rise inside of Mary. She wanted to laugh hysterically, hug John again, cry a little.

  She needed to eat and crash out.

  “Well,” he said again, stepping over Ruth carefully. “This is it.”

  Mary finally took a look around, trying not to appear overeager to finally see John’s home. It was small. Just one room with a bed along the far wall and a kitchenette tucked in the opposite corner. There was a kitchen table and, under one window, a love seat with a coffee table in front.

  Her first impressions were homey, clean, man-space. She immediately loved all the touches of Estrella around the apartment. There was a colorful, mismatched afghan she’d obviously crocheted for John. And a series of paintings along the wall, some of her earlier work that Mary had never seen before. The bottom half of one of his windows was covered over in a stained-glass windowpane that Estrella had obviously worked hard on. The overall effect was nice. It wasn’t a curated space by any means, but it wasn’t depressing either. It was neat and intentional. Very John. She liked it.

  “So, uh, make yourself at home. Gah! Ruth!” He did a quick little dance step to avoid his cat.

  She covered her mouth with one hand so he wouldn’t think she was laughing at him, even though she kind of was.

  John’s phone dinged in his pocket, and as he set their food on the table and unwound himself from his messenger bag, he checked the text.

  “Oh, good. My neighbors texted me back. I’m gonna run over there and get things squared away.”

  What he was getting squared away, she had no idea. She was still standing on his front mat, taking in his apartment.

  “Here,” he said, striding over and lifting her bag off her shoulder. He set it on the love seat. “I probably should have mentioned that I don’t have air-conditioning.”

  She saw his look of chagrin for only a moment before he turned to the window in the kitchen and propped it open with a box fan, flicking it on. He strode to the window above the bed, put one knee in the middle of the comforter and did the same with another box fan.

  “But it’s actually pretty comfortable at night with the airflow. You should be all right. Okay. Um. Bathroom’s there, let me just...” He strode to the bathroom and poked his head inside, obviously checking to make sure it was clean. He nodded his head. “Yeah. So. I’ll be right back.”

  And then he was scooting around her, out his front door. Mary heard him knock on the next door down and then the sound of his voice and another voice from the other side of the far wall. Thin walls in this building.

  Mary looked longingly at the bathroom. She wanted nothing more than an icy shower and her pajamas and a place to rest her head. But she figured that she’d wait until after she’d eaten. She washed her hands and set out their dinner. She found only four place settings of dishes in his cupboard, all clean, though a little chipped. She set the table with two of them, folding paper towels neatly underneath the silverware. She fished two beers out of the fridge. There was a small, stubby candle in the drawer next to the bottle opener, so she lit it, setting it in the middle of the table. She wished there was a flower she could set out, but this would have to do. She smiled as Ruth twined around her feet, roughly rubbing her little furry face against Mary’s bare ankles.

  He was right about the cross-breeze from the fans. The cool air felt heavenly and the white noise from the rushing breeze made Mary feel as if John’s home were safely tucked into a cloud, floating above Brooklyn, high above any intruders or ruined shops.

  Oh, God. Her beautiful shop. All that waste. The meaningless destruction of something so beautiful.

  She felt a crack deep within her and knew that her tears weren’t done. But she didn’t want to cry right now. She wanted food and rest. So she went to her knees and scooped Ruth onto her lap.

  Ruth made an alarmingly loud sound that Mary supposed was a purr. She laughed and poked at Ruth’s flicking tail, scratched at her ears, absorbed the animal’s warm, weighted comfort.

  The voices on the other side of the wall stopped, and a moment later, John was back through his front door. “Everything’s good over there. They said I can head over whenever you want to crash. I see that Ruth wasted no time in seducing you.” His lips softened into a half smile at the sight of Mary on the floor with his goofy cat. Then his gaze flicked to the table and the smile tightened back into his usual expression of lined consternation.

  He cleared his throat. “Table looks nice.”

  They sat down together, John filling up waters for them and cracking both beers open.

  “What did you have to get figured out with the neighbors?” she asked.

  “Oh. Just wanted to make sure I could sleep on their couch.”

  “Oh.” She furrowed her brow and looked around. John had a small sofa and just the one bed. Of course there wasn’t room for two in here. She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t picked out that detail immediately. “John, you don’t have to do that. I could sleep on the sofa—”

  “Mary.” He frowned. “That thing is only three feet long. Just take the bed. The neighbors have let me sleep over before. They like me. I gave some free legal advice to their boy a few years back.”

  She glanced uneasily toward the bed, uncomfortable with booting him out of his own home. But he was thumbing through his cell phone, either oblivious to or ignoring her reaction.

  He entered into a phone call, which surprised Mary a bit. He never made calls or texted when the two of them were together. She realized then how much she usually had his entire attention. The sudden loss of it threw into sharp relief the heady electric zing of having his full focus.

  “Christo?” he said after a second. “Hey, it’s John. Yeah. Right. Good to hear your voice too. How’s Candy? No way, already? Hunter’s a good school. Definitely. She gonna live at home? Probably for the best.” He took a bite of food while he listened to the other man on the line for a minute, swallowing down half his water at once. “Listen, I called to see if there was a chance you’d break your no-work-on-Saturdays rule. Friend of mine got her house broken into last night and I was hoping to get her apartment secured by tomorrow. Nah, tomorrow is soon enough. With me, actually.”

 
; John’s eyes met Mary’s for a moment before they flicked away.

  His cheeks went pink. “Yeah. No. It’s not—Jesus, Christo.”

  Mary could hear laughter coming through the line loud and clear. John abandoned his dinner and rose up to stalk over to the kitchen window, looking out into the world. “Yeah, that should work. All right. I’ll text you the address. Thanks, man.”

  John sat back down, digging into his food again, the tips of his ears and his cheeks still slightly pink.

  “You just...handled that,” Mary mused, setting her fork down.

  “Oh. Right.” John cleared his throat. “Sorry, I should have told you that my old friend is a locksmith and a carpenter, and he’ll definitely get you fixed up.”

  “No apology necessary.” Her eyes fell to the candle that sat between them. “I can’t remember the last time someone just handled something like that for me.”

  “You’ve been running the shop on your own for a long time?”

  Mary’s eyes rose to his. This she could talk about, the history of the shop, not the way it was now, in shambles. “Almost six years. I inherited it, actually.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. My aunt Tiff bought the building almost forty years ago. She lived in the apartment above and ran the shop below, just like me. She left the whole thing to me when she passed.”

  John blinked at her. She could see him filing away the information that she, in fact, owned that fancy Cobble Hill apartment, but thankfully that wasn’t what he chose to comment on. “I’m so sorry for your loss. Was it sudden?”

  Mary shook her head. “No. Cancer. We knew for a few years before she passed.” She paused. She didn’t have to tell him the rest, but for some reason, she felt herself wanting to. “She actually refused treatment there at the end. Her last year. She said that she’d rather live enjoying the time she had than hoping for a few more stolen moments.” It was the choice that Naomi would never forgive her for. The choice that Mary had understood innately. “My mother seems to think that if Tiff had had a partner and a couple of kids, she might have chosen differently. Might still be with us.” Mary shook her head. Being able to explain her mother’s behavior didn’t make it any less painful to endure.