Page 58 of The Law of Attraction
He shrugged. “I have a dice app on my phone.”
“You really are a nerd,” she exclaimed in delight.
“Are you surprised?
“Yes. You’re way too hot.” The words tumbled out before she could stop them.
He managed to look startled, dismayed and flattered all at once. “I don’t know if that’s more insulting to me or to nerds.”
Olivia concentrated on her knitting, pretending she hadn’t just overplayed her hand. “I just called you hot, so it’s probably not more insulting to you.”
“But it implies you didn’t think I was interesting because of the way I look.”
“Well that’s true.” She risked a wry grin and he huffed out a laugh.
His gaze lingered on her, long enough to make her uncomfortable again. “Teach me to knit.”
She stared at him in surprise. “You’re not serious?”
He came over and sat down next to her on the floor. The spicy-sexy scent of his hair product perfumed the air between them. “Why not?”
She didn’t know why not, except it wasn’t something she could imagine herself doing.
But she had an extra pair of needles and some worsted waste yarn in the bottom of her knitting bag, so what the hell? At least it would pass the time.
Adam groaned in frustration as yet another stitch escaped off his needle. “Why am I so bad at this?”
Olivia reached out and pinched the tiny loop between her thumb and forefinger before it could unravel. “You’re doing fine. You should have seen me when I first started.”
The thing about teaching Adam to knit that she hadn’t previously considered was that it required them to sit very close together. Even worse than that, it required her to touch his hands—a lot. She’d had to show him how to hold the needles, and where to insert the needle into the loop, and how to wrap the yarn around and transfer the stitch from one needle to the other.
Not to mention, there were a lot of dirty-sounding phrases involved in knitting. Every time she had to tell him to “insert the point” or “stick it in there,” she felt herself flush. It would be one thing if she was the only one conscious of the double entendre. But every time she said something like that, Adam would give her this look, like he was thinking about it too, and then they’d both be thinking about it, and she’d flush even more.
She’d even found herself uttering the phrase “just the tip,” which had driven them both into a five-minute fit of hysterical giggles.
“Did you think it would be easy?” she asked as she carefully placed the loop back on his needle.
“Maybe? Easier than this, anyway.”
“What exactly about using two sticks to turn a piece of string into clothing sounds easy to you?”
“Well, when you put it like that…”
“Not there,” she said when he inserted his needle into the wrong side of the stitch.
He course corrected, the tip of his tongue sticking out as he concentrated on wrapping the yarn around his needle. “I guess I never really thought about it at all, except as something old ladies do.”
Olivia rolled her eyes. “And if old ladies can do it, it must be easy?”
“Well…yeah?”
“It’s not easy.” She nudged his shoulder with hers, only barely resisting the urge to lean against him.
“I’m figuring that out.” He sighed and lowered his small knitted rectangle to his lap. “My hands hurt, and it’s getting too dark to see.”
She turned and looked out the window. Ominous dark clouds were building to the south. The next band of the storm was coming.
“We should go grab some sandwiches from the office,” she said, checking her phone and realizing it was past noon. Somehow they’d wasted over two hours knitting.
