Page 52 of Never Alone
Natalie.
The fact that she had turned out to be the girl who hurt me when we were sixteen hadn't changed the fact that she was beautiful. She'd stopped wearing the contacts a few days ago. Her eyes were green again. Her lips were right there.
Her cheeks went a little pink.
"I'm just saying," she said. "I trust you."
"Right."
I took my arm back. I didn't know what to do with my hands. I went to the sink and rinsed a cup that didn't need to be rinsed.
CHAPTER 11
Tessa
Cole was at the kitchen table with the lawyer's paperwork spread in front of him.
I was at the counter, drying the same plate I had already dried twice.
I had been living with Cole for a week, and the not-naming of certain things was becoming a job.
There was, for example, the morning I walked into the kitchen to find him at the coffeemaker in gray sweatpants and no shirt, hair still wet from the shower, his back to me. He was making coffee like a man who had lived alone for ten years. Which he had. I had time to look at his back longer than I should have before it registered I was supposed to do something about it. I told him to put on a shirt. What I didn't tell him, or myself, was what those seconds had done to my breathing for the rest of the morning.
There was, then, the night he told me he had never been with a woman.
I put his arm around my waist because I wanted him to know I was fine with it. I wasn't flirting. I was a woman trying to show a man that what he had inside him was not a thing to be afraid of.
He looked at me like he was going to kiss me.
He didn't. He said, “Right,” went to the sink, and rinsed a cup that didn't need rinsing. But the look was there. And it didn't go anywhere in three days.
What I didn't tell him, or myself, was that I wanted him to.
There was the move, three days after that. Cole paid the early-termination fee on his old lease without making a thing of it. Two guys from the station came to help, loaded up everything he owned, and had it all in the new apartment by Sunday.
There was this apartment—two bedrooms, a kitchen with a window over the sink, fifteen minutes to Noah's school, eight to the bakery. There were the locks Cole replaced the day we got the keys, and the smoke detectors he replaced the morning after that.
There was the bedroom thing. Noah and I had the bigger room. Cole took the smaller one for himself. I told him it should be the other way around, that a man his size should not be sleeping in the smaller bedroom. He told me it was fine, and that was the end of the conversation.
There was, in other words, a lot of thinking I was not doing.
I set the plate down.
"Cole."
He looked up.
"What about the rent?"
"What about it?"
"We haven't talked about how we're splitting any of it."
He set the pen down.
"Don't think about it."
"I'm not letting you carry a two-bedroom by yourself."
