Page 24 of Hard Check
Leo shifted the bag on his shoulder and leaned against the wall, settling in like he wasn’t in any hurry to end this conversation. One side of his mouth ticked up. “Is this something I’m going to need to sit down for?”
“I don’t think so.” Dawson pulled the paper out of his back pocket. “Mostly routine stuff. But I also wanted to tell you we’re going to have to wait a bit longer of a couple of parts.”
“And you couldn’t text that?”
“Could’ve.” Dawson shrugged. “Didn’t.”
The words sat there between them, doing more work than Dawson had intended. Leo’s eyes searched his face, and Dawson let him look, which was new. Which was dangerous.
Leo reached for his wallet. “I never asked you what I owe you for the other night.”
“The tow’s covered by your roadside assistance.”
“Whatever they’re paying isn’t enough. And this is for you, not the company.” Leo pulled a few bills out. “What’s fair? Fifty good?”
Dawson looked at the money, then at Leo. Leo’s chin was set, his wet hair starting to curl at the ends where the product had washed out, and Dawson hated how much he noticed that.
“I don’t want your money,” Dawson said.
“Then what do you want?”
The honest answer was so far from anything Dawson could say aloud that he nearly laughed. He looked at the floor, then back at Leo.
“Pizza,” he said. “Maria’s. You’re buying.”
Leo blinked. Then his face broke into the same grin Dawson had seen through the glass—the real one.
“Yeah,” Leo said. “Okay.”
Dawson turned toward the exit. Suggesting dinner with Leo was stupid. He tried to come up with an excuse that wouldn’t make him sound like a complete idiot since pizza had been his idea.
The evening air hit them both when they pushed through the doors. It was late September, and it seemed summer was finally over. A few weeks and it would be jacket weather, then coat weather, then the kind of cold that made your entire body ache. Dawson unlocked his truck.
“I can drive,” Leo said. “I’ve got the rental.”
“I’ll take my truck. Meet you there.” If he couldn’t back out of dinner, he needed to minimize the time they spent together.
“Give me twenty minutes? I should swing home and change.”
“It’s Maria’s, not a steakhouse. You’re fine.”
Dawson walked to his truck alone. The parking lot was half-empty, the evening settling in around the building, and he sat behind the wheel for a long moment before turning the key.
He’d spent the last week lying in bed with a book open on his chest, staring at the ceiling instead of reading, thinking about what it would be like to say fuck it and find out if there was anything to the way Leo’s gaze lingered a beat too long whenever he looked at Dawson.
And now he was driving to Maria’s to have pizza with him because Leo had pulled out his wallet and Dawson had said,No, take me to dinner instead, like that was a normal thing to say to a man he kept telling himself he should avoid.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Leo was losing a fight with his own hair in the rearview mirror when Dawson knocked on the rental’s window.
He flinched. Dawson stood on the other side of the glass, one eyebrow raised, watching Leo with his fingers still raking through the mess the post-practice shower had made of his curls. The gel was gone, and his hair was doing whatever it wanted, which was curling at the temples and making him look seventeen. His shirt was wrinkled from sitting in his cubby all day.
He hadn’t had time to make himself look presentable, and his mother would rather have died than let him walk into a restaurant looking like this. Good thing she was in Miami and not standing in a parking lot in Wisconsin because, for the first time in a while, Leo didn’t feel like fixing it for her.
He opened the door and got out. Smoothed the shirt down. It didn’t help.
“You look fine,” Dawson said.
