Page 23 of The Grumpy Defenseman
“No.”
“Then stop doing the math and let yourself feel it.” She set the mug down and stood, stretching like she owned my condo. “You spent three years protecting yourself from Case Whitfield. That was necessary. But this isn’t Case. This is a man who showed up to a rooftop bar because you asked him to, and then kissed you like he had been thinking about it for weeks.”
Case Whitfield.
My body heard the name before my brain caught up. A hand on the back of my neck. The weight of a boulder pressed against my sternum. His voice close enough to count as breath.
You see the way no one else does, Sam. That’s why I needed those frames.
Two seconds. Then the kitchen was back. My coffee. My best friend in yesterday’s mascara.
“You don’t know that’s what…”
“Four seconds, Sam. Hand on your face. Bourbon on his breath. That man has beenthinking about kissing you since the first time you pointed a camera at him.”
I stared at her. She stared back. Neither of us blinked.
And underneath all of it was the part I had not said out loud: wanting Evan was not abstract. It came with buses and bruises, trade rumors and Sandra’s clipboards, and a room full of men who would clock a change in his breathing before I finished denying it.
“I need to go to work,” I said.
“Yes, you do.” She grabbed her shoes and headed for the door, pausing at the threshold. “And when you see him, don’t you dare do that thing where you act so normal everyone within ten feet knows you’re lying.”
“I don’t do that.”
Bella slid her feet into her heels and shot me a look over her shoulder.
“Sam. You once told a barista you were ‘perfectly fine’ in the same voice people use to identify a body. That latte was complicated,and so are you.”
She paused before opening the door, as if the idea just struck her, though it had not.
“Also, Sunday at Mamá’s. My sisters, even Mack, the whole crew. She’s been asking about you, and I have no excuses left. She’ll be expecting real bakery bread.”
“Bella…”
“Not optional. And don’t bring sad grocery-store bread. Bring crusty bread that looks like it has survived something.”
“This feels aggressive for breakfast.”
“It’s family. Aggressive is the house style.”
Then she left. The door clicked shut behind her, and my condo settled into quiet.
I stood at the kitchen counter with my coffee and the very inconvenient realization that Isabela Rey was right about everything she had ever said to me and probably always would be.
Evan
Ranger hit me like a freight train the second I opened the car door.
Eighty-two pounds of golden retriever momentum collided with my legs, tongue aimed at any available surface of exposed skin. He did not care that I was carrying two coffees and a bag of groceries. He did not care about anything except the fact that I existed and was within licking distance.
“Easy,” I said, which had never worked in the fiveyears I had been saying it.
He ignored me with the cheerful disobedience of a dog who understood exactly one command, come, and obeyed it only when it coincided with what he was already planning to do.
Ranger was technically Lena’s dog, according to paperwork and feeding schedules. Emotionally, he had claimed joint custody of me years ago.
Lena was on the porch, arms crossed, watching the assault with the detached amusement of a woman who had been awake since five and had already handled two children and a dog who had eaten another shoe.
