He put a carton of eggs in the fridge and peeked back over his shoulder, surprised by the comment. “That can be arranged, but I hope you’re not really surviving by grilled cheese and burrito alone.”
She winced. “Boxed mac and cheese makes an appearance sometimes, too. And hot dogs if I’m feeling fancy.”
He shut the fridge and turned fully to her, trying to read if she was joking. She wasn’t. Knowing that she was living on cheap, food-type products disturbed him more than it should. “No one in your family ever taught you how to cook for yourself?”
She shrugged. “This is going to sound super pretentious, but my parents had hired help, so meals just appeared. If I went into the kitchen while Ms. Jenkins was cooking, she’d shoo me out. Even she knew what a hazard I was in the kitchen.”
“Well, of course you were a hazard if no one ever bothered to show you how to cook. It’s not something anyone’s born knowing how to do.” He pulled a few other items from the bags, an idea poking at his brain. He cleared his throat. “I could teach you a few things if you want.”
Her expression brightened. “Really? Do you have a death wish?”
He laughed. “I have full faith that I could teach you how to cook something other than boxed cheesy things without anyone dying in the process. It’s an important life skill. Cooking and not dying, I mean.”
She cocked her head in a playful tilt. “The Horror Virgin teaches the Cooking Virgin?”
“Sounds like a fair exchange to me,” he said, glad to hear she still wanted to meet up for movies. “We could add a cooking session to our movie nights.”
“So I get food and a movie buddy?” she asked. “I’m in.”
“Yeah?” The answer pleased him more than he wanted to admit, a buoyant feeling moving through him. “Great.”
“But that actually wasn’t what I wanted to talk to you about.” She bit her lip like she was fighting a cringe.
“Oh? I didn’t realize you wanted to talk. I thought you were just a benevolent grocery-carrying neighbor.” He quickly put the rest of the cold things in the fridge. He’d organize them later. Right now, he felt like whatever she wanted to talk about was something he needed to pay full attention to.
She scuffed the toe of her Doc Martens on the floor, stalling. He got the impression he was seeing a flashback of what Andi had looked like as a teenager—Andi without her trademark self-assurance. “So about last night. Specifically, about how it ended.”
He braced his hands on the small butcher-block table he used for an island, his knee aching. “What about it?”
This was the part where she was going to say he acted weird or inappropriately, that he’d let the lines blur with that hug.
“I think I may have given you mixed signals.”
He shook his head. “No, that was my—”
“Because I was,” she said, cutting him off. “The signals were mixed because I was mixed up.”
He swallowed down his retort, not fully understanding. “Okay.”
She took a breath, her shoulders lifting and falling with it. “We talked about how it wasn’t a date. We set up expectations. Neither of us are dating. We’re both in weird places. All true.” She wet her lips. “But when we hugged last night, I… Well, I wanted to kiss you.”
The floor seemed to tilt beneath him. So he hadn’t read her wrong. That had been a kiss-me expression. His brain gave a little fist pump. “Oh.”
She looked down, color coming into her cheeks. “I wanted to kiss you, but I freaked out at the last minute.” She glanced up, her gaze serious. “I panicked. That’s what happens when I try to get close—physically—with a guy.”
A pang went through him at her somber tone. “Did I do something to scare you?”
She shook her head. “No, it wasn’t you. I… It’s aftereffects from what I went through in my past.”
That knocked the wind out of him. Last night he’d suspected what she’d been through, but now she’d practically confirmed it. At some point in her life, she’d been abused or assaulted. God. “I’m sorry, Andi.”
She wouldn’t look at him. “It’s okay.”
But it wasn’t. And he needed her to hear that from him, not to have her feel so alone and vulnerable. “I don’t know what you’ve been through, but if it helps, I can tell you that I’m not unfamiliar with post-traumatic stress.” He swallowed past the dryness in his throat. “I’m dealing with that, too.”
Her attention snapped upward. “You are?”
He pointed at his prosthesis. “I lost my leg and suffered some serious burns when a building collapsed on me during a fire rescue. I get flashbacks if I hear anything that sounds like snapping wood. And I wake up from nightmares pretty often. It’s why you hear me moving around here so late at night.”
He left out the part about his crushing depression. He didn’t want her to see that side of him. Andi made him act more like his old self, and he wanted to keep it that way.
Empathy crossed her face. “I’m so sorry, Hill.”
He lifted a shoulder. “I’m dealing with it and am seeing someone about it, but I’m only telling you because I don’t want you to feel like you owe me some kind of explanation. You wanted to kiss me and then decided you weren’t comfortable doing that. That’s okay.”
She rocked back on her heels. “Would you have kissed me back? We talked about just being friends.”
The question sent a ripple of electricity through him. “I stand by wanting to be friends. But that doesn’t mean that friends don’t sometimes add benefits to that relationship.”
She held the eye contact. “So…”
He let out a breath. “Of course I would’ve kissed you back, Andi. I’d been stopping myself from kissing you all night.”
Her shoulders seemed to sag in shared relief. “I don’t know what to do with this…this attraction thing. Friends with benefits sounds like such a cliché, and I don’t even know that I won’t freak out if you did kiss me, but…”
“But what?” he asked, voice quiet, heartbeat loud.
She gave him a helpless look. “But I still want to kiss you.”
The words were so honest and raw, so familiar to him. He knew what that feeling was—wanting something but not knowing if you were capable of having it without your demons getting in the way. He fought those wars, too.
“Maybe it doesn’t have to be so complicated or defined,” he said, the words tumbling out.