I was about to say that neurotic was more like it, but the buzzer for the door rang before I got a chance.
“Since you two have descended into hysteria, I guess I’ll be the one to answer that.” He picked up his empty wine glass, and I suspected he was going to fill it while he was up.
I quickly got control of myself so I could hold up my glass. “Mine too?”
“I’ll bring the bottle,” he said, already halfway across the room.
“That was fun,” Avery sighed, several seconds later. “I needed that.”
“Me too.” It had been hard saying all the things I’d needed to say to Brett in the break room today. Surprisingly, it had been even harder to walk away. I desperately wanted to text him or call or just show up at his apartment. When Avery had suggested a competitive game of words, I’d scoffed, but then Nolan had opened a bottle of wine, and an hour into the match, I felt a lot better.
Or I did as long as I stayed focused and didn’t let myself think about Brett.
Now that we’d quieted down, and Avery was concentrating on her next turn, and Nolan wasn’t here to entertain me, my thoughts flew once again to him. What was he thinking? Was he laughing at me? Had I humiliated myself? Had I scared him off permanently?
I lay backward onto the floor with a groan.
“Don’t think about him.” Avery didn’t even look up from her letters.
“Easy enough for you to say.” I groaned again.
“Eden’s distracting me from finding a bingo,” she said to Nolan as he came back into the room.
“That’s too bad, sweetheart, but I think the game’s over now.”
I raised up onto my forearms to give him a questioning look. Sure, Avery was ahead, but we could catch up. I could, anyway.
“That was Brett at the door,” Nolan clarified. “He’s on his way up.”
Avery actually put down her tiles and looked over at me. “Oh my God!”
My heart sped up instantly, as if I’d been the one to go answer the buzzer and had sprinted the whole time, but I wasn’t going to get ahead of myself. “He’s here for me?”
“I think that since he specifically said, ‘Hey, Nolan, is Edie in tonight?’ it’s safe to say that yes, he’s here for you.”
“Oh my God.” I jumped up, immediately regretting that I’d changed into sleeper shorts and my Feminist AF T-shirt instead of staying in my work clothes. Worse, I hadn’t done anything to my face yet, and considering how much I’d been crying from laughter, there was a good chance my makeup was all over the place.
“You look great,” Avery said, reading my expression. “Just…” She lifted the edge of her tank and used it to dab at something on my cheek, flashing her tits as she did.
“Stop. I’m not two. And we don’t need to see your boobs.”
“I don’t know. They’re good boobs.” She continued, of course, and I hoped whatever she’d done had actually helped, because by the time she was finished and her tits were put away, there was a knock on the door.
I grabbed her hands and laced them in mine. “Oh my God.”
“He’s here.”
“He’s here!”
“This is good,” she said, coaching me through my nerves. “This is really good. You’re good. You deserve good things.”
“Okay. Okay.” Deep breaths.
“I guess I’ll get that since you two seem otherwise occupied.” Nolan was already halfway to the door. “Come on in. Don’t mind the women. They seem to be having a...a...thing. Can I pour you some wine? We’re drinking one of Eden’s favs so of course it’s overly sweet.”
“I’m good, thanks.”
I dropped Avery’s hands and turned toward his voice. Oh, damn. He was good. Looking good, anyway. Still wearing his suit pants from the office, but he’d ditched the jacket and the tie. And his shirt was unbuttoned at the collar. And I wanted to peel it down and place a kiss on his skin right there.
“Avery,” Brett said, nodding a greeting to my sister.
Then his eyes met mine, and the earth moved. “Hi.”
He gave me a smile, the kind that felt secret and only mine. “Could we, uh, talk somewhere?”
I moved around the coffee table, coming closer to where he stood. “My bedroom? Or I could change?”
“Your room is fine.”
“Okay. Lead the way.” I needed the extra seconds walking behind him so I could wipe my sweaty hands on my shorts and exchange one more glance with Avery, who was doing the finger in the hole gesture when I looked over, and my whole face went red just as Brett looked back at me to make sure I was following.
“All good. I’m fine,” I said, like an idiot. “Right behind you.”
He knew where my room was, of course, having been there a dozen times before, but after several weeks being estranged, his presence in my space felt magnified. And when I closed the door behind us, I felt oddly like a teenager sneaking around behind Avery’s back.
He seemed to feel the same. “Are you going to get in trouble for having a boy in your room with the door closed?”
I laughed way too jubilantly, nervous energy getting the best of me. “Yeah, they’re…” I didn’t have a snappy comeback. “I don’t know what’s with them. So you, uh, wanted to...hi.”
He chuckled. “Hi.” His expression fell serious. “Why don’t you sit down?”
My stomach tightened. People sat down for bad news, not good news. The last thing I wanted to do was sit down.
But not sitting wasn’t going to change whatever he had to say, and defying him wasn’t the way to winning him over, so I perched myself on the edge of the bed. “Do you want to sit, too?”
The room wasn’t that big and didn’t have a lot of furniture, but my vanity had a bench that he could pull over. Or he could sit on the bed with me, which might have been distracting, but I needn’t have worried because he shook his head. “No, I think I need to stand.”
“Sure, sure.” I wrapped my fingers in the bottom of my shirt, hoping that he wouldn’t notice I was wringing my hands if they were hidden.
“So. Earlier.” He cleared his throat, and every second that he spent not talking felt like an eternity. “I should have said this then, probably. Honestly, I was a bit taken aback.”
“I’m sorry. I was trying not to invade your space, but I—”
“Don’t.” He held a commanding hand toward me. “Don’t apologize. Please.”
“Okay.” My skin was on fire, yet goosebumps were forming all over my arms and legs. Obviously, my body was as confused as my head. If he didn’t want an apology, then I hadn’t fucked up, right? “So...why are you here?”
“Well, I have more to say, if you let me.”
“Sor—” I cut myself off before the apology fully formed. Then I did the zipping mouth gesture and hid the key under my butt before I sat on my hands and tried not to rock back and forth.
“I should have said that the last ten years—me brooding on the sidelines—”
“You weren’t really brooding.”