She cracks her neck, pulling to a stop in front of a shelf with plants that look like they have ribbons for leaves. “Because I don’t know how to date,” she confesses quietly, her eyes skirting to mine for only a split second before they’re back on the plants. “This one.”
She taps the black pot holding one of the plants, and I sidle up next to her, reading the label.
“Snake plant.” I make a face. “Sounds like it’ll attract the wrong kind of roommate.”
“It’s not called that because snakes like to hide in it,” Amanda says with a smile. “It’s because of the way the leaves look.”
I pick one of them up, inspecting it from all sides. “And you think I could keep it alive?”
“It thrives on being left alone. Very little maintenance.”
I arch a brow, but carefully set it in the cart. “Worth a shot. What else?”
Amanda guides us down the rest of the aisle, and then around the corner to another, adding an aloe plant and a Chinese evergreen to the cart. After picking up some soil for repotting and a watering tin, we checkout and head back out to the car.
We load the plants carefully into the trunk, and then I open the passenger side door, smiling a bit when I catch the flush on Amanda’s cheeks when she slides inside. I jog around to the driver side next and fire the engine to life, my phone connecting to the Bluetooth automatically.
“How do you get it to do that?” Amanda asks, her mouth slightly open as she frowns at the stereo.
“Get it to play my music?”
“Yes! There’s no CD player, no auxiliary cord… I spent the better half of an hour trying to figure this out the other night after class.”
I chuckle, holding out my hand. “Give me your phone.”
She narrows her eyes but pulls her phone from her back pocket and plops it in my palm. “Don’t go through the photos.”
I arch a brow at her. “I wasn’t going to, but now…”
“Don’t, I mean it.”
“Mrs. Parks,” I say, feigning shock. “Are you sending nudes?”
“No!” she says instantly, giving me a look. “Ew. Do people really…” She shakes her head. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”
I laugh, hooking her phone up to the stereo Bluetooth. “If not that, then what’s so bad? You got pictures of someone you murdered on here?”
“Sadly, I’m not that crazy. Yet,” she adds with a smirk. “I just… I’ve been trying to take pictures for an online dating profile.”
Her cheeks blush furiously with the admission, and then a John Mayer song floats over the speakers.
“There, all set,” I say, handing her phone back to her. But I don’t reach for the gear shift. “Do you want to show me what you have so far?”
She blanches, clutching her phone to her chest. “Absolutely not.”
“Come on,” I say on a laugh. “As someone who’s been on at least a half dozen of those sites, I feel like I have the experience to weigh in as an expert.”
Amanda’s mouth pulls to the side as she considers. “You promise not to laugh?”
“Promise.”
She stares at me a moment longer before she sighs, swiping through her phone to an album and handing it to me.
I feel her watching me as I swipe through the selfies, and I’m almost positive all of them were taken on the same night. She’s sitting on the couch by her bookshelf, dressed casually in a red blouse.
The lighting is awful, but she’s hot in every single one of them.
In some, she’s smiling, others she’s neutral, and a few of them, she has this look in her honey eyes, this come and get me glisten with a smirk that says she’s trouble. Her chestnut hair falls over her shoulders, framing her breasts, the kind of thick, long hair a man can’t help but want to have his hands tangled in.
I keep swiping, trying not to give anything away with my facial features — like that if I saw her on an app, I’d swipe right and pay the extra fee to super like her, too.
In the next one, her shirt is hanging in just the right way that her cleavage steals the show, along with her pouty lips and fuck me eyes.
I swallow, skipping past it before I can stare too long.
“They’re all gorgeous,” I say after a moment, peeking at her before my eyes are on the phone again.
“But…”
“But… you could do better,” I say honestly. “The lighting is kind of dark.”
She sighs, taking her phone back. “I knew it. They’re awful.”
“They’re not awful,” I correct quickly. “You look amazing. But they don’t show anything about who you are.”
She frowns. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, you’ve got roughly ten pictures and half a paragraph to attract the right kind of guy. You want to show them as much as you can about who you are, what you’re looking for.” I pause, thinking. “Do you have any pictures of you working in the garden? Or at school, or with David, or doing something you love? Pictures from a night out with your girlfriends, maybe?”
It feels like an innocent question, like one simple to answer, but Amanda’s eyes grow sad, her brows pinching together as she stares at her phone in her lap before tucking it into her back pocket again.
“Just forget about it. Let’s go.”
I frown. “Hey… what’s wrong?”
She shakes her head, but her eyes water, betraying her attempt at indifference.
I curse. “Amanda, what is it?”
She groans then, letting her head fall back against the headrest before she turns to look at me. “I don’t have any girlfriends,” she whispers. “Or any hobbies. I don’t have anything interesting to say about myself.”
I swallow. “That’s not true.”
“It is,” she argues. “Greg, for my whole life, I’ve been Josh’s wife. Or David’s mom.” She sniffs. “I don’t have a personality outside of the men I take care of.” She makes a face. “Took care of.”
My chest squeezes.
I didn’t think about that, about how she’d always been a caregiver. She was like that when I first met her, making sure David was okay, that Josh was cared for even when he didn’t deserve it. I never once saw her go out and splurge on a nice outfit for herself, or getting her hair or nails done the way my mom did.
Now, she has an empty nest and a soon-to-be ex-husband…
“And friends?” She laughs. “I pushed all my friends away over the years, especially when they started questioning why I stayed with Josh. I let him convince me it was them tearing us apart, that we needed to keep what happened in our relationship between us because they just didn’t understand. I stopped talking to all my friends, to my family…” She shakes her head. “To everyone who wasn’t him.”
I reach out for her, folding my hand over hers and squeezing tight.
She sucks in a breath, eyes skirting to the touch before they find my gaze once more. I can feel how erratic her heartbeat is where I hold her, my thumb hovering over that artery in her wrist that gives her away.
This is crossing a line, I try to warn myself.