I can’t help myself. Diving into characters is what I do for my job, and now I have a new puzzle.
Namely, Luca Rossi.
Baseball player. Dick. Bearing wounds from childhood that he refuses to talk to me about and a secret past with a woman that he pretends doesn’t exist.
Or at least doesn’t think about enough for her to have come up in our conversations.
Spending time with someone like Luca should be helping me want to give love the middle finger, but it’s not.
Not yet.
I’m too intrigued by the puzzle of all the things I don’t know about him yet, which will undoubtedly be my downfall.
I sneak into the house before dawn to use the bathroom.
I’m tiptoeing, and I even remember to skip the saggy step. The last thing I want is to encounter either his mom or his nonna. My plan is to do my business and sneak out to a coffee shop for a morning of trying to write—trying being the operative word, since I haven’t been in the mood since Jerry happened.
But trying to write is better than staying here and pretending life is great when his mom is dating my ex-fiancé and his grandmother will probably put The Eye on me too if she finds out I’m only playing the role of Luca’s girlfriend.
When I dance into the bathroom upstairs, yank my pants down, and sit, I fall butt-first into cold toilet water.
“Aaaaah!”
I almost clamp my hands over my mouth, remember I’m touching the edges of a toilet seat that’s probably gross, and instead squeeze my lips together and pray no one heard me.
“Hello?” Nonna yells.
“Who’s there?” Luca’s mother shrieks.
“Luca? Is that you?”
“Of course it’s not Luca! He doesn’t scream like a girl!”
“Oh. Then it’s his floozy, isn’t it?”
Oh god.
Oh god oh god oh god.
I didn’t lock the bathroom door, which means one of them is going to find me in here sitting in toilet water with my hooha hanging out, and Luca’s mom is probably naked too, and this is not how I want to start my day.
“Don’t come in!” I screech. “And why didn’t you teach Luca to put the damn seat down?”
“That’s his father’s fault!” his mother yells back.
Nonna snorts loudly enough to scare Dogzilla, who bolts into the bathroom after pushing the door open with her nose.
“Bullshit,” Nonna hollers. “It’s those last two assholes you tried to make Luca’s stepfather!”
“That was seventeen years ago, you witch!”
“Would you two wait until after coffee to start this?” The bathroom door swings open again, and there’s Luca, with his hair perfect and his pecs solid and his arms the very definition of arm porn, not to mention the black athletic shorts slung low on his hips and showing off his happy trail, striding into the bathroom built for one and taking up all the breathing room while I sit in toilet water soup with my arms crossed to block his view of my beaver and my shorts hanging around my ankles.
“I love them both, and I can’t stand them together,” he mutters.
“Get out,” I hiss.
“Are you okay?”
Happy Henri who’s had a solid week of good writing days, lots of sleep, and a chance to binge watch the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer recently would smile brightly and assure him I’m fine and that I meant to do this in the name of research so he’d leave.
I am not Happy Henri this morning, nor have I had enough sleep, enough writing time, or enough Buffy time. But I fake it anyway, because that’s what I do. “Yes! I’m great! Fully awake now and ready to start the day! So refreshed! Especially on my bottom!”
His lips twitch.
His lips twitch.
The nerve.
“Who starts their day at this hour?” his mother calls.
I glare at him, since his mother can’t see that.
He swipes a hand over his mouth. “Two seconds. I’ll get you clean clothes.”
Oh, he thinks it’s going to be that easy, does he? “Pick out an outfit for Dogzilla while you’re at it. She and I are going to a cat-fé so I can get some work done.”
If he doesn’t know what a cat-fé is—you know, a café where cats are welcome—he doesn’t show it.
He merely turns and leaves the bathroom so I can hustle my flat butt out of the toilet water, shake my shorts off, and dive over my cat to hide in the tub before he returns.
I pull my shirt off and toss it over the boring blue shower curtain—which goes remarkably well with all the seventies-yellow tile in here—and crank the water, then scream again as the ice-cold flow surges out the showerhead in needlepoint spikes instead of the bathtub faucet.
Dogzilla hops her lazy butt up onto the tub shelf and peers at me. She loves showers, but she, too, has her limits.
And yes, my cat loves showers.
And I love her for loving showers, because it makes her unique.
The door opens. “You being attacked by the shower demons?” Luca asks.
“You may leave your sacrifice on the sink and see yourself out.”
“But, honey, I need to shower too.”
I freeze.
He did not.
He. Did. Not.
I peek out the back of the shower curtain, exposing nothing more than my eyeballs and nose.
Luca’s peeling his shorts off.
“What are you doing?” I whisper.
“Selling it,” he whispers back.
“You can just—just—” Oh, god, his butt.
No, that’s not a butt.
That’s an ass.
Muscle. And curves. And dimples. And muscle. And the backs of his thighs. And—
I wrench my gaze to the window above the toilet. “You can stand there and make noises like you’re in here.”
“But then I won’t come out wet.”
And now I’m wet, and not because of the shower. Thanks, Luca. “It’s six million degrees in here. We’re all already wet.”
“I can’t still smell like sweat and dead leaves and ant guts when I leave this bathroom, Henri.”
“Then we’ll both take fast showers and fake that we’re in here together.”
“You told me yesterday that you’ve seen naked men before and that we had to do this.”
“Yes, but you’ve never seen me naked before, and I’m having a very bad day, and maybe I don’t want to do this right now.”
“Do you have four belly buttons and an eyeball in the middle of your breast?”
“What? No. Of course not.”
“Seen one, you’ve seen them all. And I’ve seen more than one, so trust me, it’s just a body.”
I glare at him, which is a mistake, because glaring at him means looking at him, and he’s standing there stark naked.
With everything hanging out.
Hoo boy.
Naked Luca.
He’s right, of course. He’s not the first naked man I’ve seen.
But he is the first naked man I’ve seen with muscles like that, and a scruffy jawline like that, and eyes like that, and basically, it’s like being in a room with one of the heroes from my books come to life and sculpted before me, and right now, I like my heroes way more than I like any man I’ve ever been naked with, which is confusing all the neurons firing in my brain and overwhelming my hormonal systems.