Clara’s shy smile made him want to grab the straps of those ridiculous overalls, yank her mouth to his, and finally taste those strawberry lips he’d been dreaming about since she first walked into his life.
“We should probably head back.” He needed doors between them, ones he could lock.
“Oh. Sure.” Clara brushed off her butt and Josh tried not to notice the way her hands glided down the generous swell.
Fuck. If he wasn’t careful, he was going to end up with a crush on his roommate.
chapter thirteen
TWO WEEKS INTO his self-imposed underemployment, Josh had grown dangerously bored. It was disastrous, having so much free time in the vicinity of Clara Wheaton.
He first noticed the symptoms when he found himself timing his showers to follow hers. Something inside him perked up when he walked in and their tiny bathroom still held the scent of her soap. It was like stepping into a meadow. And if that meadow also made him think about Clara, naked, wet, and covered in bubbles? Well, he shot those daydreams on sight.
It was easy to blame this new, strange behavior on his first physical dry spell in recent memory. Even though his romantic relationship with Naomi had fizzled more than a few months back, up until last Thursday, work had kept his libido in check. His right hand hadn’t seen this much action since he’d hit puberty.
Josh displayed mental symptoms of decline as well as physical. He had grown so desperate for conversation he resorted to waking up early to catch Clara before she went to work.
Unlike Josh, she loved mornings. As soon as he stumbled into the kitchen, she put on cheesy pop music to accompany her as she made coffee and packed her lunch.
He’d never seen so much Tupperware in his life. She even had little containers for the dressing, so small he could fit three of them in his palm. They were almost cute. Baby Tupperware.
Everything seemed to deflate when she left promptly at seven thirty. He felt so useless sitting around that by day three he offered to drive Clara out to her office in Malibu. Josh had nothing better to do. In the evenings, he picked her up and let her drive home for practice. It was pathetic that basically acting as his roommate’s chauffeur gave him a small, twisted sense of purpose, but these days he had to take the wins wherever he could find them.
He still spent most of the day alone with nothing but the possessions Clara left like footprints across the house. Each afternoon a new box of tchotchkes got delivered to their door. While her changes were subtle, they touched every single room. He’d open a drawer to find coasters or oven mitts. Hand towels appeared in the bathroom, along with some kind of basket of dried flowers and twigs.
She might have a doctorate, but where he came from, that shit would not pass as art.
Clara even bought curtains for his bedroom. He opened the door one day to find them hanging jauntily above his window, both charming and useful. Somehow, while working, she still found time to turn Everett’s man cave into something resembling a home. As if he needed further evidence of her competence to press on the bruise of his stalled career.
He’d started running in the afternoons to have something to do. Trying to burn off the itch he felt in his limbs. On those long jogs to the ocean, he tried to think about his future. Tried to brainstorm production partners, and people within the industry who owed him a favor, but even if he could find someone to let him produce, Josh didn’t have a clue what he’d make.
When he returned home from his latest jog he knew, even before he bumped into Clara’s five separate hampers, that she must have run out of clean underwear. The whole house had filled with sweet-smelling humidity radiating from the small laundry room next to the porch.
He balled his hands into fists and immediately moved to open a window.
Tonight, like every night this week, Clara had deposited herself on the couch surrounded by piles of documents. He didn’t know what kind of workload she’d agreed to when she took that job, but it seemed to involve a lot of take-home reading.
Josh rearranged her laundry baskets so he wasn’t barricaded out of his own kitchen.
“You don’t need to separate your clothes into that many separate cycles,” he told her as he deposited one of the full hampers at her feet.
“I know you probably don’t care since you seem to live in jeans and T-shirts,” she said prissily, “but different types of clothes require different water temperatures and speeds.”
“Yeah, that’s the wrong way to think about it.”
“Excuse me?” Clara lowered the document in her hand.
Bending to examine her system of organization, Josh began to sort through her clothes, rearranging items into new piles on the carpet. “Fabric content determines ideal washing conditions, not color. For example”—he held up a soft T-shirt—“cotton is prone to shrinking. You should only use cold water and air-dry cotton of any color.” He tossed a set of shorts over his shoulder. “Linen wrinkles like a bitch, so you should be pressing those shorts immediately after they come out of that washer.” Two pairs of pantyhose tangled together around his wrist. Josh separated them and placed them over the arm of the couch. “Hanging nylon will avoid that aggressive static situation you’ve got going on.”
Lesson over, Josh followed his nose into the kitchen. He opened the oven to investigate the source of a pleasant peppery smell. “Oh, you can do whatever you want with polyester,” he yelled so she could hear him through the doorway. “It’s hard to mess up polyester.” Josh eyed a lasagna bubbling under the broiler. “Can I have some of your pasta?”
“Of—of course. It’s vegetarian . . . and I made the sauce from scratch.”
Josh’s stomach growled. Another symptom. In such a short time, Clara had already gotten him addicted to vegetables. Probably tricked him into some kind of iron dependency with her magical menu that disguised an ungodly amount of leafy greens. Sometimes he woke up in the middle of the night craving spinach.
Clara shook her head slowly as Josh joined her on the couch with a steaming plate. “How do you . . . how do you know so much about laundry?”
“I’ve got more than your average experience. My mom works for a dry cleaner. Has ever since I was little. She browbeat that stuff into me as a kid. Last I heard she’s still there. At this rate, her hands will never stop smelling like bleach.”
“Last you heard?”
“I haven’t seen anyone in my family in a few years. Not since I told them about my job.” Josh blew on his loaded fork. “They didn’t get it.”
The guilt from that moment had eaten at him until he’d stopped returning their calls. He’d even gone so far as to change his number and his email address. He didn’t need lectures or quiet concern.