I groaned, reaching up to run my hand over my short, cropped hair. “Why do you have to remind me?”
“Why are you being such a baby about it?”
I shook my head. It wasn’t worth wasting my breath on. Simply put, I had trusted Ricky to watch over my sisters while I was gone, but to keep his hands to himself. He had broken an unspoken oath, one I couldn’t expect either Grace or Lucy to understand.
I grunted an unintelligible sound, then said, “I’ll call you when I know how long I’ll be here.”
“Oh, okay. Change the subject.”
“Yep. Talk to you later.”
I could almost hear her eyes roll through the phone. “Uh-huh. Bye, you idiot.”
I hung up before I could throw an insult at her and dropped the phone into my lap. My thoughts had now shifted from Dumass and his widowed wife to every sickening thing my sister was doing with Ricky—probably at this very second—and I couldn’t stand it. As my hands gripped the back of my head, I squeezed my eyes shut, forcing deep breaths in through my nose, out through my mouth …
“Would you like something to drink?”
Startled, I dropped my hands to dangle between my spread knees, and I looked ahead at the soft, welcoming blue gaze that beckoned me in like the warmth of a fire on the coldest winter night. I swallowed, almost certain now that driving through that pothole was the worst possible thing that could’veeverhappened. Many years had passed since I had met Laura, and I’d never been tempted once to stray, but I was sure this woman could have me on my knees with a snap of her fingers, and I wasn’t sure what that meant for me or my feelings for the girl back home.
In my stupor, I somehow forgot what she’d asked, and embarrassed, I shook my head and chuckled despite myself. “Sorry. What did you say?”
Her returned smile was tight, and her cheeks deepened in color. “Did you, um …” She gestured toward a small table holding a coffee carafe and cups beside a water cooler. “Did you want something to drink?”
It was late afternoon. The likelihood of that coffee still being warm, let alone hot, was slim, and from the smell of it, it was highly unlikely to be good. I’d ratherdrink the instant shit the Army provided in the MREs—and I rarely, if ever, drank that.
“Oh, sure,” I said, pushing a smile and getting to my feet. “Thanks.”
“There might be some doughnuts left in that box there too,” she said as I grabbed a paper cup not much bigger than a thimble and held it beneath the tap of the carafe. “If you’re hungry.”
Now, while that coffee was far from appetizing, a stale doughnut was better than no doughnut at all, so as the coffee trickled out at a snail’s pace, I flipped the box’s lid and was happy to find two jelly doughnuts left in the box from Dunkin’ Donuts. I grabbed one, grateful that it hadn’t yet staled to the consistency of concrete and took a bite.
“Wait, was that the last jelly?”
I turned to her, mid-chew. “There’s one more,” I answered as crumbs proceeded to spray from my mouth to the floor.
I growled at my inconsideration, holding a hand over my mouth through my humiliation.
Somehow, in the moment, I forgot the coffee, still dispensing into my toddler-sized cup, and it began to overflow, trickling onto the weathered tiled floor.
“Oh my God,” I uttered after a hasty swallow, dropping the doughnut onto the table and hurrying to turn off the tap while grabbing some tissue-thin napkins from beside the stack of tiny cups.
“Oh! That’s okay. I’ll get it.”
As I knelt to the floor, she hurried from behind her desk and dropped beside me, and in perfect synchrony, ourheads bumped in our coupled rush to clean up what turned out to be a very little mess.
She laughed, flustered, and I laughed with her, our eyes meeting and holding long enough for my heart to skip a beat or two. God, what the hell was wrong with me?
“Sorry,” she said, her cheeks now a strawberry red to match her hair.
This close, I could count the freckles smattered across her nose. A little closer, and I could kiss her, find out if those lips were as soft as they looked …
Get a grip, Tailor.
I looked down at the small puddle of coffee on the floor and shook my head. “Nothing to be sorry about,” I said, mopping the mess up with the napkins.
She was quiet, but she remained next to me, and when I finished wiping the floor, I turned back to her to find her eyes on my shoulder.
“My dad is a Vietnam veteran,” she offered. “He was also a sergeant.”
