The corner of his mouth curved, and then he pulled open the door and was gone.
Alone, she spun around and faced her empty apartment, feeling bereft and lonely and then annoyed because it was way too soon for those kinds of feelings. Foranykinds of feelings, for that matter.
The apartment seemed too quiet, though, and she suddenly realized she hadn’t seen Thelonious once all day. He was probably hiding under her bed, which was odd because normally he liked new people. She was convinced he showered them with affection in an attempt to make her jealous.
Her phone rang—dun dun dundunnn—and she ran to grab it off the kitchen counter, glad for the distraction. She grinned when she saw Skye’s name.
“What is this I hear about you leaving Bootleg with a hot guy last night?” her friend shouted before Eva could get a word out.
She thought of her advice to Skye—If you want him to stick around, you’ve got to make him work for it—and burst out laughing.
Talk about hypocritical. She hadn’t come close to following her own lofty advice. And now here she was in her best friend’s shoes, wondering if the guy was ever going to call her again.
Karma was a bitch.
9
Walking onEggshells
Roughly five thousand kilometers away, in a beautiful oceanfront house nestled between old-growth cedars, Jacqueline Gregory stretched her feet out on the sofa and watched her shirtless husband trudge past her to the kitchen, rubbing sleep from his eyes.
She smiled to herself. She was a lucky woman. Twenty-seven years of marriage and she still found her partner sexy. And how could she not? Dan was a handsome man who kept himself in peak physical condition. And besides his sweet tooth, he’d always been a health nut, which meant he’d aged remarkably well. So well, in fact, that she sometimes wondered if he’d aged at all.
“What did Eva want?” he asked, pouring coffee into a mug.
Jacqui took a sip of her own coffee and looked out the tall A-frame window. She never got tired of the view. The cedar branches and fern leaves textured the foreground while the gray ocean tossed in the distance. Mossy rocks covered the beachfront. It was raining today, but then, this was the West Coast. It was always raining.
“She met a guy,” Jacqui said.
Dan peeked around the corner of the pantry. “She what?”
She chuckled. This was why Eva had called her mom for advice, not her dad. “She needed some womanly advice.”
“I hope you told her to send him packing.”
“I didn’t! I told her to be strong, set healthy boundaries, and drill him with questions about his past.”
Dan ducked back around the pantry, and she heard the sound of him scooping copious amounts of sugar into his coffee. She made a face. How he could stomach that waste-of-perfectly-good-coffee swill would forever be a mystery to her. She liked hers black and strong.
“Who is this guy?” Dan grumbled, diligently stirring, the spoon clinking against the mug. “What’s his number? I’ll give him a call and drill him with questions myself.”
“That’s not happening. Eva is a grown woman.” Twenty-seven years old she was now, but of course, Dan would see her as his baby forever.
Jacqui had only been twenty when she’d given birth to Eva, and though it had been one of the most stressful periods of her life, she gave thanks every day for her family and was grateful things had turned out the way they had. She’d gotten a loving husband and an amazing daughter out of it, and she’d somehow still managed to make it as an artist.
“I trust her judgment and know she can make good decisions about who she spends time with. She seems really into this guy, and she’s smart enough to decide for herself if he’s good for her.”
Dan sighed, coming around the kitchen with his mug of swill in hand. “I just worry about her and how far away she is. I miss her.”
“I know, hon. I miss her too.”
He smiled as he sank onto the sofa next to her. “She’s passionate, our girl. She had to go off and chase her dreams.”
Leaning against the arm of the sofa, Jacqui lifted her legs and put her feet in her husband’s lap. He curled his free hand around her ankle, and they sat with the ease of a couple who’d been together for years.
“He’s a musician,” she told her husband, smiling.
Dan grunted, unimpressed.
