Both small and large.
Like the choice to uncap a bottle.
“This was nice, tonight. Thank you,” Iris said, gazing toward the ocean from her own chair while Morgan and Angel lay sleeping at their feet.As they’d been doing much of the evening.
“Itwasnice,” he agreed. Ready to build, choice by choice, the friendship that they both wanted. Seeing a way for it to happen.
“I’m seriously thanking you,” she said then, her tone serious, somewhat pensive. But still not at all a woman-to-man thing.
And so he said, “I’m not sure why you feel you need to.” Yeah, she’d brought out her tablet—that had been new—but he’d perused her photo shoots more times than he could count.
Most times while sitting on Sage’s porch, with his sister and Iris and a baby monitor, while Leigh slept inside.
He heard her sigh. Tensed. Waiting. “When I first started taking an interest in photography, I…knew someone…who saw what you saw tonight. Not on the same scale, maybe. I was a total amateur with a second-rate camera, but she saw what I saw behind the lens. You’ve always seen more than most say they do when you look at my work. I just figured it was because photography is the creative medium that speaks to you, but tonight…”
His gut warmed, spreading upward to his chest, not downward.
“You don’t need to thank me for that,” he told her softly. She’d said “she” when referring to the person in her past. Since he knew she identified as heterosexual, he figured she was referring to a friend. A platonic one. “It’s what friends do, right? They see the person in what they do?”
She was silent, and he tensed again.
Too much? He took it too far?
She sipped. He did. Morgan snored. The waves flowed in the distance, gracing them with white noise.
“I quit work early today.” Iris’s words fell into the peace that was trying to encapsulate them.
Grateful that whatever had stopped her from replying to his friend question seemed to have passed, he asked the obvious, “Why?”
She’d brought up the situation for a reason.
“Because I was worried that if I didn’t show up on the beach, you’d think it was because of last night and I didn’t want things to get all weird again.”
Last night.
Two words.
That catapulted him down to the ground, in his sister’s living room, his wallet condom stretched to the limit…
All day. He’d made it through the entire day without letting himself go there.
And with two words…
“That alone kind of makes it weird, doesn’t it?” he asked when he could do so without choking. He didn’t look at her. Stared at waves. Sipped beer.
“Yeah.”
She sure didn’t sugarcoat.
He watched her beer bottle rise, looked away before the two mouths made contact—one glass, one warm, soft flesh that he’d tasted. Devoured.
“That’s why I brought it up,” she said. Then she continued, “I just want it clear that I don’t intend to do so again, so if I’m not out tomorrow, or the next day, or any other day before Sage gets back, it doesn’t mean anything more than it meant before she left.” Her tone easy. Through the whole thing.
Which almost convinced him that she was as calm as she sounded.Unless she was a very good actress, he was the only one getting hot and bothered.
Not altogether a bad thing.
Himself he could handle.
