Page 45 of Truly, Madly, Deeply

She did say so. She said so emphatically, in fact. With her whole chest, metaphorically speaking.

She typed that out, felt weirdly doth protest too much about it, and deleted the whole thing, letting her silence speak.

She thought he was gorgeous, and he knew it, and that was all there was to it.

It didn’t have to mean more than that. She didn’t know if she wanted it to mean more than that. But she had a feeling she was going to need to figure it out.

Soon.

***

Saturday morning passed without a text from Colin.

Which was perfectly fine. For the best, even. He was a distraction she didn’t need, definitely not when she had four pesky chapters left to write, a list of admin tasks the length of her forearm to knock out, and some planning to do if this trip to Chelan was going to go off without a hitch.

Not that she was going to get any of it done if she kept glancing at her phone every five minutes waiting for a text that might never come because damn it, Colin was a distraction whether he was texting her or not.

Truly pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead, checking for a fever, something, anything that would explain away this preoccupation, the persistent fluttering in her gut. Occam’s razor stated that the simplest explanation, the one that made the fewest assumptions, was preferable to those that were more complex, but there was nothing preferable about having a dumb crush.

And God, was it dumb.

So what if she liked Colin’s stupidly gorgeous face and wanted to run her fingers through his Pantene-commercial hair and trace a new constellation out of his beauty marks using her tongue and sink her teeth into his big, dumb biceps that no goddamn lawyer had any right to have? So what if he made her laugh and wasn’t too proud to say sorry? He was also argumentative and annoying and got a sick thrill from pushing her buttons and he made it hard for her to focus. And that? That was something she could not abide.

Not now, with Mom and Dad’s marriage on the brink of collapse and Truly the only person who gave enough of a damn to fix what was wrong.

A shadow fell across her table and her gaze left her screen, flickering to the half inch of watery coffee and melting ice left in her cup, her hand covering the plastic lid protectively, not ready for a bored barista to clear the table and boot her out when she’d accomplished squat despite the change of scenery.

“So this is where the magic happens.”

Her head snapped up.

Colin stood beside the table, coffee in his hand. His dark hair was damp from the rain, curling in front of his ears, his thin white tank cut under the arms to nearly his waist, so damp it was practically see-through. All she could think about was that stupid picture she’d screenshotted on his IG. The one of him wearing those obscene swim trunks, rivulets of lake water clinging to his chest.

Her breath caught, voice clogging in her throat.

Inexplicably, Colin’s face fell. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to bother you, I just wanted to say—”

“No!” She gestured to the chair across from her. “Hi. Sorry, I’m a space cadet. Did you, um—” It would be weird to ask him if he wanted to sit, right? Wait. “Hold on. You live across town. What are you doing here?”

In her coffee shop. The one just two blocks from her apartment.

“Before you ask—because I know you’re going to—no, I’m not stalking you.” Until now, she didn’t know it was possible for an eye roll to look fond. “I was in the area.”

Truly leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. Did she honestly believe he was stalking her? No. Could she help but give him a little grief? Also no. “In the area, hm? You don’t say.”

Colin tipped his head back, mouthing a silent prayer up at the ceiling. For patience, probably. If she happened to get a thrill at the way the move bared his throat, putting his Adam’s apple and his moles on display? That was between her and God. “I coach Little League, okay? We’ve been dealing with some scheduling issues at our usual park, and uh, Kinnear doesn’t have a diamond but it’s big enough so...” Rambling had never been so infuriatingly adorable. “Anyway, I was in the neighborhood.”

“Because you coach Little League.” Jesus. “Do you rescue kittens from trees in your downtime, too?”

A smile ghosted across his face, the corners of his eyes crinkling and his lips twitching. “Your ability to make any compliment sound like an insult is truly a gift, you know that?”

Ha freaking ha. “Maybe I’m just waiting for the skeletons to come tumbling out of your closet. I mean, you take on adoption cases pro bono, you’re Mr. Emerald City Family Defense Fund Volunteer of the Year, and now you coach Little League? There’s got to be something to balance it all out. Road rage or maybe you’ve got a secret porn addiction or—”

Colin choked. “A porn addiction? Yeah, no.”

She clicked her tongue against the back of her teeth and tried not to smile. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, McCrory. We all have our weaknesses.”

A sly smile graced his face. “Someone sounds awfully curious about my masturbatory habits.”

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