Page 60 of An Engagement for Erica

Her brown hair was down like normal, her makeup minimal but still expertly applied. It felt like a business Friday casual day to him rather than a Saturday at the hospital meeting his grandfather.

He grabbed the beer and looked around at everything else.

It was organized well and nice and clean inside the fridge.

There was a lot of healthy food, but he hadn’t expected any differently.

He shut the fridge and looked around and noticed the house was clean but not immaculate. It made her seem somewhat human to him.

When she walked out in a pair of black cotton shorts with an elastic waist, the hem stopping above mid thigh and a fitted T-shirt tucked in, he might have had to roll his tongue back into his mouth.

There wasn’t one thing sexy about the outfit.

It wasn’t anything more than anyone would wear running to the store.

But for someone who was always prim and proper, he liked she was showing him another side of her.

“Do you work out?” he asked.

“I do,” she said. “But there isn’t that much muscle on me.” She looked down. “At least not like you. I do like to do yoga. It relaxes me. I think it’s good for me to have that downtime. Harmony and I do it together.”

“Do you do yoga outside?” he asked. “You know, can I sneak down and get a peek?”

She laughed. “We do it outside at times. Normally later at night or early in the morning.”

“Bummer,” he said. “I don’t need to have someone calling the cops on me.”

“I’d smooth it over,” she said. “Do you want to walk down and show me your place? Not that we can get in or anything.”

“Nope. The closing is set for Thursday afternoon. They are keeping some of the furnishings and an exercise room there for me. It’s got a finished basement so that will be the only place that is set up.”

“I noticed you didn’t have a lot of furniture in your apartment,” she said.

“And that is all I’ve got,” he said. They left out the garage door again and she punched codes in the security panel to have it close and they started to walk. “The only thing more I’ve got other than what you saw is my bedroom furniture. I knew I’d buy a house so I figured I’d hold off until I did.”

“I’ve got my furniture in storage from our apartment. It was nice quality but not needed at my father’s place. I’m not sure how long we will stay here. I think it would have been better to stay where we were for our businesses.”

“But you needed a change of pace.”

“So did Harmony,” she said. “This is working for us. My father is in no hurry to kick us out.”

“The one thing I liked about this street is the distance between the houses,” he said.

“It is nice. We’ve got neighbors and you can hear them if they are talking loudly, but you can’t really see them. In the winter without the leaves on the trees you can see more.”

“I can’t wait to get here. For the past almost two decades I’ve lived in buildings with shared walls.”

Since he went away to college and then got his own place. He was lucky to never need roommates after college, unlike a lot of his friends.

Maybe some family money supplemented his living expenses, but he never took advantage of anything.

“The same with me. We’d come here to visit and there were times I’d struggle to leave. It’s not like me when I always had work to do. When everything happened months ago and my father suggested I come here to live, I didn’t have a lot of fight left in me.”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” he said, his hand reaching down and threading their fingers together.

“Didn’t what? Have much fight left in me?”

“Not that,” he said. “Or maybe, if it’s what made you come here. I like to think it was a bit of fate bringing us both here when we met somewhere else. Think about it. The size of New York City and we meet and then came back here.”

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