Page 19 of The Forever Formula
I pulled out my phone and opened a contact I hadn’t used in nine years. I pressed the call button and held it up to her.
“There. I called,” I said with a grin.
“Good enough for me. I was just messing with you, anyway. Come by anytime.” She laughed and turned for me to follow.
I made sure to keep my gaze off her ass—as challenging as it was.
“Oh, you have company,” I said, noticing the girl eating at the counter.
“This is my friend, Megan. Megan, this is Noah.”
I nodded to the woman who was perched at the counter with toast and coffee. “Nice to meet you.”
“You too,” she said in a tone that I was sure was flirting.
“I won’t crash your party. I just wanted to see if you were up for coming to First Friday.”
Rachel turned to her friend. “I was going to tell you, we should go tonight. It’s a little festival where they shut down Main Street and have vendors and music. It’s fun.”
“Sounds great.” Megan smiled at me.
Admittedly, in the back of my mind, a little part of me was hoping Rachel would be riding down with me. I knew I wasn’t supposed to start anything with her, but the thought of being alone with her was all I could focus on lately.
Then again, if we spent time together, maybe I’d realize a lot had changed and we no longer fit together. At least, that’s what I told myself. And if that were the case ... it would probably be for the best.
“Okay, well, I’ll see you there, I guess.”
As I turned to leave, Rachel stopped me by placing her hand on my bicep. A zing of electricity warmed me.Interesting.
“Wait, can you help me with something really quick?”
I looked around as if there might be evidence of an unpleasant task awaiting me. Probably a leftover habit of living with my mother all those years.
Rachel turned and headed to the porch.
“It’s the damn sander. I can’t get it to turn on.” She grabbed the tool and flipped the switch back and forth to show me. “The porch is a mess and I want to re-stain it, but this wood looks like crap. It needs to be sanded first, obviously.”
I didn’t mean to find it funny, but the exasperation in her voice was oddly cute.
“Well, you need to hold down that button to make it go. It’s a safety thing,” I said as I showed her the button.
She depressed it again, and when the sander whirred to life, she slapped her free hand against her forehead. “I’m such an idiot.”
“You didn’t know. But, um, Rach ...”I paused.
“Yeah?”
“You don’t need to bother sanding this whole porch. That’d cost you a ton in sandpaper, not to mention it would take forever.”
She frowned at me, so I continued.
“You’d want to use a power washer, is all. That will have the wood looking good again and would get that layer of peeling stain off.”
Rachel closed her eyes a beat, as if frustrated. It took everything in me not to offer to do the job for her, but I sensed she wanted to do this herself.
“If Paul didn’t have a power washer,” I said, “feel free to drop by tomorrow and grab ours.”
“Thanks, Noah.” She sighed and followed me down the front steps toward my truck.
