Page 61 of Him Lessons

Andy sucked in a breath. Then snorted it out on a laugh. God, she was being silly.

Carefully rehanging the discarded suits, Andy slipped back out to the sales floor. A few feet from the rack, she sensed a guest approaching behind her. She turned and flashed her best customer service grin. “Can I help y—”

“Andy!?”

Her smile fell. “Aldon.”

Her former coworker — clad in palm-tree patterned Bermudas, a matching polo, and Ray-bans — gave an astonished chuckle as his gaze swept down her fitted jacket to linger on her bare thighs. “Wow, you look different.”

She glanced away, uncomfortable at his perusal.

“So, is this the new job you were mentioning?”

“It is,” she said stiffly.

Aldon pulled off his glasses and tucked them in his shirt. “Well, I gotta say the dress code over here is an improvement.”

Andy scraped the suits loudly over the bar to make room for her rejects. “What do you want, Aldon?”

He held up a hand. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to offend. Believe me, that’s the last thing I wanna do. I’m sure whatever you heard said in Dave’s office was bad enough.”

“It was.”

“I really wish you hadn’t overheard us talking like that.”

Flushing with anger and embarrassment, she hit him with a stabby glare. “What? You mean about me rambling about my bird all the time or that part about mynice tits?”

Aldon winced at the latter. “Sorry. That was some bullshit locker-room talk. I was just trying to sound cool in front of Dave. I didn’t mean any of it. I would never say anything like that to your face.” Hanging his head, he swore softly. “Damn, I should never have said anything like that — period. I want you to know I truly am sorry for it.”

Andy stopped shifting the clothes around to side-eye him. Aldon sounded genuine in his remorse. But then again, this was the guy who could “sell a pool table to a blind man,” so she was taking the apologies with a grain of salt.

“I also want you to know,” he continued soberly, “that I appreciate you keeping that conversation on the down low. Dave does too. We both really needed these promotions.”

At this, lines appeared over Aldon’s brows, his eyes darkening with a glint of something Andy couldn’t interpret before his features quickly smoothed out. “Well, it looks like things worked out for everyone in the end,” he said brightly, hand coming down on the shoulder of her jacket. “I can tell this job agrees with you. You look happy here, Andy.”

She was.

Surprisingly, of all the things that were currently causing her anxiety, the job wasn’t one of them. And that was significant. Because while a new job could be stressful for anyone, for someone on the spectrum, it could be even more so. Yet, here she was, two weeks in and doing fine.

For the most part.

At the moment, she’d really like it if Aldon would remove his rubby fingers from her shoulder. They were annoying.

How could she ask him in a nice way?

Shouldshe ask him in a nice way? What he’d said in Dave’s office hadn’t been particularly nice, and she still wasn’t entirely certain she bought this little mea culpa moment of his.

The trouble with Aldon was that he was the type of guy who sounded just as convincing apologizing for talking shit about you as he did talking shit about you in the first place. It was disconcerting, to say the least.

As were the fingers, cool and clammy-feeling, that rose over the collar of her jacket to glance across the nape of her neck.

Okay, screw this. Andy cleared her throat. “Take your—”

“Hands off!” a hard-edged voice finished for her.

Chapter thirteen

Finishinguptheartworkfor a custom longboard, Luke grinned as he capped a paint pen. Usually, this was the part where he shot his partner a fist bump, but since Dylan had taken off earlier to deliver an order to a VIP, Luke had to make do with patting his own back. “You are one sexy beast,” he drawled as he studied his latest creation.

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