by Louise Bay
He glanced up and right at me, as if he could hear me thinking. I felt his wonky smile between my legs.
Vagina, you’re a traitor.
I grinned and started toward him as if I’d just been searching him out in the crowd.
“Hey.” I tipped my head back to meet his gaze.
He took his time and made a slow, unapologetic sweep of my body from head to toe and back again, lingering on my lips and my cheeks on the way back. “Hartford?”
Should we kiss? One cheek or two? Hug? Why did I feel so awkward?
Twenty-nine, I reminded myself.
A doctor.
A crush on Joshua Luca leads to nothing but trouble.
I pulled him into a one-handed hug, pushing myself up awkwardly onto a one-legged tiptoe so I could reach around his neck. He stiffened almost unnoticeably before hugging me back.
“Good to see you,” I said into his hairline.
I could feel his large hand through my jacket span almost the entire width of my back. And that smell? I’d forgotten that. What was it, and how had it not changed in fifteen years?
Without asking, he pulled my backpack from me like it weighed nothing and slung it over his shoulder. “That’s it? No more luggage?”
I shrugged. “Nope. Just me.”
He nodded toward the exit and I followed him. “What happened to your leg?”
I glanced down at my cast as if I needed to clarify which leg he was talking about. “Oh nothing. Just an accident.” I didn’t want to get into it. I just wanted it to heal. Quickly. So I could get back to work.
“Tell me about you, Joshua Luca. What have you been doing since I last saw you?”
He shot me another trademark smile. “When was the last time I saw you?”
“I can’t remember . . . ” I knew exactly. It had been the night of the accident. Joshua had come to collect my brother before heading out to celebrate the New Year. He was in his second year at university and had just turned twenty. As I’d watched him from the top of the stairs, I’d never been so aware of our age difference. From the new stubble on his jaw to the flat, toned stomach that he unintentional revealed when he’d reached for my brother’s jacket. He’d turned into a man and I still felt like a child. My glimpse of him had lasted thirty seconds max, but it was etched in my memory like a tattoo. I’d avoided him ever since.
“You lost your braces.”
Of course he would remember those.
“Shocking isn’t it? I thought I was going to have to wear them forever. I also tweezed my monobrow. And I got a couple of degrees along the way.” People could change. I wasn’t who I’d been back then. “It’s been a while.”
“Right.” He glanced over at me and furrowed his brow before looking away. “This is us.”
He pressed a button on his key fob and the boot opened on an expensive-looking car. He slung my backpack in before heading the wrong direction to the passenger seat.
And then he opened the door. The passenger door. For me.
I shook my head. Had he grown up in the fifties? It was all part and parcel of that Joshua Luca charm that he’d had since he came out of the womb. Charm that I wanted nothing to do with.
“What?” He looked genuinely confused.
“I can open my own door,” I said as I hobbled into the vehicle, pulled my crutches with me and settled into a buttery leather seat. I wasn’t going to be reduced to a melting mess by a small act of chivalry. Not that he was trying to make me melt. He didn’t see me like that. Joshua didn’t have to try to make women melt.
Joshua shrugged and shut the door before moving around to the driver’s side.
“Sorry if I smell like Yemen. You might need an air freshener in here after our journey.”
He pulled out of the parking space and we started twirling through the narrow passages of the multi-story car park. “Yemen? I thought you flew in from Saudi Arabia.”
“No direct flights from Yemen.”
“Should you be going to places that don’t have direct flights?”
I laughed. “You sound like Patrick. I was working with Medicines Sans Frontiers. I wasn’t on holiday. But I appreciate the big-brother vibe.”
“Right,” he said, that frown appearing again. “You want a water?” He pulled open the lid to what looked like a built-in cool box under the arm rest between us and took out a bottle.
“Thanks. You got any cake in there?”
“This isn’t Tesco, but you might find an apple.”
“I haven’t had an apple for thirteen months.” I scrambled about and found an apple as green as I’d ever seen. “You want a bite?” I held up the fruit and then pulled it away as I imagined him sinking his teething into . . . me.
Was he a biter? For a split second, filthy images reeled through my brain: Joshua in bed. Naked. Joshua over me, his arms flexed as he looked down on me. His hips pushing—
Stop.
I needed to get a grip, buy some brain bleach and dose the butterflies in my stomach with propofol. I was going to be living with this guy for a couple of months. And I couldn’t be following him around, drooling like some teenager with a crush. Besides, I knew that an obsession over Joshua was dangerous. Literally. I needed to construct an impenetrable Joshua Luca forcefield around myself.
This was strictly a friend zone.
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