Center of Gravity

by Neve Wilder

  “My mom wants me to invite you to dinner.” He angled in my direction, taming his hair with a sweep of his palm across the top of his head.

  “Why?”

  “I think she feels sorry for you.”

  I chuckled at his honesty. “Tell her I’ll be fine.”

  “You should come. Free meal and she’s a pretty good cook. Maybe I’d even show you some of my work that’s not just paint on drywall.”

  “Sounds like charity to me, and if you can’t accept it, neither can I.” I smirked at him.

  “So you’re admitting it was charity.” His eyes narrowed shrewdly. Damn.

  “That was your perception, not the reality.”

  “Nice try.” He rolled his eyes and I could almost see the boy he’d been at sixteen. “Come to dinner, eat food, and leave. It’ll make her happy. Or don’t.” He shrugged and ducked his shoulders under the water.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  We swam out to the sandbar fifty feet off the shoreline and floated in silence. Alex’s fingers feathered and rippled through the water beside me.

  At some point, I realized he was standing up and speaking to me. My feet sank into the sand as I righted myself.

  “Did you ever do them? Breath-holding contests?”

  I shook the water from my ears. “With my sister when we were little. In pools, mostly.” The feeling came back to me immediately. The water sealing around my body, invading my ears with cool silence, the increasing pressure in my chest until my lungs felt as if they were collapsing, then the exhilaration of surfacing and gasping for air, gulping it in heaving, ecstatic mouthfuls.

  “What’s your sister like?”

  God, how to describe Summer. “She’s a writer. Freelance.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “California.”

  He tipped his head to one side, studying me through narrow eyes. “Are you alike?”

  I laughed. “Not at all. She’s very…impulsive. Free-spirited. Believes in auras and universal powers and Fate and a bunch of other shit.”

  He cracked a smile. “Is she older?”

  “Younger.”

  “That explains it.”

  “What does that explain?”

  “You. She’s the yin and you’re the yang. The rebel with a cause to her rebel without a cause.” I hardly had time to begin dissecting that when he said, “On the count of three, okay? Whoever surfaces or cracks up first loses.”

  He submerged before I’d caught on to what was happening. I reacted by instinct, inhaling a deep breath and plunging beneath the surface. It was stupid and ridiculous and nostalgic all at once.

  Under the water, I blinked my eyes open, watching the golden crown of Alex’s head as we both sunk to kneel in the sand, our cheeks bulging like pufferfish. Everything was as quiet and cool as I remembered, with the occasional water-muted trill of our arms moving. It reminded me of the sensory deprivation tanks Summer used to rave to me about, the absolute Zen she said she achieved floating in them. I hadn’t bought it at the time, but now I thought maybe I could understand it. This was a lesser scale and imperfect, but for a solid five seconds where I floated motionless, only dimly aware that my eyes were locked with Alex’s, I felt a twinge of bliss as I counted in my head the way I used to with Summer. One Mississippi, two. Summer always flailed too much and wasted energy. I kept perfectly still. I’d gone a whole minute once. Three Mississippi, four. Ten, fifteen.

  Then the heaviness in my chest settled in, like my lungs were being wrung out. By the time I reached thirty, Alex was struggling, starting to move around to distract himself. He arched one brow high, then both, changing tactics, but I didn’t crack. He twirled around, did a little jig on the sand, and when that garnered only a stiff bunching of my lips, he tugged down his shorts and kicked them off, baring his ass to me first, then twisting around and gripping his cock. I lost it in one big maelstrom of air bubbles, bolting to the surface, and gulping air in between gasps of laughter.

  “Cheater,” I accused when I could.

  He was gone with laughter. “Your face, oh fuck. I think your eyes literally bulged.”

  “Oh stop.” I flicked him with a spray of water. “Nothing I haven’t seen before.” I defended, as if I wasn’t pushing my own erection down with the heel of my hand. As if I wasn’t thinking of how he’d felt in my mouth. Or what his lips would taste like slicked with seawater.

  “Yeah? If I put my hand on you right now, what am I going to feel?”

  “Natural reaction, or possibly my fist in your face.” Only the former was true and even that was stretching it. I’d classify my reaction to Alex as anything but natural. It was almost paranormal. But it was the first time he’d teased me in a while, and I’d missed it more than I wanted to admit.

  “Uh huh.” He sounded unconvinced and turned abruptly, swimming for shore.

  We stretched our towels out on the sand, and then our bodies, a soft evening breeze lifting patches of goosebumps across my chest. I cracked a beer and handed it over to Alex, and he propped himself up on one elbow to sip from it.

  “I need to tell you something.”

  I eyed him cautiously, afraid the day was about to be ruined by a request for something I couldn’t give him.

  “If you come to dinner, that is. I feel like I should give you some warning. A trigger warning, or whatever. My dad’s pretty sick.” He inhaled and focused his attention over the water.

  I set my beer down and rolled onto my side, scrutinizing his impassive expression.

  “That’s the source of the financial squeeze.”

  He nodded once, slowly, and took another sip of his beer. “He was a mechanic for a long time at a chain, and he quit to start his own business. Took out a loan, rented a place. He was a few weeks from opening when he found out. He didn’t have health insurance, of course. It takes my mom and me to make all the bills and keep the house because she wants him to be in the… She wants him to be in the place he knows best. He says he doesn’t care, but I think he does. Meanwhile the bills for his treatments and hospital visits keep rolling in.”

  My thundering heart sank like a stone. “Oh Alex, I’m so sorry.”

  “He wants me to quit my job and go back to school, but it’s hard for me to even think about.”

  I dug my heels into the sand and squinted at the sky, then my gaze shifted back to Alex. The inward curve of his shoulders and the tension in his mouth shallowed out my breath and dug a hole in my chest. I wanted desperately to do something to help him. Wetting my lips, I said, “Would you consider letting me give you an advance or—?”

  An instantaneous fury ignited in his eyes. “Why are you so hell-bent on making me a project? That’s not why I’m telling you this.” Color hitched a ride at his jawline and crept all the way up to his temples. “I could get a loan if I wanted to, but I make more money working full-time hours and I’m helping. It’s something I can do to help. I’m not a fucking house you can fix up and sell.”

  My hands went up in an attempt to placate him. “You’re not a project.”

  “Then what am I?”

  And that was the most difficult question of all. There were too many underpinning emotions on my part to call him just my employee, but not enough to call him something else. I met in the middle. “A friend, in a way. I’m just trying to help and I don’t want you to cheat yourself.”

  He snorted. “I don’t know that you’re in any position to give help. Or advice for that matter.”

  “I’m—” I stiffened. “What do you mean?” Damn if we weren’t getting good at pulling each other’s triggers.

  “You could’ve had the house done a week ago. Instead, you spread it out. You go back to the city and come back the same night. You fool around with me, then try to take it all back the next day.” He leveled a cool look at me. “Something’s eating at you. And maybe it’s your parents and maybe it’s not, but you’re gun-shy about everything. It’s like you’re wallowing in your own mise
ry because it’s comfortable.”

  “It’s hardly comfortable, Alex,” I grated out, and I had more to say, but he wasn’t wrong, either. I sank back in the sand, closed my eyes, and focused on the breeze moving over my stomach.

  “So tell me.”

  And I did. I told him about my mom’s slow demise, my father’s, and then I told him about Sean. How he’d come into the firm a year and a half ago from another firm, hungry like me to move up the ladder. At first there was just a mutual awareness. He had pretty chocolate curls that had a habit of straying across his temples, liquid brown eyes that always seemed desperately earnest, and thick lashes. Fit as hell and he knew it, but there was a self-deprecating charm to him that softened all the swagger.

  We were polite acquaintances, exchanging typical office banter over the proverbial water cooler. Then Richard had shifted him over to my team. We’d gotten a few new clients whose accounts were a mess and had spent long nights after hours cleaning them up. We were professional, but there was a subtle undercurrent of intrigue between us. Discussion of the weather became flirting. Topics took a personal turn. I’d learned he was separated from his wife and moving toward divorce, that he’d always felt he was bi but hadn’t explored it as much as he’d have liked to—though he was adamant it wasn’t the reason he and his wife had split. She’d worked long hours too, was never around and so on. The inevitable happened and three months later we were entrenched. My mom had died, my dad wasn’t doing well. I was lonely, and so I’d jumped into it like a man on fire into a lake, unconcerned that the water might not be deep enough to keep me from breaking my neck.

  It was unfortunate timing that I’d chosen to tell Sean I loved him the same day his wife walked in. We hadn’t been in the heat of the moment, nothing like that. There was an ironic ordinariness to the way it had happened. I’d been in his kitchen cooking eggs in bacon grease the way he liked them, when a striking blonde had walked through the door that led into the kitchen from the garage. We regarded each other in silence, puzzling each other out. And then she just said, “Ahhhhh.” As if something had been confirmed.

  She’d turned and walked right back out the door she’d just come through and Sean came down into the kitchen to find me leaning against the counter, chewing on my lower lip as the eggs burned.

  He’d tried, at first, to maintain the notion that they were separated, but the way she’d walked in was too possessive. We’d spent another few weeks going back and forth, Sean telling me he had plans to leave her, but the timing was never right. I’d grown tired of being the person I’d have to be to continue in that kind of relationship. Then she’d gotten pregnant and just like that, it was all over, something that should never have begun. The problem was, I’d still fucking loved him even after that. My father had died in the middle of all the back and forth and Sean had become a dull ache in my chest, an occasional moment of lost air when I’d reached for a breath. Time moved on, but I wasn’t sure if I really had. I was a mess of conflicting griefs stuck in a vicious cycle.

  Alex listened to the saga lying on his side, picking at the tab on his beer can. When I finished, all he said was, “He sounds like a real asshole.”

  I smiled up at the dark. “He does.”

  His hand stole quiet as a whisper over my wrist. His fingers winnowed between mine, a relaxing coolness in his touch. No doubt he got me hot in other ways, but right then that clear and present innocence of contact was one of the nicest things I’d felt in months.

  14

  Alex

  I had zero reason to be nervous, but I was. I’d changed my shirt three times before settling on a cool, pale cerulean that complemented the same tones in my eyes. It wasn’t like Rob was coming to my house for a date and I was cooking for him or something. This was my parents’ house and I was the resident reject basement dweller. As if he needed another reminder of how different our respective playing fields were.

  My mom was excited though, enjoying having something else to focus on aside from bills, her job at the diner, and my dad’s medication timetable. She had other friends, but she rarely socialized anymore and hadn’t much since dad had gotten sick. He also had friends, but the visits were more sporadic these days. I think a lot of them just didn’t know what to do with someone who kept on living but wasn’t able to function day-to-day the way he’d been able to before.

  Even Dad spiffed up a little, putting on an actual button-down shirt rather than one of the three cotton pajama sets he wore that Mom had gotten him. Like the layers of dust on the windowsills and picture frames, our household had been collecting shitty news and hard times for months, and it was kind of sad that something so mundane as a guy coming over for dinner was the cause for the burst of happy chaos that swept over us.

  Mom moved through the house like a tornado of cleaning supplies, dusting and tidying, and lighting scented candles. She even had flowers in a vase on the table—shitty ones from the grocery store with a few dyed, never-found-in-nature colors, like bright blue daisies. I plucked those out when she wasn’t looking.

  I helped her with dinner, taking orders as she moved briskly around the kitchen. The menu wasn’t anything special, roast and vegetables, but she did it well and the scent was cozy and inviting.

  “Does Rob like white wine or red?”

  “I have no idea,” I offered unhelpfully. “I’ve only ever seen him drink beer.”

  Mom bit her lip. “Well, I only have white. It was a BOGO.”

  “In that case, he loves white.” I grinned as she swatted at me.

  “And he’s not married? No kids? No girlfriend?”

  “Nope, none of that. And no boyfriend.”

  Her eyes narrowed at me.

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Not like that, he says,” she mimicked, turning back to her potatoes and peeler. She reached back, extending a knife so I could join her. “How old is he? You said his parents passed?”

  “Fifty-seven.” I smiled down at the pile of potato peels when her gaze cut sharply across to me, then I laughed.

  “You’re such a little shit,” she said, but was grinning.

  “He’s thirty-seven.” One of the few things I knew for certain about him. “But just for the record, older men are totally acceptable these days, Mom. I’m not fifteen.”

  “Fifty-seven would be too old.”

  “Why?” I said it for argument’s sake, but Mom set down her potato peeler and leveled me with one of her mom looks.

  “Because it’s just…that’s too old. Can you imagine Dad with a twenty-three-year-old? How about me?”

  “Gah, okay, point made. But that’s you and Dad, and you’re my parents. I’ve seen some very prime fifty-five-year-olds out before. Very prime.” I wiggled my brows for effect.

  Mom rolled her eyes. “I’m sure you have. But don’t tell me about them and don’t bring them home.” Her shoulders trembled in a mock shudder.

  “I’ll make sure they’re under fifty,” I teased.

  “It’s not even necessarily the numbers thing, Alex. It’s—I mean what would you have in common? You’ve still got so much to do. Someone that age? They’re thinking differently than you are.” She waved her hand and picked up the potato peeler again. “I just think it’d be difficult to relate.”

  I chewed on my lip, considering Rob’s brush-off in a way I hadn’t before. I couldn’t talk to him about accounting or financials like Sean could, or buying a first home. But that didn’t mean I didn’t know anything about mortgages or… Ahh, hell, who was I kidding? I worked for a place with ‘buffs’ in the title and made art in my parents’ garage.

  Lainey ran to answer the doorbell when it rang. She’d put on a flower-print dress and some of Mom’s lipstick.

  “Oh, you are an adult.” She sighed with evident disappointment while I stared, wondering what dimension the man on our porch had been snatched from. Rob stood there in blue jeans and a white button down. Flip-flops, clean-shaven, hair styled back from his forehead and
a twinkle in his eye for Lainey’s greeting. My mouth watered at the sight of him. I was so used to seeing him in gym shorts and running shoes. This was…this was an incredibly handsome man. One who also carried a bottle of red wine and a bouquet of flowers. He might as well have walked out of a Nicholas Sparks novel.

  “I am, unfortunately. A lot of days I wish I wasn’t,” he said.

  His answer must have piqued Lainey’s curiosity, because she followed up with, “What would you rather be?”

  Rob was stumped. I could tell by the way his expression went a little slack. And it was cute how he stood there, absently running the plastic wrapping the flowers along his jaw while he searched for an answer until he realized flower petals were dripping all over our stoop and forced his hand back down to his side.

  “A dolphin,” I answered for him, stepping from the kitchen doorway. “So he could hold his breath underwater for longer.”

  He glanced up at me and winked, sending a sizzle of heat up my spine. “Those for me?” I nodded to the flowers, giving him a Cheshire cat smile.

  “Not even close.” He extended the bunch to Lainey quickly.

  “For me?” she asked, and he nodded. He was a decent liar. “You didn’t bring Winslow.”

  Rob squinted down at Lainey, who still guarded the doorway. “You’re a hard one to win over, aren’t you? Maybe he can come for a visit again soon.”

  Mom appeared from the kitchen, so I rescued him from Lainey by making introductions.

  “So you like red after all. Alex said you only drink beer.” Mom swept the bottle of red into her hand when Rob offered it over, giving the label a cursory glance, then gesturing to the kitchen.