Finding Mr. Right Next Door

by Sarah Ballance

  She sighed. It had to be one of the world’s worst ironies that they’d had the greatest platonic relationship in history until he’d ravaged her against the wall, and suddenly they didn’t seem to speak the same language. At least not with their clothes on.

  It was with that thought lingering indecently at the forefront of her mind that she nearly plowed over Elsie, who’d bent to study a display of adult diapers. Elsie snapped to attention with the dexterity of a woman decades younger and hollered, “Hells bells, Lexi!”

  Lexi gripped the shopping cart, wishing she could crawl under it and hide now that every Shop-Rite patron in sight had turned an incredulous eye their way. Hard to blame them, with Lexi having pinned an eighty-five-year-old woman against a giant stack of Depends. Mortified, Lexi offered Elsie her arm and helped steady her. “You don’t wear adult diapers,” Lexi reminded her.

  “They charge an arm and a leg for these things at the village,” Elsie said. That was what she liked to call the retirement condos. The village. “Five dollars a pair. The only way I’m going to pay five bucks to mess my pants is if there’s tequila involved.”

  By the time Lexi put her hand on Elsie’s arm, there were four boxes piled on the cart. “How about instead of spending half your grocery budget on these, we just keep you away from the tequila?”

  Elsie gave her the kind of look one typically reserves for having stepped in something. “Are you daft? I’m not going to wear them. I’m going to sell them.” Without further ado, she piled two more boxes under the carriage, leaving Lexi to hope there was enough room in her car to get them all back.

  “Anything else?” Lexi asked.

  “Some of those nutrition drinks. I’ve got to keep my energy up.”

  Privately, Lexi thought Elsie had more energy than a woman half her age, but that was a good thing. The timing of her arthritic flares years ago had literally put Matt in Lexi’s life, but thanks to more than two decades of medical advancements, Elsie now had far more good days than bad. Lexi could only hope for the same fate, but with no idea where she and Matt stood, that modicum of hope seemed vastly optimistic.

  Lost in thought, Lexi turned too wide and nicked a shelf on the nutritional supplement aisle, knocking several vitamin bottles to the ground. Fortunately, this time Elsie was clear, but the old woman’s eyes narrowed in such a way that suggested Lexi wouldn’t be so lucky.

  “Are you looking to bump up my disability check?” Elsie asked drily as Lexi bent to clean up the mess. “Or is something on your mind?”

  “I’m fine,” Lexi assured her. Who wasn’t fine while collecting bottles that had spun and run rampant on aisle eight of the grocery store?

  “It’s not you I’m worried about,” Elsie retorted. “You keep driving like this and I’m going to have to strap on one of these suckers”—she patted a box of the adult diapers—“just to get back home.”

  “It’s nothing,” Lexi said as she stood, belatedly catching Elsie’s comment. Ew. “I’ve just got a few things on my mind.”

  “Ah,” Elsie said, nodding. “The boyfriend.” When Lexi gave her a sharp look, she said, “Do you really think Matt didn’t tell me you were off cattin’ instead of visiting me?”

  “I absolutely was not,” Lexi told her. “And he’s one to talk, but that is beside the point. The man I was out with is a police officer, and the police department is collecting new stuffed animals and blankets to comfort kids who are on scene of a call. I was helping them put together packages to ride around in the patrol cars.”

  “So you aren’t dating him? There’s nothing between you?”

  “No.”

  “And you’re not pining after him?”

  “No.”

  Elsie smiled like a cat with a mouth full of feathers. “Then what’s got you knocking old folks off their orthopedic shoes and cleaning off shelves like it’s Black Friday?”

  Lexi opened her mouth and closed it again.

  Elsie smirked. “If there’s one thing I’ve noticed in my eighty-some years, it’s that people have a terrible habit of not knowing what they’ve got until it’s gone.”

  “But—”

  “And they’re so quick to wallow in their misery that they don’t think to fight for anything. Or they wake up one day and find out they’ve been in the wrong fight all along.” Elsie patted Lexi’s shoulder, then grabbed a pack of nutritional drinks off the shelf beside her and balanced it on top of the already teeming cart. She’d already started walking away before she spoke. “They tell you to choose your battles, but there’s one thing most folks never seem to get right about that.”

  Lexi stared after the retreating woman, wishing she could just let that carrot dangle, but only a beat passed before she caught up to Elsie and asked, “What’s that?”

  “To actually want whatever it is you’re fighting for.”

  …

  Matt had no hope of getting through this thing with Lexi unscathed. Hell, he would have been thrilled if scathed was all he got. On the inside he was a mess. Outside, he was lifting more than he ever had. Despite which, he hadn’t begun to take the edge off, and the painted gray cinderblock walls of the firehouse weight room weren’t helping his sunny disposition.

  “Nice form,” Jack said.

  Matt didn’t look at him but he’d sounded surprised. Probably because Matt had just added ten pounds to the rack and counted out twenty reps when he normally stopped at twelve. He felt like he could handle a hundred more, but he wasn’t stupid. Adrenaline wouldn’t stitch the torn muscle back together when he lost his fight.

  Fight. He almost laughed. Lexi had lost it for him. He was just the chump sitting ringside, his feet planted in a sea of empty beer bottles and discarded popcorn boxes as the lights went up and the crowds wound down. Everyone important was gone.

  “So, um, how’s it going with Lexi there? She’s staying with you, right?” Jack asked.

  Matt realized he was still hitting reps, not even counting them anymore. He stopped and eased the weights to the rack. His arms wanted to float. “Lexi is fine,” he said.

  “And you are…?”

  Matt was so disconnected that he wasn’t sure if Jack was digging for info or just trying tactfully to get Matt to vent. “Not having to carry breakfast next door.”

  Shane walked in then, stopping short to look at them with an edge of concern on his face. “What’s going on?”

  “Haven’t gotten it out of him yet,” Jack said. “We’re still at the part where he’s in denial.”

  Matt couldn’t believe Shane didn’t know everything. Lexi and Caitlin were practically joined at the hip. “You mean Caitlin hasn’t filled you in on every sordid detail?”

  “No,” Shane said slowly. “She’s at a used book convention in Las Vegas. But now that you’ve confirmed that there are, in fact, sordid details, feel free to fill us in yourself.”

  Matt used a clean towel to wipe his face and hide his groan. When he dropped it in his lap, they both still watched him. “It’s nothing,” he said. Catching the look Shane and Jack exchanged, he added, “It’s actually nothing.”

  “So she isn’t currently living with you?” Jack asked.

  “She is currently at the store with my grandma, or somewhere thereabouts.”

  Shane raised an eyebrow and looked at Jack. “Deflection. Where does that fall in the cycle of acceptance?”

  “Well,” Jack said, “there’s denial, anger, depression, bargaining, acceptance…maybe it’s part of the bargaining phase.”

  “I don’t know,” Shane mused. “He seems a bit closer to denial to me.”

  “You’d both better hope I’m past the anger part,” Matt said with barely restrained irritation.

  “You know,” Jack said, “after Diego and his wife split, he stayed with me for a while. I don’t think I ever went through stages.”

  Matt
glared. “What’s your point?”

  Jack gave him a blank look. “You’re emotionally involved, dumbass.”

  “Ah,” Shane said. “All caught up now.”

  “That’s it?” The question slipped out before Matt could sensor it.

  “Well,” Shane said, “ordinarily I’d ask how the sex was, but Lexi is our friend, so I’m just as likely to punch you if you try to tell me.”

  Matt sighed. “Yeah, don’t ask about that.”

  “So,” Jack said, with a grin, “either things are going well, or they’re going very well.”

  Matt picked up the water that sat near him, shooting a glare that managed to hit Shane and Jack both. “Things,” he said before turning up the bottle and stating the god-awful truth, “are going to hell.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Lexi was more than a little irked that Matt had chosen to meet her at her parents’ house. As he’d pointed out when trying to persuade her to live with him for the duration of the repairs of her home, her parents were nearly an hour away. That Lexi and Matt would start the day in the same house and drive separately was enough to raise a brow or two. Lexi having to stammer an excuse for it mere hours after they’d had frantic sex against a wall made it ridiculous. That she’d have to insist everything was fine in front of Matt, who would have carnal knowledge of exactly how untrue that was, was laughable.

  Especially since the reason everything wasn’t fine had nothing to do with him being an idiot and everything with her wanting to do it again. About once an hour she’d catch her fingers tightening, gripping a shirt that wasn’t there, trying to hold onto a man who’d didn’t want to be held, and she’d feel the loss all over again.

  By the time she stood on her parents’ front porch, there wasn’t a breath deep enough to save her. So she just walked inside and through to the backyard, numbly aware of how everything that had been so familiar for the entirety of her life now felt so different. The last time she’d walked through that house, she hadn’t slept with Matt. The last time she’d gotten a drink out of that fridge? No sex with Matt. The last time she’d climbed those stairs? Hadn’t had sex with Matt.

  Her entire life as she knew it had somehow taken sides, cleaved neatly around the moment that he’d managed to simultaneously both fill and empty her with the force of a single thrust.

  The result of which was her wandering through her childhood home, thinking of Matt and thrusting and the odds that the heat that crept to her face hadn’t already turned her a dozen shades of red. Fortunately, if anyone could divert her thoughts from sex, it was her parents. Until Matt got there, or until they started asking relentless questions about why he wasn’t, she was safe. Hanging on to that happy thought, she slid open the French door off the kitchen and stepped outside.

  She nearly fell backward when she saw Matt sitting on the deck with her dad.

  “What… I didn’t know you were already here,” she said. Great. Now she had no idea what, if anything, he’d told them. Not helped by the fact that her face had to be blazing, which meant convincing them that nothing was going on would be next to impossible. She suddenly had no clue how to act. Were things supposed to be normal with them? He’d left the house that morning pretty ticked off, so his casual smile now was anything but disarming. In fact, it had a certain predatory quality to it.

  Her dad, after standing and wrapping her in a hug, said, “He’s lending us the Jeep to move mulch to the flower beds in back.” He gave a quizzical look. “He didn’t tell you?”

  Lexi glanced at Matt, who sat serenely, no signs of helping her out. “I was with Elsie,” Lexi said. “I guess it slipped my mind.”

  “How is Elsie?” Lexi’s mom asked, coming up behind her with a drink, which she handed Lexi.

  Grateful for the brief reprieve, Lexi drained half the glass of fresh-squeezed lemonade and said, “Her usual self. Whatever regimen they’ve got her on is working wonders.”

  “What’s working wonders,” Lexi’s dad said with a smile, “is that stuff she has planted in her window box.”

  Matt snorted.

  Lexi’s mom gave an uncertain smile, as if she didn’t quite get what they were talking about, which was just fine with Lexi. Matt and Lexi’s dad fell into a conversation about a couple of small wildfires in the west, to which Lexi half listened, since her mom insisted she didn’t need help in the kitchen. Everything was done. Just waiting on the grill. With that last point, her mom shot her dad a look that Lexi had seen a thousand times before, but this time it made her sad. She hadn’t realized before that when she’d pictured her future, with the two point four kids running amok in her parents’ vast backyard, that Matt had always been in the chair next to hers. She’d never thought of herself with him, but it startled her to realize that she’d likewise never seemed to consider there might have been anyone else.

  “So what’s this I hear about you looking on the computer for a date?” her mother asked. “On that website with the silly commercials?”

  Lexi died inside. Apparently, Matt’s innocent act was entirely that, and with her parents staring at her she could hardly shoot him the death look she so desired. But she glanced at him anyway and was surprised to see that same conflicted, smoldering look he’d worn right before he’d wrecked her against the wall. In a flash, the look was gone, but it was too late. A flutter in her chest upended any grip she had on her current reality, sending her pulse racing errantly like a dry leaf tossed by an autumn wind to twist and skip across the ground.

  Any prayer that she’d had an ally in him was dead the moment he spoke. “Not just a date,” he said, “but a relationship.”

  “Are you okay with that?” Lexi’s mom asked him. The question clearly surprised him, because the hint of a smirk he’d worn dropped out of sight.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” Matt asked.

  Lexi fumed inside. Now was not the time to bring up amazing sex, but did he have to act like it hadn’t happened? Granted, she’d have killed him if he’d acted like it had, but still.

  Lexi didn’t want anyone to answer that particular question, so instead she asked, “How would you possibly know I’ve joined a dating site?”

  “I was there looking.”

  Lexi stared at her mom, perfectly proper in her pearls and coiffed 1960s hair, and asked, “You were on a dating site?”

  “Relax,” her ultra conservative mother said. “Your father and I were looking together.”

  Oh, God. Lexi wanted to crawl under the floor. “You were what? Why?”

  While she frantically tried to remember if she’d included anything on her profile she’d rather die than have her parents see, Matt snorted. “I’m all for expanding horizons and trying new things, but this might be more than I need to know.”

  Lexi’s parents smiled pleasantly, either oblivious to what they’d just implied, or—

  She cringed as a dark, horrible lightbulb came on. “Oh my God, you’re not swingers?”

  Her mother paled. “What? No. Is that what that site does? Connect swingers?”

  Lexi’s dad touched her mom’s arm. “Relax, honey. Lexi can’t be into that. You can’t trade partners when you don’t have a partner to trade.”

  “Thanks a lot, Dad.” She was officially mortified, especially with Matt smirking at her. Fortunately—or not—her parents were staring at her, missing the innuendo in his gaze. So much for not discussing her sex life with her parents. But the joke was on them…they thought she didn’t have one. Thank God they didn’t realize she’d spent the most delicious moments of her life with her back flat against the wall, getting absolutely pounded by Matt, who now sat innocently kicked back in an Adirondack chair, one sneakered foot crossed over the opposite knee like he didn’t have a care in the world.

  Innocent her butt. He sat there laughing with her parents. Traitors, all of them. And Matt didn’t say a word in her defense, though
actually, she’s sleeping with me might not have been the best response.

  “And for the record,” Lexi’s dad added, “We are not swingers. Your mother was just spying on you.”

  “Perfect,” Lexi muttered.

  “Better than finding out your parents are swingers,” Matt said with a laugh. And then those laughing eyes fixed on her, and she could have sworn they were smoldering, and that made her want to absolutely melt.

  “I’m going to get a drink,” Lexi said. She might have to dump it over her own head, but she’d cross that bridge after she escaped into the house. Right now she needed to not be looking at Matt.

  The plan was a good idea for precisely three seconds. Because no sooner than she’d slid the glass door shut behind her, it opened again. She spun to find him there, hot as sin and looking on the verge of committing any number of them. When their eyes met, the slow smile that shaped his lips sent her thoughts straight to where that mouth had been. And all the places it hadn’t. Low, low in her belly the heat rose. Clenching her thighs helped nothing.

  Before she could do something stupid, she did something insane—she grabbed his arm and dragged him upstairs and into her old bedroom, quietly, firmly shutting the door behind them.

  “Are you crazy?” she hissed.

  His smile dripped with false innocence. “For what?”

  Disbelief bloomed wildly in her chest. “Do you really not know? Is this just who you are? Someone who stares people into orgasms?”

  He blinked, his smirk slipping into wonderment. “Do I what now?”

  “You know what I mean.” And because he probably didn’t, and she really didn’t want to explain, she added, “Never mind. This is not the place for this conversation.”