by Selena Scott
“Bye, Nat,” he called even as his front door was closing behind her.
He scratched his head and stood in his messy living room for a long time after she left.
CHAPTER FOUR
Nat kicked ass in class that day. She was funny, sympathetic, witty, and just generally on her game.
But the whole time, a thought percolated in the back of her mind, whispering alarming things in her ear.
She wasn’t going to do herself the disservice of convincing herself that nothing had happened that morning. Because she was smart enough and observant enough to know that, in fact, something had absolutely happened between her and Raph.
It had been subtle. And had she known him any less, she might have been able to dismiss it as nothing. But the fact was, she knew him as well as she knew herself, and she’d been able to feel the very second it had occurred to him that they might just be the solution to one another’s problem.
She’d felt him go still, his hands on her feet, her feet in his lap, his clothes on her body and her body on his couch. And she’d felt the moment things had, well, not really changed, but sort of altered.
She knew that Raph was suddenly aware of her as a woman because she was suddenly aware of him as a man.
Which was weird. Because they really didn’t do that. With or to one another.
But that didn’t mean they couldn’t do that with and to one another.
…right?
Natalie occupied her mind as well as she could, staying after to discuss a few concepts with some of the people who were taking the licensure class. And then running in to the office to field some phone calls and go over paperwork with one of her clients.
She left her boxy, boring office that day with the rare sensation of having absolutely killed it at work. She’d gotten three steps closer to closing a deal she’d never dreamed she’d have been able to close. She’d plowed her way through a mountain of paperwork that she usually would have let fester in her inbox until it was almost late. And she’d actually returned every single voicemail that had blinked on her office phone.
The thought of picking up takeout never even occurred to her. She was driving home from the grocery store with a back seat filled with ingredients before she barely had time to think twice about it.
She unloaded her groceries and cleaned out her fridge at the same time, taking out her trash and wiping down every surface in the kitchen while she was at it.
She actually made a mean pasta sauce, when she put her mind to it, so she put it on to simmer. And while she waited for her dinner to be ready, she found her way into her cluttered living room and gave it a quick clean up. Nothing special, just reordering her shelves and dusting and vacuuming. She gave her room the same treatment and then treated her bathroom to a fifteen minute insanely thorough scrub-down that ended with a shower for her.
She was in the kitchen in her pajamas, serving herself some pasta in a freshly washed bowl, when Kaya came in the front door.
“Oh no,” Kaya said, a worried expression on her face. “You cleaned.”
Natalie laughed. ‘That’s a bad thing?”
“No. Not by itself.” Kaya threw her bag down. “But you only clean when something bad happens.”
Historically, that was true. Nat cleaned when she needed to completely occupy her mind so that thoughts that threatened to drive her insane didn’t get to have their way with her. But that’s not what—
“Oh! Right. Yeah. Paul broke up with me once and for all.”
But even as she said that, Natalie knew she wasn’t telling the whole truth to her sister. She’d been upset about Paul. And when she really thought about it now, she still felt pretty stung. But she didn’t think that’s what had brought on her cleaning mania this evening. It wasn’t actually Paul she was avoiding thoughts of.
It was Raphael.
Natalie frowned into her pasta and then served up another bowl for Kaya.
“Are you even listening?” Kaya asked, accepting the bowl of food and joining her on one of the barstools at the kitchen counter.
“What?”
“Nat, I just said, like, three minutes’ worth of things.”
“Sorry, there’s just a lot on my mind.”
“I can tell.” Kaya pushed her food around. “Tell me about what happened with Paul.”
Natalie made a face. “I’d rather not. It’s not that big of a deal. More than anything I’m just disappointed.”
“Not heartbroken, then?”
“Um. No. I guess not. But I did—do—really like him.”
Kaya said nothing.
“Raphael told me that Paul is a walking office supply.”
Kaya burst into hysterical laughter. “Wow. He’s dead right.”
“He’s really not that boring once you get to know him!”
Kaya wiped her eyes and turned to her sister. “Nat, you need someone who will never be described as ‘not that boring’. You’re fun and smart and hilarious and you deserve someone who completely thrills you. You know?”
Raphael’s face zipped across Nat’s consciousness and she had the strangest déjà vu feeling, like she was remembering a memory that had never actually happened. Lying in bed with him, him leaning over her, whispering something.
She shivered involuntarily and shoved a huge bite in her mouth to give herself something to do.
“I could say the same for you, Kay,” Nat eventually said.
“Ugh, not this again. You and Raph are such freaks when it comes to my dating life.”
“It’s not about you dating…”
“Then what is it about?”
“I don’t know, you pretty much only ever go to work and sulk around the house.”
“I’m not sulking!”
“Me and Raph and Seth and Sarah are pretty much your only friends. You spend all your time reading or listening to music alone. I just think…”
“What? Just say it.”
“You’re a little pathetic, sis.”
They both burst out laughing at Nat’s blunt assessment. Finally, when the laughter cleared, they caught one another’s eyes and the laughter started all over again.
“And you think me forcing myself to date would make me less pathetic?”
“No, but I guess I just don’t understand why you cut yourself off from the world so much, you know? Sometimes you kind of act like the Durants.”
Kaya pursed her lips and frowned. “You mean I act like I have some big secret that I have to guard with my life?”
“Yeah,” Nat said eventually. “Do you?”
“Have a big secret?”
“Yeah.”
“No. Yes. I don’t know. It’s dumb.”
Natalie thought for a long minute, knowing that there was probably a better, more smooth way of asking this, but she just jumped right in. “Are you gay?”
Kaya shook her head. “No. I mean, I totally have a girl crush on Sarah.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Right. But no. I’m not gay. It’s not something like that.”
“Then what is it? You can tell me. Anything, I swear. I’m a locked vault. Well, I mean, you can unlock me to tell the secret, put the secret in there, and then lock me back up and then I’m a locked vault.”
Kaya smiled and shook her head at her rambling sister. “I like someone who doesn’t like me back, is all. See? Lame.”
“Impossible,” Nat replied immediately.
Kaya genuinely smiled at her sister’s intense allegiance. “Actually, it’s more than possible. It’s reality.”
“What do you mean you ‘like someone?’” Nat had never heard her sister express feelings for someone before. “Like, a crush?”
“I mean that I’m… really into someone who isn’t into me. Who actually doesn’t like me at all. Who kind of wishes I wasn’t there.”
Nat’s brow furrowed. “Kaya, I’ve been there with you for pretty much every day of your entire life and I’m here to tell you that I’ve yet to m
eet a single man who ‘wishes you weren’t there.’”
They were both acutely aware of Kaya’s physical effect on men.
“No, it’s not like that. I mean, I think he finds me attractive. That much is obvious, at least. But I think I, as a person, a presence, am irritating to him. I kind of infringe on his territory in a way. I always get the impression that he’d be a hell of a lot happier if I just disappeared.”
“How do you know him?”
“From work.”
Nat was 100% sure her sister was lying about that, but considering she, herself, had just lied about which man she’d been avoiding thinking about… well, she figured that sisters weren’t obligated to tell one another absolutely everything.
“And you think he wishes you’d disappear.”
“Actually I know he wishes I’d disappear. I think… I think there’s a chance that he might hate me.”
Try as she might to imagine someone, anyone, hating her sincere, honest, beguiling sister, Nat just couldn’t picture it.
“Sometimes these things are complicated, Kay,” she said eventually. “You might not be able to see the full picture right now.”
Kaya shrugged noncommittally.
“No, I’m serious,” Nat pushed, suddenly full of the righteous vigor of a person attempting to expound upon an issue they’ve just started to try and understand in their own mind. “Sometimes a situation has to be allowed to… evolve. Before you can really know what’s there.”
“Maybe,” Kaya said, obviously not agreeing. “Listen, I’ll clean up since you cooked. Are you sure you don’t want to talk about Paul?”
“I’m good, I think. Just gonna hit the sack early.” Nat kissed her sister on the side of the head and started on her bedtime routine.
Even after a shower, blowing her hair dry, a special face mask, a tooth-whitening treatment, and twenty minutes with a guided meditation app, Nat was still lying face up in her bed, staring at her bedroom ceiling a good hour before she usually turned in.
She wasn’t avoiding Kaya. But she also wasn’t ready to talk about any of this and Kaya, similar to Raph, had a way of getting to the heart of the matter.
So, Nat waited out the long night on her own, with nothing but her thoughts to keep her company.
***
Nat wasn’t the only one who had a shitty night’s sleep.
Not too far from her apartment, a man sat in a dimly lit room in his own home. The room was gloomy and dark, except for the extremely bright lamp he had pointed downward at the smattering of pictures that were strewn across his desk.
The man bent over the pictures had a small, mean face. His last name was Race, and that’s what everyone called him. He wore a hat low over his brow and his hands looked almost more like gloves than actual hands. They moved stiffly and were very calloused, signs of a man who’d spent one too many cold nights outdoors.
On the wall behind him hung a variety of weapons. A bayonet from the revolutionary war. A series of daggers of varying sizes. A tiny, stylish gun with silver embellishments, the kind that a woman might slide in her purse on the way to an opera.
Though his concentration was singular and focused down on the photos before him, his head snapped up as an owl hooted outside his home.
“Great Horned Owl,” he said, identifying the bird call to no one in particular, as he was alone in his house. “Though some fool is bound to think it’s one of the Snowies.”
There’d been recent sightings of Snowy Owls in Boulder, near the reservoir, and it had served only to irritate the man to no end.
Not because he didn’t want to see a Snowy Owl, but because he’d had preferred to not have loads of amateur bird watchers blundering around the reservoir.
A year ago there’d been a murder there and at this point the man considered the reservoir to be under his own, specific jurisdiction.
High-traffic pedestrian areas were bound to scare off most animals. Even predators. And there were a few specific predators that the man had been after for quite a while.
He’d gotten the mountain lion that had murdered the man last year. He’d shot the thing dead with his own two hands. Then he’d promptly turned it over to the feds and that was the only part of the matter that he’d come to regret. His contact at the Bureau had never had any reason to confirm or deny the man’s suspicions on what the creature truly was.
The next animal he killed in those woods was not going to get turned over to the government, that was for sure.
The man leaned back in his chair and stretched, finally looking away from the photos he’d taken himself, some of them ranging back many years. There were a few mountain lions in the photos, but mostly, the photos were of a pair of gorgeous red wolves. Both males.
Identical.
As if they were twins.
***
Unsurprisingly, Raphael slept extremely well. He always slept extremely well. But the second he woke up, his thoughts were on Natalie. Natalie and their very strange moment from yesterday morning.
Unknowns like what he’d experienced with Natalie didn’t particularly keep a man like Raphael down. So, though she stayed on his mind for most of the day, he went to work just fine and actually had a fairly nice day.
Seth and Raphael owned a landscaping company together. Seth was a landscape architect and the brains behind the business end of their, well, business. Raphael managed the crew and did more than his share of the manual labor. It suited both of them quite well. Raphael preferred to spend his days outside, even in the rare Colorado squalls that rolled off the mountains and even when the snow dumped hard onto their backs. In the dead of the winter, when there was no way they could break ground, they worked snow removal and helped with contracted maintenance on a few of the ski resorts that dotted the mountains around Boulder.
During those days, Seth kept busy rustling up new clients and designing oases for the ones they already had. Raphael kept busy with whatever task was directly in front of him, moving through it with a methodical attention to detail that he showed in almost no other aspect of his life.
It wasn’t snowy that October afternoon, it was crisp and sunny. Two things that Raphael loved about living in Boulder. Plenty of people who were just passing through complained about how dry the air was there, but to him, it just felt fresh. He’d visited other parts of the country at various times of the year and couldn’t help but feel as if it were just kind of… swampy. Humidity of any kind made Raphael feel as if the world were sweating along with him.
No, he was a Boulder boy, through and through.
And it was with his window down that he drove home, slicing through the crisp, evening air, feeling like a million bucks, even if the Natalie thing was sitting gently on one shoulder, begging him to look at it.
He didn’t really look at the potential issue until he was inside his house, unpacking the Chinese food he’d picked up on the way home.
He’d phoned in, and recognizing his number, the woman on the line had asked if he wanted his usual. He’d said yes. And now, as he was unpacking the food, he realized that ‘his usual’ also contained Natalie’s order as well. Because whenever he ordered from there, he and Natalie were together.
Because he and Natalie were usually together.
Not tonight, though. And no texts from her throughout the day. Which was unusual.
Raph sighed and leaned back against the countertop, eyeing the extra food. He plunged his hand in his pocket and yanked out his phone, calling Nat.
“Hey,” she answered and he was very relieved to feel no butterflies or anything out of the ordinary at the sound of her voice.
“I ordered too much Chinese food, wanna come over?”
“I’m already here, actually. Just pulled up to your house.”
“Oh. Cool. See you in a sec.”
Raph jogged to his front door, jumping over the shoes he’d taken off in the middle of the hall, and tugged the door open for her even though she had a key.
She wa
s just picking her way up his driveway in her realtor heels. They were the most expensive things she owned, second only to her used Honda Accord, and he knew that she was convinced that they were responsible for almost every deal she made as a real estate agent. She said that they made men want to give her what she wanted and they made women respect her life choices. Win/win.
Personally, whenever Raph had ever looked at those heels, the only thing he’d really thought was ‘ouch’. They were at least four inches and spiky, turning her feet into sleek, arched, Darth Vader lookalikes. Tonight, though, in her pencil skirt and silk blouse, picking her way up his front path, his world did that tippy thing again and he finally understood why those shoes helped her make sales. Because suddenly he wasn’t looking at those shoes and watching her walk up his front steps. He was looking at those shoes and imagining her doing… other things.
“Hey,” she said again when she’d come level with him at the door. He realized he was blocking her way so he jumped back to let her pass.
Even with the heels on, she only came up to his chin and when she kicked them off, she promptly fell level with his sternum.
“Good to see you,” he heard himself say. Which was awkward because they never said stuff like that when they were meeting up after a long day at work.
“Um. Yeah.” He could tell that she thought he was just as awkward as he thought he was.
She tossed her messenger bag down next to her heels and started sauntering toward the kitchen.
He closed the front door, confused by his reaction to her. His body felt as if that greeting had been left unfinished. As if she’d raised a freshly inked rubber stamp high over his head but had failed to bring it down, thereby ending the interaction.
It was true that they occasionally high-fived in greeting, sometimes gave a brief hug if it had been a longer stretch of time since they’d seen one another. Was that what he’d wanted?
He wasn’t sure and it threw him off a little as he followed her into the kitchen.