But I don’t want a relationship. I will never want one. Love is great while you’re in the middle of it. It’s the part where everything falls apart that I have a problem with. I’ve seen the aftermath up close and personal and want nothing to do with that. I refuse to be left with two kids and spend days, weeks, months sobbing into my pillow over someone who didn’t think I was worth sticking around for.
Not that I actually think Jameson would ever just up and leave someone like my mom did. But rarely does love ever last. It’s never a guarantee that two people will be in love forever and spend their entire lives together. It seems that’s more the exception than the rule. Something could come in between us and ruin everything. I like him so much. I’d rather just be his friend and not run the risk of losing him.
He sticks his hand out in front of me to help me stand. I place my hand in his and look up into his eyes. I like the way his calluses rub against my palm and the way his hand engulfs mine. His eyes rove over my face, and a shiver runs down my spine as his fingers pull something from my hair. He smiles as he holds a tiny purple flower petal from Lo’s bouquet in front of my face.
I nervously run my hands through my hair to make sure no more nature is hiding out in my long tresses. Jameson positions himself beside me and gently plays with my hair hanging down my back. It’s distracting, and my brain is short circuiting, which is problematic since he’s asking me a question right now.
“Beg your pardon?” I ask. Lo bites her lips as she watches our exchange.
“I asked what your favorite thing to do with your dad was…twice,” Jameson laughs. He’s still fiddling with my hair, and it does not go unnoticed by my younger sister. She raises and lowers her eyebrows suggestively at me, and I give her a look to tell her to mind her own business.
“Are you okay?” Jameson lowers his brows and asks. “Lo, I’ll redirect my question to you since the unseasonable heat seems to be addling your sister’s brain.”
“Ice cream!” she exclaims.
Jameson stuffs his hands in his pockets and turns to face me with a questioning look on his face. “Ice cream, huh?”
Now that his hands are out of my hair, my brain can process simple thoughts. But gosh, that smile and that dimple on his cheek threaten to send my heart into a frenzy all over again. I nod my head, and he tilts his head toward his truck as he turns to walk in that direction.
Lo looks at me with her mouth gaping open and fans her face dramatically. Rolling my eyes, I smack her shoulder and stomp after Jameson. Her laugh behind me does nothing to calm my frazzled nerves.
Lo has abandoned me and my melting ice cream. Her friend, Amy, is working this afternoon, and they’ve been sitting at the counter, talking, since we got here. They’re gossiping about all of the high school relationships and who’s taking who to the homecoming dance. I completely forgot about the dance coming up in a few weeks. I set a quick reminder in my phone to take Lo shopping for a dress. She told me it wasn’t a big deal since she’s just going with a small group of girlfriends, but it’s her first dance here. I want it to be fun and special for her.
I’m glad she’s finally making friends and fitting in. I was worried those first few weeks after moving here, but things have really turned around for her since she gave Daniel that black eye—not that I condone solving problems with violence.
But I need her to stop being sociable right now and get her perky teenage bum back over here in her chair. I’m in need of a buffer.
Watching Jameson lick that ice cream cone is nothing short of distracting. I can’t even focus enough to remember to eat my own ice cream. I can’t stop watching him, and there’s drool sliding down my chin.
“Are you okay? Do I need to take you home?” Jameson asks me when he sees me staring at my brownie pieces sitting in a puddle of what was once strawberry ice cream.
I snap my head up to meet his gaze and say, “Oh yeah, I’m fine.” His face tells me that he doesn’t believe me for a second, and he’s right—but not for the reason he thinks. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to deny my attraction to him, and I don’t like it one bit. I’ve been attracted to men before, but it was relatively easy to avoid them and forget about them.
Avoiding Jameson is impossible…completely out of the question. Never mind the fact that he lives next door to me, and this town is microscopic. I doubt I’d be able to keep myself away from him even if it were feasible. My fingers itch to text him approximately a hundred times a day. Anytime something exciting happens, he’s the first person I want to tell.
“It’s okay if you’re not, you know. I can’t imagine losing my mom,” he says. There he goes again, being all swoon-worthy, doing absolutely nothing.
“You and your mom are really close, aren’t you?” I ask. I scoop a bite of brownie into my mouth. The ice cream is a complete goner now.
“We are. She’s never given me any other option,” he laughs. He shoves the last bite of his cone into his mouth, and I watch his jaw as he chews. His face turns a little red, and he clears his throat before taking a sip of water. Gosh, I’m so awkward.
“Hey, Millie!” Lo calls over to me. I shift my attention over to her, ignoring Jameson’s stare boring into the side of my face. “Amy gets off work in an hour. Is it okay if I hang out here and then go over to her house?” she asks.
No. No, it’s not okay because then that means I’m alone with Jameson again. I can’t be trusted to be alone with such a perfect specimen of a man. The last time I was alone with him, I clung to him like a koala clings to its favorite tree. Who knows what mortifying things I’ll do this time.
I paste a smile onto my face and pretend like everything is perfectly fine. “Sure,” I reply in a peppy voice. “Be home by ten. It’s a school night,” I remind her.
Jameson stands from the table, and my eyes follow his body up, up, up until they land on his face. He’s watching me with a raised brow, and I roll my eyes. He chuckles as I stand to throw my wasted ice cream in the trash. What a bummer. This place has really good strawberry ice cream.
He totally knows I’ve got the hots for him. Probably nothing new for him, though. I’d be willing to bet that every female who has come into contact with him since he hit puberty has had a mild case of heart palpitations when around him. How many useless EKGs have been ordered by clueless doctors over the years?
It’s fine. I’m fine. I can handle being friends with a gorgeous man. Just because I find him unbelievably attractive doesn’t mean I’m in love with the guy or anything. Plenty of men and women are friends without things getting blurred and weird.
Chapter Fourteen
Jameson
Millie has been acting strange all day. She’s been quiet and jittery, but I thought she was sad since it’s the first anniversary of her father’s death. But then I noticed her staring at me a lot, and she was normal with Lo. I’m starting to think she’s being weird because of me.
I’ve just pulled up in front of my house, and I walk around to the passenger’s side of my truck to help her down. I open the door and hold out my hand for her, but she ignores it and jumps down instead. I shove my hands into my pockets and watch as she takes off into a run toward her house.
I slam the door of the truck and walk into my house. I was hoping she’d want to hang out for a while, eat dinner together or something, since her sister bailed on her. No one should be left alone on a day like today, no matter how fine they say they are. She cried at story time when reading a children’s book, for goodness’ sake. She’s obviously not as fine as she says she is.
I slam the door to my bedroom in frustration and change out of my jeans into some workout clothes. I lace up my sneakers and head back to my truck. I already texted the guys and told them I wasn’t going to make it for baseball tonight, but since Millie obviously doesn’t want to hang out with me, I’m going to go anyway.
My eyes immediately land on the cream-colored purse sitting on the floor in front of the passenger’s seat when I climb ins
ide. It feels like an olive branch…or an invitation.
Before I can overthink whether or not I’m invading her alone time, I snatch the purse off the floor and march over to her front door and ring the doorbell. There’s a crashing sound coming from what I think is the kitchen and then a swear that I never thought I’d hear come from her mouth. I bring my fist up to my mouth and clear my throat to keep from laughing.
No laughter comes from my mouth when she answers the door and I see her face. Her eyes are red-rimmed, and makeup is streaking down her face. As soon as she sees me, her face crumples, and she covers her face with her hands. I walk into her living room, toss her purse on the floor, and tug her into a tight hug.
At first, she’s tense, but after a minute, she takes a deep breath and relaxes. Her arms wrap around my waist, and I feel her fist the back of my t-shirt. Without letting go of her, I lead her over to her couch, and we plop down onto it. Millie lifts her knees to her chest and ends up mostly in my lap. I’m not complaining.
No, no. This is a serious moment. Don’t think about how nice she feels.
“I’m sorry. I’m such a mess,” she says when she finally looks up at me, wiping all of the smudged makeup from her face. I cup her cheek in the palm of my hand and run my thumb underneath her eye.
“You have every right to be a mess today,” I tell her. “What was that crashing sound I heard before you answered the door?” I ask.
“Oh, that…that was the shelves in my pantry betraying me,” Millie grumbles as she climbs off my lap. I’m reluctant to let her go. I like her here; it feels natural. She grabs my hand and leads me to the pantry in her kitchen. The two bottom shelves are broken, and the food that I’m assuming belongs on those shelves is now spilled all over the floor.
“What happened?”
“I was climbing on them so I could reach my secret stash of chocolate—it’s top secret, okay? If Lo finds out about it, she’ll eat it all,” she points in my face and says.
“Why don’t you have a stool?”
She shrugs her shoulders, and I make a mental note to get a stool for her so she’s not scaling any more unstable shelving. I do a quick scan of her body and note the bruise forming on her shin. Other than that, she appears to be okay.
“Okay, where’s this secret stash? I’ll get it for you,” I ask as I move things around on the top shelf. I’m not finding anything resembling chocolate. There’s a box of Wheaties, a bag of flour, oatmeal, granola bars that look like they probably taste like grass, a canister of protein powder…no chocolate.
“Oh, it’s in the Wheaties box!” she says. Very sneaky. I admire her devious ways.
I hand her the box, and she dumps the contents onto the counter to rifle through it. There are Snickers, Twix, Reese’s cups, some sort of chocolate bar with hazelnut and raisins (gross!). I reach for a Reese’s cup, and she smacks my hand away.
“Ouch!” I say as I hug my hand to my chest.
“Oh, sorry, natural reflex! You can have some,” she says begrudgingly. She watches me carefully and purses her lips. I get the feeling she’s not excited about sharing her chocolate. I chuckle as I reach over her shoulder and grab an entire handful. Her mouth falls open, and she quickly snaps it shut. It’s taking every ounce of self-control she possesses to not say anything.
I peel open my Reese's cup and make a big show of popping the entire thing in my mouth at once. I haven’t eaten candy like this in far too long. Why don’t I have a candy stash at home? That will be corrected immediately.
I tear open the wrapper of my Snickers. It says “fun size,” but really there’s nothing fun about this. It’s so small it just leaves you wanting more. It should be called “tease size.” Before I know it, I’m tearing into the next one, and Millie grabs my hand to stop me.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she asks. She looks appalled.
I shrug my shoulders and say, “Eating chocolate,” around a mouth full of Snickers. I assumed my actions were pretty self-explanatory.
“No, you’re committing a crime against candy bars everywhere!” she shouts in complete outrage. I think steam is going to escape her ears any minute now. “You’re wasting my chocolate!”
“How so?” I ask and pop the next Snickers into my mouth. Her eyes grow wide with anger as she watches me chew and swallow in approximately ten seconds.
“You’re not even taking the time to savor it,” she squeaks. She swipes the rest of my treats away from me and tosses them back into the Wheaties box. She stands in front of the pantry, contemplating how she can get the box back into its home on the top shelf. I snatch the box out of her hand and grab a few more pieces of chocolate from it before placing it back on the shelf.
Millie reaches to take the candy away from me, but I take off in a run into the living room, holding it above my head. She jumps to try to grab it, but with my height and her lack thereof, she doesn’t even come close to reaching it. She jumps again and wraps her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist.
She’s laughing and hasn’t noticed the catch in my breath. I wrap my free arm around her waist and watch her face as she attempts to pull my arm down. I bring my hand down in between us and hold the candy out.
“Okay, so how am I supposed to eat the candy?” I ask. She places her hands on my biceps and lowers her feet back to the floor. I feel like my heart is going to beat out of my chest when she keeps her hands on my arms and looks up at me. Does she know what she’s doing to me right now?
She takes a Snickers and unwraps it. “For starters, you don’t eat it in such rapid succession. You take the time to enjoy it,” she says and takes a small bite. Actually, I can’t even label that as a bite. It’s more of a nibble. I’m half-tempted to shove the whole thing in her mouth. It takes her five times longer to eat that tiny Snickers than it should.
“See?” she asks when she’s done.
“That was torture,” I reply and throw two pieces of candy in my mouth at once just to annoy her. She rewards me by reacting just as I expect. She grabs a chair from her table and scoots it up to the pantry so she can reach the box of candy.
“You know what, I’m relocating my stash. You don’t deserve to know its location.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t refer to it as a stash…” I call out as she runs down the hallway to her bedroom.
A few minutes later, she comes back out, having changed into lounge clothes and her thick-framed glasses. She looks just as nerdy as one would expect a librarian to look…and I love it. Gosh, she drives me crazy. I never knew I had a thing for nerds until Millie.
Work has been slow all day today, which is fine with me. It gives me time to catch up on all of the paperwork I have to do. Crash reports have piled up over the last week, thanks to some bad weather. Why don’t people understand that you can’t go seventy around a huge curve when the roads are wet? That’s a dumb question—this is Texas. People seem to think they’re always driving in a Nascar race in this state.
I’ve managed to knock out three reports when I decide to take a break and go grab myself some lunch. I go to the local sandwich shop downtown. I’m standing in line when an eerie feeling comes over me, like I’m being watched. I scan around the room, but there’s hardly anyone else in here other than the two employees behind the counter. It’s still a little early for a lunch crowd, but when you start your shift at 6 am, your schedule gets weird.
I look out the window, and a man in a navy-blue hoodie across the street takes off running down the sidewalk. I dash out the door of the sandwich shop, but the man is gone before I can get a good look at him. All I have to go on is a pair of gray sneakers and a scraggly light-brown beard. So, basically nothing.
I order my sandwich and head back to my patrol car to spend my lunch break searching for information about who the man in the hoodie could be. I’ve got it narrowed down to three different men. I study their pictures, but it’s useless to try to compare them to the man I’ve just seen.
I send some info
rmation over to my friend at the sheriff’s department who’s trying to help me find this sneaky guy. He hasn’t had much luck finding any information.
I shove the last bite of my sandwich into my mouth right before my phone starts ringing. I grab a napkin and wipe my hands before grabbing my phone and seeing Millie’s name on the screen.
“Hewwo,” I answer around a mouthful of bread and deli meats. I’m glad it’s just her calling and not the communications office calling me to go to a crash or something.
“Uhh, are you busy?” she asks, confused by how weird I sound.
I swallow before saying, “No, I’m just finishing my lunch. Sorry. Go ahead.” In reality, even if I had been busy, I would’ve taken her call. Ever since the other day at her house, I’ve thought of little else than Millie. She has consumed my brain.
“So, I need to ask a major favor of you…” she says and pauses for a long time. I can hear her overthinking whatever it is she’s called to ask me. I wait, and wait, check my watch, and wait some more.
“You still there?” I ask after a few moments.
“Yeah. I need to have my wisdom teeth removed,” she says and then stops talking again. I have no idea what this has to do with me.
“Aren’t you, like, twenty-five?”
“Yeah, yeah. Twenty-six, but whatever. Listen, I’m scared of the dentist. Terrified, okay? I’ve put this off as long as I can, but these bad boys have been bothering me for like a solid two months,” she says. Now that she mentions it, I can hear the panic in her voice. I still don’t understand why she’s calling me about this in the middle of a work day, though.
“So, what are you needing from me?” I ask.
“Lo can’t miss school again so soon after her suspension, I can’t ask Hannah because she has to fill in for me at work, and Tess has her kids…” she says. I think I know where this is going.
The Nice Guy Next Door Page 12