“You didn’t.”

  “Fuck no.” I sigh, deeply. “No. I stayed with him.”

  “To the end?”

  I nod. “To the very end. I sat with him and held his head in my lap as he took his last breath.”

  “Jesus, Nova.”

  I laugh. “Funny, that’s exactly what Laurel said when I told her the story.” I shrug. “There’s more to it, a lot that went on before Craig, and after, but…I guess I only tell you so you know I know what it’s like to lose someone you love.”

  “I’m sorry you went through that.”

  “Me too.” I meet his eyes. “Before, when you and I…whatever you want to call what we did.” I pause again, swallow hard. “When I first, um…took you out of your pants.” Another pause. “I, um. Craig wasn’t my first, and wasn’t my last. But he was…the one. The one that mattered, the one who really truly, deeply meant something to me. And I thought of him. When I first saw you, touched you, I thought of him. How I haven’t…” I blink, swallow, and can’t look at James. “I thought about how I hadn’t…needed…anyone the way I wanted and needed you in that moment, not since Craig. And I…I hated thinking about him when I was with you, touching you, being touched by you, but I couldn’t not. So…I get it. You accidentally saying Renée’s name—I get it.”

  He takes the ring from me and spins it in the sunlight streaming through my open blinds. “I still have our rings…our wedding bands, her engagement ring.” He hands the ring back. “I actually wore my band for three years before Jesse made me take it off.”

  “I wore that ring on my index finger for a while, and then I forced myself to take it off.” I traipse over to the box, replace the ring and then sit back down on the bed, covering my chest and lap with the blanket this time. “It’s not worth much, but I can’t get rid of it.”

  “I know.” He rolls a shoulder. “Why keep the rings? It’s painful to see them, but it’d be like giving away the last reminder of her I have. Jesse and the guys helped me clean out her clothes and such a few months after she passed, and I’ve gradually given away the rest of her stuff, and replaced most of the pictures of us with pictures of the girls and me. Each of my girls has a picture of herself with Renée, and I have one of her and I in my top dresser drawer, upside down, under my socks. But everything else is gone. Except the rings.”

  Another long silence between us.

  James shifts. Looks at me. “Do you regret it?”

  I meet his eyes. “Regret what? Being with Craig? Staying with him to the end? Or what you and I just did?”

  He scoffs, tilts his head back on his neck. “I meant what we just did. But…the rest too, I suppose. Since we’re talking about it.”

  “No, I don’t regret what you and I just did, James.” I pin the blanket under my arms, against my sides. “I don’t regret it at all. I…it was the best I’ve felt in…a very, very, very long time.”

  “Me too.”

  “Do you regret it?” I ask him.

  He doesn’t answer right away. “I…no. I don’t regret it. But I’m still…I don’t know how to put it. Fucked up about it. I feel…guilty, I guess. Like I betrayed her. But I know she’s… gone. And before she died, she made me promise not to stay alone forever. So I…I don’t think she would be mad, or whatever. That’s a stupid way to put it, but I’m not very good with words. She wanted me to find someone. I was with her when she died. I held her hand. We were separated by the blue tarp thing they put up for a C-section, and she was bleeding out and she knew it, and no one could stop it and…she squeezed my hand as hard as she could and looked at me, and begged me to not stay alone forever. She knew me, I guess. Knew I’d…well, do what I’ve done: close up. And she loved me so much she wanted me to find some kind of happiness after she was gone. Even in death she was thinking about me.” A tense, thick, sharp silence. “But I still feel guilty. Looking at you. Wanting you. Kissing you. Touching you. Wanting you as bad as I fucking want you? It feels like a betrayal of her. Of what we had for twenty fucking years. Of how I felt about her, how I loved her. And—and you touching me…that felt…so—god, I’ve had the worst…best…I don’t know—the craziest, dirtiest dreams since we met, since we kissed, and you touching me…it was…” He shakes his head and trails off.

  “It was what, James?”

  He shakes his head, his mouth moving but no words coming out. He tries again, with a sharp breath. “It felt amazing. I wish I had better words to use, but I don’t. Amazing isn’t strong enough. It was incredible. But the guilt…fuck, the guilt.” He looks at me, then, after long moments of staring anywhere but at my eyes.

  “You dreamed about me?” I ask, a small smirk on my lips. I can’t help but be a little pleased by the fact that he’s dreamed about me.

  He groans, head tilted backward again, hand rubbing over his lips. “Yes.”

  “What kind of dreams?” I keep looking at him, watching him. “You said crazy, dirty dreams.”

  He nods. “Yeah.”

  “Tell me.”

  He shakes his head. “I felt shitty about that too.”

  “James, you have to know—”

  “I do know. She’s gone and I’m allowed to move on. I know.” He shakes his head. “When I say I felt shitty about it, I didn’t mean like that. I meant…in terms of you. I…” Another shake of his head, another trailed off sentence.

  “What, James?” I ask. “Tell me.”

  “You’re fishing.”

  “Yep.”

  He looks at me, brown eyes steady and wide and deep. “I had fantasies about you, Nova. Dirty stuff. You can probably guess what I dreamed about. You. What we just did. Other stuff.”

  “I’ve dreamed about you, too. Had thoughts.” I pause, try to smile but the tension is too taut and thick, and I can’t. “Wanted you, and tried to pretend I didn’t. Woke up with dreams about you—about us—lingering, and feeling guilty about it, because we agreed we wouldn’t…” I gesture toward the kitchen. “Do exactly that.”

  “So neither of us regret it,” James says, “but…now what?”

  I shake my head and shrug. “I have no idea.”

  “That makes two of us.” A phone rings in the distance, and it breaks the moment. James growls. “That’s mine.”

  “You should answer it. It’s probably important.”

  “It’s always important.”

  “All the more reason to answer it.”

  “You trying to get rid of me?” he asks, and I think he’s hiding a real question behind a joke.

  “No,” I say. “I’m not. But I’m really mixed up and confused right now, and I need to figure things out.”

  James nods. Slides off the bed, and I’m surprised yet again at how lithe and quiet he can be, for such a huge, muscular man. He exits my room and I hear him call back whoever had called him. While he’s gone, I grab my knee-length plush robe from the back of my bedroom door and put it on, tie it. When James comes back, he’s fully dressed, hat back on, Oakleys on the brim, shirt tucked behind the buckle of his black leather belt.

  His eyes rake over me in my robe, and then fix on my eyes. “I have to go. A client’s foundation is cracking.”

  “Not good.”

  “Nope. They’re gonna want me to fix it, but you really need a foundation repair specialist for that.” He shuffles his feet. “I didn’t build the house, by the way. When I put in a foundation, it don’t crack.”

  I smile. “I know.”

  “Nova, I…” He trails off, shaking his head. “I don’t know what the hell to say, to be honest.”

  “I don’t either. We kind of messed up our agreement, didn’t we?”

  He laughs. “Yeah. No more pretending we’re not attracted to each other, huh?”

  “That was a pipe dream, I think.”

  He nods. “Yeah, it was.” Another long silence. “So, um. The remodel.”

  “James—”

  “It’s not a favor,” he cuts in. “Yes, I like you. Yes, I’m fucking crazy attracted to you. I just…I want to do this for you. I’m not sure I can give you a reason that makes any sense. It’s not because you’re hot, or because of what we just did… It’s…everything. It’s you. I want to remodel your house because I like you, because of all the reasons I said I wasn’t doing it, and because I just…I’m a builder, and it’s what I do, and I’m a man attracted to a woman and we do crazy shit like high-dollar remodels for cost when we like a woman. I don’t know what else to say.”

  “The obstinate, stubborn, independent part of me is screaming at me to say no.” I laugh. “But I guess being selfish is winning. Because the vision you described for my house? James, I want that.”

  He stands in front of me—we’re in the center of my bedroom, and he’s towering over me, six inches taller and staring down at me with those intense, wild brown eyes. “There is one other reason I want to do the remodel.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “So I can see more of you.”

  I laugh. “Funny. That’s the other reason I’m saying yes, and I’m glad you voiced it first.” I sober, then. “Are we…we’re not going to try and pretend this didn’t happen, are we?”

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “Neither can I.”

  “But…just being totally honest—”

  “You’re not sure you can emotionally handle a repeat,” I guess. “Or anything more.”

  He sighs, nods, and rubs his beard with one hand. “Yeah.”

  “But you still want to see me again?”

  He nods. “Yeah.”

  “So things are going to continue to be awkward, weird, and complicated.”

  “I don’t know how to make it different.”

  “Me either.” I put my hands on his shoulders. Lift up on my toes. Kiss his cheekbone, just above his beard line. “Then it’ll just be awkward, weird, and complicated.”

  He accepts my kiss on his cheek, and then twists his face and suddenly we’re kissing again, and I’m on fire and tasting his tongue and whimpering—

  “Dammit, dammit, dammit.” He pulls away abruptly. “Complicated. So fucking complicated.”

  I touch my lips with two fingers. “Very complicated.”

  “I have to go.” He growls this from across the room.

  “Yeah, you do.”

  Without another word, without a backward glance, he leaves. Out of my room, out of my house, out of my driveway. I stay in my room, sit on my bed, and try to figure out if I want to laugh or cry or do both.

  That just happened.

  I put my hands over my mouth and let myself have a girly moment—I scream, kick my feet, and laugh hysterically. Because that’s better than crying.

  I need a shower: I’m still sticky…he missed a few spots when he was cleaning me up.

  Never in any of my wildest, dirtiest wet dreams of James, ever, did I picture us doing what we just did. Even as a teenager, even in my promiscuous period, I never did anything that hot. That messy. It wasn’t sex, so what was it? Dirty. Hot. Impetuous. Like we just…didn’t have any chance of resisting the need to just touch each other.

  God…

  I need a shower, and then I need to talk to Audra.

  Chapter 7

  Audra shows up twenty minutes after James leaves, parking her slick little white Mercedes convertible in the driveway behind my truck, letting herself into my house. She’s dressed in shimmery, sparkly purple skintight workout shorts that only just barely cover her actual buttocks and give her mad camel toe. The shorts are paired with a violently yellow sports bra that looks painfully tight but still doesn’t do much to contain her naturally massive mammaries. Her shoes are an eye-watering barrage of bright colors, and her hair is twisted back in a scalp-tightening French braid. She’s coated in a sheen of sweat, and if I weren’t a completely and utterly avowed straight woman, I’d have a hard-on for her, to be honest.

  I’m still in my bathrobe, or rather, in my bathrobe again because I took a shower. My hair is damp and brushed straight back, sticking to my neck. Audra rummages in my cabinets until she finds a glass, fills it with ice and water, and drains it, refills it, and then arches an eyebrow at me.

  “So. The doctor is in, my dear,” she says. “Talk to me.”

  I shake my head and sigh. “I don’t even know where to start.”

  She smirks. “It’s the middle of the day and you just took a shower. Plus, you called me instead of Imogen or Laurel.” She takes a sip of her ice water. “You fucked James.”

  “We didn’t fuck,” I say.

  She narrows her eyebrows at me. “You did something, and you can’t convince me otherwise.”

  I flip my hair away from my neck. “I’m not saying we didn’t do anything, I’m saying we didn’t have sex.”

  She frowns. “Intriguing. Go on.”

  “We…messed around.”

  “And? Why am I here? You wouldn’t call me to come over and talk if you didn’t have some sort of…I don’t know—conflict.”

  I fill and turn on my electric kettle to make tea. “I guess I should give you the backstory. So, the pool party where I first met you guys—”

  “I thought for sure you and James were gonna be a thing, like, as of that day.”

  “Under different circumstances, we probably would have been. But we both have…issues.”

  “James lost his wife in childbirth, so I get his hang up, but you’re little miss ‘I don’t talk about my past’, so I have no idea what your issue is.”

  I laugh. “Funny thing is, I had a major panic attack about a week ago and showed up at Laurel’s house at three a.m., sobbing. And I told her my whole story. And the process of telling her my story I realized I have to quit planning Imogen and Jesse’s wedding, because of the aforementioned hang-up, which led me to having to tell her the story. Then I sort of told James some of the story when he was here quoting me on a remodel and we, um…yeah.”

  “So basically everyone knows but me?”

  I laugh. “Yep. You’re the last to know.” I shake my head. “No. Laurel and Imogen are the only ones who know the whole story.”

  I give her a highlights version, and when I’m done, she’s staring at me with interest.

  “So that’s why you’re such a bitch all the time,” she says, with a grin that tells me she’s kidding.

  “Yeah, exactly,” I say, with another laugh. “I’m a bitch because life dealt me some shitty hands.”

  “So you and James have that in common, then—having lost a partner.” She frowns. “I’d think that would bond you a little.”

  “You’d think. But in reality, it just makes both of us reticent to trust anyone, and we feel guilty for doing anything with anyone. For enjoying anything, because it feels like betraying our dead lover.”

  Audra winces. “Oh.”

  I nod. “Yeah, oh.”

  “So, is that what happened? You guys messed around and now you have survivor’s guilt or something?”

  “Wish it was that simple or easy,” I say.

  Audra waves a hand. “So? What the hell happened? Don’t keep a bitch waiting.”

  “Back to the backstory, first,” I say. “The pool party. We clicked, you know? Like, instant chemistry. Attraction, sexual tension from the first glance, the whole shebang.”

  “But.”

  “We kissed,” I say, staring out the window. “And by kissed, I mean, he slammed me up against the refrigerator and kissed me absolutely stupid. Like, I’ve never been kissed that way by anyone, ever, not even by my dead boyfriend.” I pause, then. “And actually, that was my exact thought, verbatim—not even Craig ever kissed me this way. And I froze.”

  “Oh,” Audra says, understanding dawning. “Oh boy.”

  “And it turns out James had a similar thought. Except in his case, it wasn’t just a boyfriend, it was his high school sweetheart, the only woman he ever kissed, touched, dated, anything—not to mention the mother of his children and his wife of twenty years.”

  “Yikes.”

  “Yeah, so kissing me, and feeling like it was that good, as good or better than kissing his wife? Grounds for feeling a little guilty, I’d say.”

  “Must have been a hell of a kiss,” Audra notes.

  I snort. “You have no idea.” I sigh dreamily. “Never in my life has a single kiss affected me that way—no touching anywhere except his hands on my face and mine on his shoulders. I seriously got wet from the kiss. If he’d touched me literally anywhere, I’d probably have spontaneously orgasmed.”

  “Jesus,” Audra says, eyes widening.

  “Yeah.” The kettle comes to a boil and turns off, and I pour myself a mug of green tea; I wiggle an empty mug at Audra as an offer, and she shrugs and nods, so I pour her some too. “So, after the kiss, and our individually motivated freak-outs, we agreed that maybe it was best for both of us if we just…ignored the thing between us and acted like nothing had ever happened.”

  Audra nods. “Which is why things were so weird between you two for the last year.” She laughs. “It totally worked, too, I bet,” she says, her voice dripping sarcasm.

  I sigh again. “I mean, yeah. It worked…until it didn’t.”

  “Usually how that goes, in my experience.”

  “Because you have SO much experience pretending you don’t feel sexually attracted to someone.”

  She fake-glares at me. “For your information, I TOTALLY held out on sleeping with Franco for, like, DAYS, at least.”

  “Wow,” I say, deadpan. “Such restraint.”

  “Right? I know.” She goes serious, then. “So you and James pretended you didn’t have the hots for each other for over a year, and then…?”

  “And then…” I shake my head. “If I’m going to actually tell you this, I need to sit down.”

  I take my tea into the living room and curl up in my favorite spot: my gray suede recliner I’d found for twenty bucks at a resale shop. I blow across the top of my tea, and then take a sip.

  “So, I had a panic attack. Planning the wedding for Imogen and Jesse brought up all these feelings I’d kept buried for years—I designed centerpieces and stuff that was pretty much exactly what I’d planned for my own wedding to Craig…the wedding that never happened, because he got cancer and died without ever even proposing.”