Breaking Even (Sterling Shore 5)

RYE

Does this girl buy anything other than white or black cotton panties? No lace, no satin, no other color. How can someone so feisty manage to be so dull in every other way? There's no way she's getting laid if she’s wearing this stuff.

She has a thousand candles, like most girls, and they’re all lit throughout the room and the house, giving me a view of the sad life she leads. I should have snooped when I was cutting down her bed.

“What the hell are you doing?” she yells at me, slapping my back and then dancing around while clutching her hand as she scowls at me. “That hurt!” she barks.

I look at her as though she's lost her mind while I close her sad underwear drawer.

“You hit me,” I remind her as she glares at me.

Her hair is wet and dripping down the front of her red shirt. That wouldn't be so distracting if I had gotten laid in the past few months. Damn work.

“Yeah, but you're looking through my panties!”

“That's what you call them?” I ask, sounding intentionally disappointed as I point over my shoulder, gesturing to the drawer of the dreary.

Her eyes rake over my naked chest and fall down to the pink towel clasped around my waist. Good thing I'm sexy enough to pull off any color.

She blushes while attempting to scowl, but she's too busy getting lost in her fantasies. While she's distracted, I walk by her, pretending as though I didn't just break the cardinal rule about personal boundaries. You learn a lot about someone by their underwear drawer. Poor girl has no life.

No wonder she started a war with me. It's probably the only excitement she ever gets.

“Why were you looking at my panties, and why are you wearing my towel?” she asks as she follows me out.

“Let me go grab some clothes and we'll go get something to eat,” I say instead of answering her question.

Her footsteps pause, and I fight back my grin.

“Why would I go to get something to eat with you?”

“Because I'm starving and you interrupted my food, which is too cold to eat by now, and I have no way of warming it up. Get ready.”

“I'm already ready,” she says as I turn around.

Her hair is still wet, she’s wearing very little makeup, and her clothes are two sizes too big for her. Did I mention her hair is wet?

“Just thought you might want to wear something that fits. Or maybe dry your hair.”

“I prefer comfortable stuff,” she says, an angry, defensive undercurrent to her tone. “And I can’t dry my hair without power. I’ll look like a clown if I attempt makeup by candlelight.”

Sheesh. She blows my kitchen to hell with her ketchup bomb, and she's pissed at me. Hell, I didn’t even point out the makeup bit. Not aloud, anyway. Well, I don’t think I did.

“Fine. I'll be back in five.”

I jog over to my house while still wearing her towel, and ignore the numerous whistles and mocking catcalls I hear in the darkness. At least they can't tell the damn thing is pink.

It doesn’t take me long to pull on some clean, ketchup-free clothes—even though the fact I can’t see a damn thing makes me uncertain about what I’m even wearing.

Several flashlight beams are littering the sidewalks when I come back out, and my feisty little neighbor is standing in my yard, her back turned to me as the moonlight gives us all the light it can produce—which isn’t too much tonight.

“You could have come in,” I say as I shut and lock the door.

She turns around and her arms fall to her sides.

“I'm still trying to figure out what you're about to do,” she says, her eyes probably oozing skepticism, but it's too dark to see.

That's when the lights come back on, and the neighborhood comes to life as all the interrupted evenings resume. She looks up at the streetlights, and she shrugs.