Second Time's the Charm

Pushing back from the table, he stood. To come closer? Just get the inevitable over with? They’d acknowledged their mutual attraction....

“I’ll stop by to see if the tile’s in on my way home from work tomorrow,” he said, gathering her plate and his, and heading to the sink.

“Great.” She stood, too. Afraid to follow him to the sink. To get any closer. Afraid of herself. “You don’t have to do those,” she said.

“Are you kidding?” Ignoring her protest, he proceeded to locate her scrubber on the inside cupboard door in front of the sink, rinsed the dishes and loaded them with precision into the dishwasher. “I learned early on that if you don’t help prepare the meal, you help with the dishes.”

“You’ve never mentioned your folks,” she said. “Abe’s mom isn’t in his life, but what about his grandparents?”

Good, Lil. Much better. Kinda hard to think about sex when moms and dads were the topic of conversation.

But there was that gorgeous butt again. The opposite side of the groin pressing up against her kitchen sink.

She had never cared much for butts before. Why now? Why his?

Breaking out of her musings, she realized he hadn’t answered her.

He finished the dishes. Wiped the table, rinsed her cloth and hung it back up on the bar inside the cupboard door. Closed the cupboard with what seemed like finality.

“Jon?”

“It’s just Abe and me.” He leaned his sexy backside against the counter and faced her.

“You sound defensive.” He studied her. She wasn’t sure what he was expecting to find.

Eventually, he moved back to the table and dropped into the chair he’d occupied earlier. Joining him, she felt like she’d passed some kind of test.

And was leery to speak for fear of saying the wrong thing.

“I’m sorry.” They weren’t the words she’d expected.

“For what?”

“I just... I know I have an attitude when it comes to...some things. I’m working on it.”

Not sure where they were heading, Lillie just nodded. Did his folks blame him for having a child out of wedlock? In this day and age that was a little hard to believe.

“You want to talk about it?” she finally asked.

“Not really. But if you’re going to help Abe, I suppose you should probably know a little bit mor

e about him.”

“It might help,” she said. “Was there some trauma in his life? Something to do with your folks?”

Maybe his loss was still new...raw. It had taken her a couple of years before she could talk about her parents without breaking into tears.

“I have no folks,” Jon said.

She waited.

His elbows on his knees, he stared at the floor. “As in, I’ve never had folks.”

“Oh.”

“I was born—full-term, amazingly—to a user.”

“Drugs?”