“I SWEAR I’M NOT stalking you,” Mark said in lieu of a greeting as Addy stepped out the door Thursday afternoon.
Sitting on the low wall in front of her unit, she watched as he slid a plastic box under her car, used pliers to loosen something up and guided the center of the box to catch the flow of used and dirty oil.
“I know you’re not,” she said, enjoying the break from the personnel files she’d been perusing all afternoon. Pleasingly boring files belonging to well-qualified people.
“I want to warn you, she’s probably cooking up some plan to get you and me together.”
“As long as we know it’s not going to happen, there’s no harm in her meddling. We both understand and accept it for what it is.”
His grin warmed her more than the bright sun shining down on them. She should go in.
But she didn’t feel right leaving him all alone to tend to her vehicle.
“I hate to think what she says about me when I’m not around to defend myself,” Mark said, leaning back against his truck, which was parked in the driveway next to her car.
“I can tell you one thing she never mentions,” she said. “Your grandmother never mentions any of your friends.”
“She didn’t think they were good enough for me.”
“You don’t agree?”
“No. I grew up with them. Some of them are like family to me.”
“Any one more family than the others?”
She handed Mark the glass of tea from the tray she’d carried out and he sipped. “I was closer to some than others.”
“Did you have a woman you were closer to than others?”
It wasn’t her business. Absolutely not her business.
But if she knew, she could stop obsessing about it. Could stop wondering if there were late-night phone calls. If some afternoon she might come home to find a strange woman on their shared doorstep.
If she knew his heart was taken, she could stop imagining him naked.
He crossed his ankles, studied his flip-flops. “I did.”
“As in past tense?”
Squinting in the sunshine, he looked at her. “I asked her to marry me. She turned me down.”
Was the woman daft? “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m not sure that I was ready to marry her. I just didn’t want to leave her high and dry.”
“Not much of a reason to marry.”
“I was deciding whether or not to come out here,” he said. “We’d been seeing each other a couple of years. I’d reached a turning point. I wanted her to know that I hadn’t just been using her until something better in life came along.”
“Like a scholarship offer.”
“Like anything.”
“Do you love her?”
“I care about her, yeah.”
She needed him to love the woman—so much that there’d be no chance for anything to develop between them.