Close to You (Fusion 2)

“I’m fine,” I reply. “I was just going to say hi. No big deal. I have some stuff to do, so if you could just take the cat outside with you when you go, I’d appreciate it.”

I stand and move to leave the room, but Landon catches my wrist in his hand to stop me. Since I was young, Landon’s always caught my wrist when he wanted to take a bite of whatever I was eating, or just to catch my attention. He’s a touchy-feely guy. I frown down into his face and my heart catches. His blue eyes are . . . sad.

And my arm is on fire from his touch.

“I really am sorry,” he says. “I’m just not myself these days.”

I gently tug my arm out of his grasp and sit back down, watching him. “Okay.”

“I didn’t want to come home,” he says as he pets the cat, currently purring happily as if he lives here. “I guess things are just weird right now. But that doesn’t mean I can snap at you. You’re the sweetest person I know.”

“You don’t know me anymore,” I murmur, remembering what I thought about in the car. Landon’s brow furrows, but then he nods.

“Maybe not. But I do know that you’re sweet, and I care about you, and I just wanted to say I’m sorry for being an ass.”

“Thank you.”

He looks over at me now and really looks at me, his eyes tracking me from head to toe, then finding mine again. “You look great.”

“Thank you,” I repeat, not knowing what else to say. I can see that he’s hurting, and maybe confused, and everything in me wants to scoop him up and pet him, like he’s the cat, to soothe him and comfort him.

But I can’t. It’s not my place. So I sit where I am, waiting for him to make the next move.

After a long minute, he stands, sets the cat on the floor, and walks to the door. “Thanks for stopping by, Cami,” he says, nods, and walks out.

I sigh and stare at the cat. “You’re not going to leave, are you?”

He simply jumps back up on the couch where Landon was just sitting, curls into a ball, and immediately goes to sleep.

“YOU’RE LATE,” I inform Riley, who just walked through my door with a bottle of wine and a grocery-store sack full of ice cream.

“Sorry,” she says as she hurries into the kitchen to stow away the ice cream and pop open the wine. “I got held up on a call with the Web designer. But I brought sugar and wine, so I should be forgiven. Besides, the show hasn’t started yet.”

I slap slices of pizza on plates for both of us, and we each take a plate and a glass to the living room and settle in for our date night.

Every week, Riley, another best friend of mine, and business partner, comes over and we watch our favorite shows back-to-back while eating bad food and drinking too much wine.

It’s tradition.

“Meow,” the cat says as he slinks into the room, his nose sniffing out the food.

“What the hell!” Riley says in surprise. “When did you get a cat?”

“I didn’t,” I reply as the opening credits for The Vampire Diaries begins. “He got me.”

“Huh?”

I explain how he ran in the house and refuses to leave. “So I bought him some food and a bed and some toys.”

“You got a cat,” Riley says, grinning.

“He got me,” I say again.

“What’s his name?”

“Scoot. Because he won’t scoot.”

“I think it’s awesome,” Riley says with a smile, and scratches Scoot’s ears, making him purr. “He’s so pretty.”

“And stubborn. He doesn’t listen. I tell him he can’t sleep on my bed, and he does it anyway. The only thing he does right is use the litter box.”

“He’s a cat,” she says with a shrug. “That’s what cats do.”

We settle in to eat and watch TV as Scoot jumps up on the back of the couch and curls into a ball to sleep and watch over us.

“I’m telling you,” Riley says as she sips her wine. “That Ian Somerhalder is going to eventually be my husband.”

“He’s already married,” I remind her, and watch as young vampires feed on innocent bystanders while also saving the town from evil.

It’s an amazing sort of irony.

“For him I could be a home wrecker,” she says thoughtfully. “I mean, look at him.”

“Sexy for sure,” I reply with a nod. “Except when he has blood dripping down his chin.”

“I wouldn’t kick him out of bed for having blood dripping down his chin,” she says with a smirk. “Unless he wanted to do me in the bathroom.”

“Ew,” I reply.

“You don’t like to do it in the bathroom?”

“No, the blood part. Ew.”

We giggle, then settle in to enjoy the rest of the show. When it’s over, I pause the DVR so we can clean up the pizza, refill our wine, and scoop ice cream. Because right after The Vampire Diaries is The Originals, an offshoot of The Vampire Diaries.

Just as I’m about to resume the TV, Riley says, “So, have you seen Landon?”

She’s not looking directly at me, and she says it as if she’s asking me if I’ve checked the weather forecast for tomorrow.

“I saw him the other day,” I reply. “Just for a minute.”

I really don’t want to get into it. The girls all know that I’ve crushed on Landon for years.

“Kat said he came into the restaurant the other day,” Riley says. Kat is the fifth friend of our group. The five of us co-own Seduction, a trendy restaurant in Portland. We’ve been open for almost a year, and business couldn’t be better.