Camden (The Henchmen MC 18)

Standing there being so stupidly gorgeous and all.

Really, was it necessary for one person to get all the good genes like that? Wouldn't it be fairer to the species as a whole to divvy out that thick, dark hair to one guy, then those impressively lashed gooey chocolate eyes to another, then give that proud brow and strong jaw and amazing cheekbones to other guys entirely? Maybe give someone else a couple of his inches since being over six foot was completely unnecessary.

I stopped myself there.

Knowing that if I kept at it, I would start thinking about other parts of his anatomy.

And that, well, yeah, my poor system didn't need that.

I just hadn't expected him.

Then there he was.

Getting me all flustered.

Making me talk to him.

Then be a complete idiot when I realized he didn't hear me, didn't speak.

I wanted to let him know I wasn't, you know, unfeeling or whatever.

So after I picked up my supplies from the food store, I ran really quickly into the office supply place, thanking the timing of the universe that it was back-to-school time and everything was on sale at a steep discount, which meant the whiteboard and hanging thingymabobber didn't cut too much into my grocery budget for the week.

I needed to be thinking about that.

Getting some jobs lined up, making some money, putting the buffer back into my account. Well, not my account. I didn't have accounts. Not anymore. But into my carefully stashed savings.

I had enough for the rent and my security deposit - and I said a little prayer of gratitude that the place came furnished - and I would be able to hold myself over bills-wise for a few weeks. But just barely. And only if I was incredibly careful.

No more impulse buys.

Not even to be nice to my hot new neighbor.

Temporary.

He would be a temporary neighbor.

They always were.

I didn't have to like that for it to be the truth. I mean, sometimes I did like it. Because sometimes you get trapped across the hall from some real winners. Like the early twenties couple who - on alternating nights - had rip-roaring, ear-splitting, thing-breaking fights until the wee hours of the morning, or had bedspring-groaning, headboard-knocking, plaster-cracking, screams-to-God sex until the sun was coming up. After them there was the battering ram of a woman in her eighties with an indoor chain-smoking habit - despite indoor smoking being against the rules in that building - that made me have to stick towels under my doors to try (and usually fail) to keep the smell out. There was Stanley, the three-time-loser, fresh off his third divorce, who thought I would make a fine fourth Mrs. Stanley Mitchell, despite being old enough to be my father.

Those were just a few of the many, many terrible neighbors I had in the past. Ones I was happy to leave behind when the time came.

Maybe that was why I was so gung-ho to make a connection with this one. There was no smoking, no leering, and no loud fights or sex coming from his apartment.

That said, was he exactly the sort of man I should have been trying to get to know? Well, seeing as he was wearing a biker cut with a one-percenter badge, and the fact that I swear everything about him exuded darkness - or even death - then, you know, not really. Any sane woman would have stuck to her plan of ducking her head and hustling past. Even if he was hot. I mean Ted Bundy was - by 70's standards - a hottie; that didn't mean he didn't butcher a ton of women. Sometimes the good-looking guys were the creepers too.

Really, I just wanted to make good on my social faux pas. I hadn't exactly encountered a lot of deaf people in my life; I had been clumsy with my trying not to be weird about it.

That was all it was.

I wasn't going to be making any kind of actual connection.

Yet nothing stopped me, the next morning, from erasing the reintroduction and grabbing the marker again.Nice to meet you, Camden. Do you happen to know any places in town that would have bulletin boards for me to post something up on? I mean, not to bother you. Just... if you can think of anything. - AnnieEven in a whiteboard message, I was a little rambling. I also had this tendency to kneecap my sentences - add modifiers like "If you don't mind" or "maybe" or "kind of" or "just," words to soften everything I said. At least that was what the therapist my mother had brought me to see after her somewhat brutal divorce had told me. She also told me that I did it because I had grown up in a house with someone who constantly undermined not only my mother and myself, but all women; thinking we should be softer, sweeter, more accommodating, less demanding.