Cameron
"So Brett had nothing to do with this?" I asked. We were on the couch. The coffee table was gone, and we had moved it up closer to the fire. Natalie was sitting with her legs crossed, facing me, holding her plate in one hand and twirling her pasta around on her fork with the other.
"Nope," she said.
"I don't believe you." She shrugged and ate a mouthful of pasta. I had halfway expected that she'd turn it down, say she didn't eat carbs or something. I had met some women like that, dated some too, and Natalie, no fault of hers, kind of fit the bill. No shame in taking care of yourself, but it had been a little unfair of me to make that assumption of her. If she had not wanted to pursue law, she could have made money on her looks. Modelling or marrying rich, or both.
"What? Don't believe I was concerned and thought that if I could do something to help that I should do it?"
"Nope," I said, smirking at her. She laughed. She had lost the jacket she had been wearing and was in a comfortable-looking woolen sweater. She had thought ahead before making the trip over here, getting some extra clothes on the way. She claimed that she had figured she might have to use a hotel after getting caught in the storm, but I disagreed. If there had been any chance of making her stay, I wouldn't have let her go to a hotel. While I cooked, she had gone back to her car to get the clothes and her purse. Her makeup was all washed off, and she had tied her hair up away from her face.
I never asked questions when it came to women and their makeup. All I knew was it went on their faces and could be surprisingly expensive. Natalie looked... Well I didn't know why she used the stuff at all. She was beautiful without it. Her eyes were bright, and I couldn't stop watching her lips as she talked to me. It wasn't like it was the first time, but clearly, things had escalated a little bit. She was spending the night; this night and probably a couple more if the snow didn't let up. We were about to have to get a lot more comfortable with each other, and I had no problem with that.
I couldn't believe it. Just when I had written it all off as bad luck and bad timing, here she was, right where I wanted, and neither of us could leave. "I think you were just looking for another reason to come up here."
"You didn't give me very many," she shot back.
"Yet here you are. And you brought gifts." She rolled her eyes and ate some more of the pasta. It was just regular pasta noodles and a tomato-based pasta sauce. We weren't in the kind of kitchen where I could try and impress her, but she hadn't complained.
"Were you really not going to go after what I told you yesterday?"
"I wasn't," I said honestly. "I would have been able to get by if I had been alone. Having you here complicates things, to say the least. Showing up with more food was the least you could have done."
"How has it been?"
"Good," I said lightly.
"Now I don't believe you."
"How do you like it so far?" I asked. She looked around the room like she was evaluating it.
"A little bare bones, but it's warm."
"Sorry I don't have a palace for you, princess."
She wrinkled her nose, scoffing. "Look who's talking," she said. "Which one of us has our name on a skyscraper?" Ouch, she had me there.
"Which one of us came to the mountains wearing heels and makeup?"
"I had places to be after coming here. This," she said, motioning at the cabin, "came totally
out of left field."
"How bad is the snow back home?"
"Nothing next to this. Not enough yet to make the BYU kids stay indoors."
"BYU? Wait, where do you live?"
"Provo."
"No way. Me too," I said, before remembering where we were, "I mean, not anymore, but I had a place there." I hadn't done anything with it yet, but I had been thinking about selling. I asked her where she had lived, and she told me—just ten minutes from where my house had been. Shit, I thought. She had really been right there. At work, every day, and a ten-minute drive from my home, and this was what it had taken to throw us together. Sounded like a pretty strong cosmic message, if you believed in that kind of thing, or the biggest coincidence possible. Coincidence or not, I was here and so was she.
I had had time now to think about all the ways things could have gone differently for us if we had gotten to know each other sooner or at the very least had a conversation because of something other than my parents dying. Timing still couldn't have been worse, but we were both here now, and ‘til the snow cleared, we were going to stay here. I couldn't stop what I thought about her. I mean two people snowed in for a number of days, all that time alone together was enough to encourage them into seeking more than just warmth with each other.
"I read that your parents lived in Holladay," she said. I told her it was true. Technically Salt Lake was my hometown, but I hadn't lived there for years. It hit me hearing myself talk that it was something I hardly did anymore. Speak. I mean, sometimes I had found myself speaking out loud alone, but it had been a good little while since I’d had someone to listen when I did. And that someone being a beautiful woman I should have spoken to a year ago when I had started seeing her around the office.
"What about you?" I asked.