Once in the elevator she quickly pulled out her phone to check the number of Jake’s unit. She really hoped he was alone in that shower and didn’t have … company.
Her stomach twisted at the thought. What if her no-show last night had had him reaching for the proverbial black book? What if he’d spent the evening with a woman who hadn’t stood him up? A woman who wasn’t so busy being proposed to by her ex-boyfriend, and then breaking down afterward, that she hadn’t even managed a simple text message?
She took a deep breath and knocked on his door.
Please be alone, please be alone, please—
He was wearing a towel. Only a towel.
His expression wasn’t quite ice-cold. But it was close.
“Hey,” she said nervously.
He looked at her for several seconds, leaning against the door jamb like it was the most natural thing in the world to be half naked with his front door wide open.
Finally he slowly moved aside and allowed her to enter. “I see I’m paying good money for a doorman.”
“Oh, you mean Carl?” she asked, keeping her voice chipper. “He’s a real sweetie. Just had to give him the password and he let me right up.”
“The password?”
“The names of your family members,” she said, glancing around curiously at his apartment. “I nailed it.”
Jake grunted as Grace picked up a picture of said family members. It was one of several framed photos of his family, as well as a handful of exotic-looking landscapes.
The apartment was definitely lived in. The piles of magazines and stacks of books leaned toward cluttered. But it wasn’t unclean. There weren’t the clichéd pizza boxes and empty beer bottles she’d envisioned in the typical bachelor pad.
“Did you take these?” she asked, leaning down to get a closer look at what looked like a picture of some sort of ruins amid a jungle.
He came up behind her, and the smell of clean man washed over her.
Don’t swoon. Don’t you dare swoon, 2.0 ordered.
“Yeah, a few years ago. Spent three months in South America bouncing around.”
“Three months? What about work?”
“That was work. I was freelancing for a travel magazine.”
“That must have been hard,” she said, setting the picture down and picking up another of a spectacular waterfall.
“Hard?”
“Yeah. Not having a home base,” she said. “I’d go crazy not having a familiar place to come home to every night.”
Something bleak flashed across his face before the indifferent mask fell back into place.
“I like it, actually. Keeps things interesting.”
“Right. I forget that what I see as routine, you probably see as mundane,” she said, keeping her voice light even as her heart felt heavy.
As if she needed another reminder that her ideal future was one of stability and predictability and his was one of constant change. At least as it pertained to his women.
But she hadn’t come here to mope or snoop. She’d come to apologize.
“Jake,” she said, turning around. “I—”
He’d disappeared.