Love On Her Terms
Love On Her Terms
Jennifer Lohmann
If only attraction always led to happily ever after…Mina Clements wants to grab life with both hands. With a fixer-upper and a fresh start in Montana, the graphic novelist is ready to do just that. Plus, having handsome handyman Levi Pardo next door could be a bonus… But even though sparks sizzle when Levi helps with her renovations, the widower’s in no hurry to fall in love again. Still, he’s much more than the neighbour who looks good swinging a hammer. He’s a man she wants to trust with her biggest secret—one that can either bring them closer or wreck the new beginning they both need.
If only attraction always led to happily ever after...
Mina Clements wants to grab life with both hands. With a fixer-upper and a fresh start in Montana, the graphic novelist is ready to do just that. Plus, having handsome handyman Levi Pardo next door could be a bonus... But even though sparks sizzle when Levi helps with her renovations, the widower’s in no hurry to fall in love again. Still, he’s much more than the neighbor who looks good swinging a hammer. He’s a man she wants to trust with her biggest secret—one that can either bring them closer or wreck the new beginning they both need.
Mina couldn’t hear over the beating of her heart and the rush of blood in her ears.
“Are you okay?” Levi said, his forehead creased in confusion over her sudden change of behavior.
“I’m fine.” Her voice sounded breathy and disjointed to her ears, but he only nodded.
Levi’s gaze had become intense with emotion during the time they’d been sitting on the couch. Intent had softened his jaw and, she saw as he set both their bowls on the ice cream table, his shoulders. As he sat back up, the coming kiss dulled the world around them.
He leaned in to her, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. “Are you sure you’re feeling okay?”
“I’m sure,” she reassured him, her lie failing miserably.
But Levi didn’t seem to notice her failure. Or, if he did, he didn’t care. Every skin cell burned as he trailed his finger along her jawline. The panic beating inside her couldn’t hide the intensity with which she wanted his lips pressed against hers. The fear didn’t stop her from leaning in to him, from meeting him halfway.
Dear Reader (#u7bdb9760-fbfd-5cc9-b506-7280383145af),
Love on Her Terms is one of those books that was born from many places yet somehow came together perfectly. There’s no question this book is influenced by the many times I’ve watched the 1966 movie A Man and a Woman (my mom’s favorite). And for years I’d wanted to write about a young woman who moves in next door to a cranky widower. She brings new sparkle to his life, but she has a chronic illness, and my hero’s not sure he can handle it. Of course, the heroine’s illness kept eluding me. Then while ruminating on a different novel where the heroine has HIV, a friend asked on Twitter if there were any heterosexual romances where one character has HIV. I knew then that I had to put the two ideas together! Sometimes—okay, often—authors need a friendly push.
My heroine, Mina, is also a graphic novelist so I can’t resist recommending Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. It’s a wonderful exploration of the art form whether you’ve read comics and graphic novels or are new to the format entirely. Some of his theories made my jaw drop in awe. And seriously, if you do pick up the book and want to talk about it—shoot me an email! And for a real-life love story similar to Love on Her Terms, read Blue Pills: A Positive Love Story by Frederik Peeters. It’s Peeters’s graphic novel memoir about falling in love with an HIV-positive woman, who also has an HIV-positive son. As a librarian and book lover, suggesting books is one of my favorite pastimes, and these are two good ones!
Love on Her Terms was a powerful book for me to write and I hope it’s just as powerful for you to read.
Enjoy,
Jennifer
Love on Her Terms
Jennifer Lohmann
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
JENNIFER LOHMANN is a Rocky Mountain girl at heart, having grown up in southern Idaho and Salt Lake City. When she’s not writing or working as a public librarian, she wrangles two cats and a flock of backyard chickens (the dog is better behaved). She currently lives in Durham, North Carolina. She has one published comic strip, which you can find in a collection called The Durham Comics Project.
To Amy, Kirill and Yuri.
Thanks for all your support over the
past couple years and for bringing comics
and drawing into my life.
Contents
COVER (#ud4c1f3b8-b1b6-5457-b894-f9bf35938a49)
BACK COVER TEXT (#u683cfcbb-91b4-5fe8-801a-471bc5fc6d21)
INTRODUCTION (#u8d9eff5e-e5ff-51ff-8474-a58bbc810cc6)
Dear Reader
TITLE PAGE (#uac375ed4-21ae-5546-ab20-554fccb495c0)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#uabd21910-039e-53d4-ad79-a3b6144ee23c)
DEDICATION (#u68effae7-ed3d-538a-904c-6bf4d9bae0ea)
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
EXTRACT (#litres_trial_promo)
COPYRIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#u7bdb9760-fbfd-5cc9-b506-7280383145af)
THE SOUND OF a heavy vehicle pulling into the driveway next door broke Levi Pardo’s concentration, forcing him to look up from the newspaper spread out on the kitchen table. A small, ridiculously young-looking woman was hopping out of the driver’s seat of a truck onto the narrow strip of grass between her driveway and his property. She’d parked too close to the lawn, which didn’t surprise him. He was amazed she could see over the dash and touch the pedals at the same time.
He looked back down at the horoscope he’d been reading, some bullshit about expressing what you’re feeling or else suffer the consequences. He didn’t believe in astrology and found the Missoulian’s particularly annoying, but he still read two signs, Taurus and Cancer, every day. Habit, after years of marriage. Even if Kimmie wasn’t around to care.
The woman moving in next door sure had a lot of energy, he thought, taking a sip of lukewarm, slightly oily coffee. He preferred to drink his coffee with flavored creamer, but he’d run out two days ago and hadn’t yet made it to the store. Through his kitchen windows he saw the woman bound to the back of the truck and, with more power than he expected from someone so small, throw the door up and open. When a car drove up and parked along the curb, the woman leaped across the lawn like a pronghorn to greet her new arrivals.
Levi needed another sip of caffeine just to keep up with her. Maybe the process of unloading everything from the back of the truck would slow her down.
He shifted his chair over a couple of inches for a better angle. The house next door had been empty for almost two years and, as far as he knew, was as run-down on the inside as it was on the outside. It had good bones, though.
So did she, he thought, as the woman turned her head and faced his window. Long, dark bangs and a fringe of hair around her chin framed high cheekbones, a sharply pointed chin and a nose that looked like something out of a marble statue in those travel books about Greece that Kimmie used to bring home, back when she was feeling good and planning their adventures. Before he’d seen his neighbor’s face full-on, he would have described her as cute. Short women were cute. Now beautiful was the only appropriate adjective.
Levi shook that thought out of his mind and turned back to his morning paper. He was about as interested in short women as he was in astrology.
* * *
TWO HOURS LATER Levi wiped down the kitchen counter, and, with the drape of a washcloth over the faucet, the second part of his Sunday ritual was done. Paper, first. Clean the house, second. It was midsummer, so he still had outdoor chores to do. He put sunscreen on his face and neck, covered his hair with a ratty Broncos cap, shoved his sunglasses on and went out to his garage for the lawn mower.
His ancient lawn mower, more Frankenstein’s monster than anything resembling the machines currently lining the entrances of home-improvement stores, clanged as he pushed it down the driveway.
Even with his sunglasses and ball cap, he had to squint against the harsh sun.
He was leaning over to start the mower when voices caught his attention.
“I just don’t get why you had to move here, of all places,” an older woman’s voice said, loudly enough that Levi could hear her, even though he couldn’t see anyone when he looked around. He could picture the woman inspecting the neighborhood of old bungalows in varying states of repair with her hands on her hips and a slight sneer on her lips.
Though Levi couldn’t understand what there was in this neighborhood to sneer at.
“Because the University of Montana offered me a job.” A younger woman’s voice this time, probably the bubbling one he’d seen driving the moving truck.
“So did the University of Richmond. If you had accepted their offer, you’d be near home.” The older woman’s voice again. Maybe the woman’s mother. They must have been standing just on the other side of the moving truck.
Levi let go of the lawn mower’s pull cord and folded his arms, giving in to the eavesdropping. He wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to get to know his neighbor, without the burden of going over and introducing himself.
“Which is exactly why I accepted the Montana job,” the woman said, too bright and cheery for someone who was arguing with her mother. “Montana. Just the word conjures up adventure. Moose. Grizzly bears. Cowboys.”
“Referring to grizzly bears as an adventure doesn’t make me feel any more confident about your decision. Grizzly bears kill people,” the older woman said.
“So does sitting, but you didn’t offer to drive the U-Haul while I rode a bicycle alongside,” the younger woman said smartly, while Levi bit back a smile.
“Don’t talk back to your mother,” a man said, a snap to his voice, which softened when he spoke again. “She’s worried about you is all. We both are. If something were to happen, you’ll be so far from home.”
“Franklin married the most organized and efficient woman on earth. If something happens to either of you, she’ll have flowers delivered to your room before you even get to the hospital.” A laugh underpinned the woman’s voice, though her humor had a sharp edge. Hidden, like the lid on a can of chili opened with a rusty can opener—familiar and domestic and safe, until you sliced a finger because you weren’t paying attention.
“You know it’s not us your mother is worried about,” the man said, the sharpness of his voice less concealed than his daughter’s. He sounded as if he’d cut himself on that can of humor before. “If something were to happen to you...”
“This is Montana, Mom, not the jungles of the Amazon. I’ll be fine. Promise. There are good hospitals here. And my health has been good for years.”
Levi shook his head. He shouldn’t be eavesdropping, especially not on conversations involving hospitals. Resolving to return to his decision that he wasn’t interested in short women, he gripped the pull cord and yanked until the ancient motor turned over, drowning out the conversation next door.
* * *
THE PROBLEM, LEVI THOUGHT, as he slipped a Pardo and Saupp Construction T-shirt over his head while looking out the window at the house next door, was that his new neighbor was always outside. It was hard to ignore a woman who seemed to think every beverage should be drunk on her front porch.
This evening, as she had for the past two weeks, she sat in the rocking chair with her feet up on the railing and a coffee cup in hand. The hems of her loose cotton shorts gapped. If he were at a different angle, he could follow the line of her skin down to her panties. She had nice legs. Not overly long, but shapely. He had no interest in women with thin legs.
She set her cup down and stretched her hands over her head. Her shirt lifted, and a little line of skin appeared between the elastic waistband of her plaid shorts and the bottom of her T-shirt. It was the type of movement he imagined her doing first thing in the morning, as she swung her legs over the side of the bed and welcomed the day. Intimate. Personal.
And he was staring out his window at her like a creep.
Levi jerked at the hem of his shirt, as if the movement could do anything to erase the image of his young neighbor with hair mussed by a long day. Not that that particular mental image was so bad, but he also imagined his hand slipping under the back of her shirt, her skin warm and soft on his cool palm and a glimpse of her face as she looked over her shoulder and smiled at him.
He reached up and closed the blinds.
He had to pick up his niece for soccer practice. Since he’d taken over coaching her youth soccer team two years ago, watching those girls tear up the field, fight, celebrate, fail and succeed had become the highlight of his fall. Solstice, his niece, seemed to have grown another three inches over the summer and would be all limbs. Helping her figure out how to manage all the new length in her arms and legs was a challenge he looked forward to.
* * *
THE NEXT FRIDAY, Levi climbed into his truck and looked next door with resignation. If he didn’t want to watch his neighbor move about his life, he had to learn to ignore her better. That and keep his kitchen blinds closed. Actually, all the blinds on this side of the house. Today she had come home from work, disappeared only long enough to change into shorts and grab a glass of what looked like iced tea. Now the ice in her tea was melting as it sat in the sun on her front porch while she was elbow deep in soil, shoving mums into the dirt. When she leaned forward, she stretched like a cat, her back long and her ass high in the air.
God, he definitely had to learn how not to watch her, because he didn’t want to shutter his entire house. He liked the sunlight coming in through the windows, especially the afternoon summer sun. The big, south-facing windows were one of the reasons he’d bought this house.
He shoved the gearshift into Reverse, looked over his shoulder with barely a glance at his neighbor’s ass, backed out of the driveway and sped down the street.
* * *
“YOU’RE LATE,” DENNIS SAID, lifting up his eyebrow and his phone at the same time. Both pointed comments on the time.
“Barely.” Levi slid into the booth and motioned to Mary for a beer. The two of them had been coming to O’Reilly’s and sitting in this booth every Friday night for three years. The first six months, she’d come over to ask what beer he wanted. He’d said “whatever” enough times that she brought over whatever she or Brian, the bar’s owner, felt like bringing to him. Sometimes he drank the entire beer and sometimes only a sip or two.
A little adventure, in his otherwise boring life.
A safer adventure than watching his neighbor.
Dennis coughed, a bad one that collapsed his shoulders in on his ears and shook the table. The kind of cough that would have his sister rushing to her husband to see what was wrong and Dennis struggling to both catch his breath and shake off Brook.
If he and Dennis were being honest with themselves, a surprise beer was probably the only adventure either of them needed, since the mine accident. And Dennis didn’t even seem to need that. He always got the same bottle of Bud Light with a Jameson chaser. Had for years. Since before Missoula. Since before everything.
“You ain’t been late since the day you were born,” Dennis said, his bottle resting against his bottom lip. “And this ain’t a big city, so you can’t blame traffic.”
“I’ve got a new neighbor.”
Levi hadn’t meant the comment by way of explanation, but he could tell by how Dennis lifted his eyebrows that it was the way his brother-in-law took the information. “He park in your driveway?”
“No. My neighbor’s not why I’m late,” he said, though he didn’t have a better explanation for his tardiness, because “No matter how close I am to my new neighbor, I want to take at least one step closer, so it took me a while to drive away” would sound pretty stupid.
“Why’d you mention it, then?”
She was on his mind. “I’m not used to having a neighbor. It’s distracting.”
“So, not a sixty-year-old with a gut. You wouldn’t be distracted by that.”
“Ha!” Levi rubbed his own stomach. It was still flat but, at the age of thirty-seven, he was starting to think more about carrots and less about French fries and beer. “We’ll both be lucky not to be that in twenty years.”
“I’ll be lucky to be that in twenty years.” Dennis took a long pull on his beer, draining the bottle and signaling for another one. It was going to be one of those nights. Levi and the dishwasher would be hefting Dennis into the passenger seat of Levi’s truck, and sometime around noon tomorrow, Dennis would text him for a ride back to get his car because Brook refused. And Brook would be texting him about letting Dennis get that drunk, because not only did she still think it was her job to monitor Levi’s behavior, but she considered it Levi’s job to monitor Dennis’s behavior.
His sister had gotten taller over the years, but inside she was still a bossy twelve-year-old playing Mom while their dad worked in the mines.
But neither Levi nor Dennis would drive home drunk, so that was progress since their reckless younger years. At least they’d learned something.
Proof that stupidity wasn’t guaranteed to kill you young.
“So, you gonna introduce yourself to this distracting neighbor?” Dennis asked, his second bottle of beer already half-gone. At least the whiskey was untouched.
“What for? To get roped into helping her with home renovations?” Levi shrugged. “That house needs a lot of work, and I’m already too busy as it is.”
“So, she’s cute.”
“She’s a child,” he said, yanking his mind away from her legs and her nose and her ass and everything else about her he’d tried not to admire over the past couple of weeks.
“She bought a house, so I’m guessing she’s at least twenty-five. Hmm. Might be more than cute—hot, even.”
Levi shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t have time. Or interest. I’ve been married already. You should know. You were my best man.”
Dennis shrugged. “Only ’cause no one else would do it.”
A couple of beers between them helped them both laugh at the joke. At the time of Levi’s actual wedding, Dennis—and everyone else—had been dead set against it. Kimmie had been too young, the chorus of noes said. And Dennis had only served as best man because Kimmie had cried when he’d refused. And then everyone had been mad at Levi for making her cry. No one had noticed at that time that his entire goal in his marriage had been to keep Kimmie happy.
All history.
“You gonna ask your neighbor out?” Dennis asked with disarming openness. Both he and Brook regularly pushed Levi to date women. Dennis suggested women like the girls who worked the registers at the hardware store or the ski shop. While Brook had a never-ending supply of friends who would be perfect for him.
Sometimes he said yes to Brook’s friends, and he’d even gone on more than one date with a couple; but there had never been any spark that compared to what he’d felt for Kimmie. Anything less would be doing both of them a disservice.
“I don’t know her name.” The least of the things he didn’t know about her, though he was very familiar with the shape of her calves.
He had to figure out how to stop looking at her without closing his damn blinds.
“Don’t see why that should stop you.”
“I’m not interested in being married again.” One time had been hard enough, even without the spectacularly tragic ending.
Dennis signaled for his third beer. Levi was still on his first. A part of him wished his friend would finish the shot sitting on the table so he would fall over, and they could both go home already, but his friend seemed determined to get drunk nice and slow. Which usually meant mean. He’d have to warn Brook.
“Hey, man, I’m not suggesting marriage,” he said, draining the last of the bottle while Mary brought a new one.
No, Dennis never suggested marriage. But that was always Levi’s first thought after seeing a woman who attracted him.
Or second, after the she’s got nice legs thought.
He just wasn’t interested in a stand, one-night or otherwise. Once attached, he stuck.
“Maybe you should ask her,” he suggested to his brother-in-law, as useless a suggestion to Dennis as Dennis’s had been to him. “Brook wouldn’t be at all mad.”
Dennis’s shoulders started to shake with a laugh, which turned into a hacking cough. It sounded worse tonight. They each waited until it passed, pretending it wasn’t happening. The one time Levi had offered Dennis sympathy and a pat on the shoulder, he’d been angrily shrugged off, which only exacerbated the hacking fit. The next time they’d gone out for beers, both had been short and angry with each other.
Levi hadn’t offered anything resembling sympathy for Dennis’s coughing since.
Like Kimmie’s suicide, they both found it easier not to acknowledge its existence. Kimmie died and Dennis had a chronic cough. Every Friday night, Dennis came out to the bar to drink and forget, climbing out of bed every Saturday afternoon back in the guise of a devoted husband and father. Levi had learned long ago how to hold on to your drink despite shit things happening in the world around you, rather than letting your drink hold on to you.
He tipped his bottle, watching the liquid slosh around while Dennis recovered himself. Levi was half-done with his beer. It would be his one and only tonight. His heavy drinking days were over, and the days he was willing to watch Dennis pickle himself were numbered. Time to go home.
“Brook doesn’t want to be with me when I’m coughing like this. And you think another woman would?” Dennis asked after he’d recovered from coughing and had been able to take another drink of his beer. He shrugged, and his smile was bitter. “Maybe you’re right—Brook might not mind after all.”
Levi shouldn’t have brought the subject up. Coal dust from the mine accident lingered in every decision they made, obscuring any view at happiness. That was what this conversation was really about. Between Levi’s dead wife and Dennis’s dead lungs, could either of them be happy again? As much as Brook and Dennis suggested Levi ask women out and encouraged him to go on dates, he wondered what they would do if he found himself happily settled.
And, hell, what would he do if he wasn’t spending his Friday nights with Dennis? They were in this wreck together.
“I’m going home,” Levi said. No reason to finish his beer. He wasn’t enjoying it any more than he was enjoying the conversation. “Finish your drink and I’ll give you a ride.”
Dennis shook his head. “It’s Friday. There’s more drinking to be had.”
“Not for me.” Could his friend hear his weariness?
“Hot date with the neighbor?”
Levi ignored the slice of resentment cutting through Dennis’s question. “Finish and let’s get going.”
Dennis’s face hardened into belligerence. “I’m staying.” The alcohol had started to hit, and his voice sounded like an angry three-year-old’s.
Levi slid out of the booth. “Fine. If you need a ride back here in the morning to pick up your car, let me know.”
“Maybe I’ll get lucky and take a girl home. Test your theory about Brook minding.” Bitterness leaked from Dennis’s mouth, lingering even after he wiped his chin with the back of his hand.
“Great.” Levi tossed enough cash on the table to cover his beer and at least one of Dennis’s.
On his way out, he stopped by the bar and told Brian and Mary that Dennis was staying. He also told them that Dennis’s car wouldn’t be running, and they should be prepared to call a cab or find someone to give him a ride. Dennis would be pissed, but there was no way Levi was leaving him able to drive home in a drunken, angry fit.
Maybe his friend would get lucky, and Brook wouldn’t be too angry that they had to get his car from the bar parking lot on Saturday. Maybe she would even remember that when he wasn’t busy playing an angry drunk, Dennis was a good guy.
Maybe Levi would get lucky, and his neighbor would still be up and sitting on her porch, reading.
CHAPTER TWO (#u7bdb9760-fbfd-5cc9-b506-7280383145af)
MINA HAD MET all of her neighbors except one. Given how rarely she saw him outside, it seemed like he was determined she not meet him or even lay eyes on him.
Still, she wasn’t used to not knowing her neighbors. Even in graduate school she’d made a point to meet all the people in her apartment building at least once. That way, she figured, even if they avoided her for the rest of their shared time in Chicago, they would be able to tell the paramedics her name if she were found gravely injured on the sidewalk outside the building.
Though how she would have managed being gravely injured on the sidewalk outside her apartment after being hit by a train was still a mystery.
Mina smiled as she crossed the property boundary. A death worthy of Anna Karenina was ridiculous, which was part of the pleasure of thinking about it. She was going to die from something prosaic and boring. A cold that turned into pneumonia. An allergic reaction. Basically, her own body turning against her. Nothing as spectacular as throwing oneself in front of a train after the betrayal of a lover.
She knocked on the door and almost laughed when her neighbor opened it, a death glare on his face that he didn’t even try to hide as he said, “Yes.”
Fortunately, death held little fear for her. It never had. Not even when in the form of a man who stood a head, a neck and a chest taller than her. Every other time she’d seen her neighbor, his black hair had been slicked back against his head, but this morning it was loose about his face, with locks hanging over his eyes. He obviously hadn’t shaved since yesterday at least, and maybe since the day before. One day, once her garden was put in and her bathroom redone, she’d make a study of his facial hair.
Today, she stuck her hand into the void between them, a desperate cover for wanting to push his hair out of his eyes. “I’m Mina. I moved in next door a couple weeks ago and wanted to introduce myself.”
His eyes were a surprisingly light brown, given how dark his hair was. She noticed this as she realized her hand...still hung in the air. She had offered him a strong handshake, like her dad had taught her. No weak wrists. People judged you on your handshake.
Or most people did. Her neighbor might never shake her hand, and he wouldn’t know that she’d practiced her handshake with strangers since she was five.
She was about to give up when his calloused hand slid into hers and gripped tightly enough that her knees went weak in the best possible way.
“Levi,” he said, his voice deep with sleep.
It seemed his dad had taught him to have a good handshake, too. His grip revealed shapely forearms with just a hint of vein under the skin. Enough that Mina wanted to see more. More forearms. More biceps.
More everything of her neighbor.
Though there was plenty to see—or, at least, to imagine. His white T-shirt had a couple of holes scattered about the cotton and worn hems. His cotton pajama pants weren’t much better. She sneaked a long enough peek to notice that the tie at the waist had been washed into a tight knot and he had to keep them loose enough to pull over his hips and butt without undoing the knot. What she could see of the hem of his pants was as worn as the hems of his T-shirt, maybe more so.
Had she woken him up? It was ten in the morning on a Saturday, so it was possible. But she’d seen him up earlier on Saturdays. And Sundays. And, from what she could tell when she closed her blinds before going to bed, he was also early to bed.
Oh, well. Too late now. If she’d woken him, the damage was already done. Best just to go on. Deciding to meet her neighbor on Saturday morning was yet another decision she couldn’t redo.
“Nice to meet you, Levi,” she said, returning her hand to her hip and her gaze to the scruff on his face.
When he rested his hand on his door, the movement raised his shirt a little, revealing both a little skin and some of the elastic sticking out from his worn pajama pants. Her gaze snapped back to his face. One eyebrow was up and, from the way he looked down at her, she couldn’t tell if he was amused, irritated or both.
She looked down at his bare toes before she could feel self-conscious about knocking on his door and waking him up. He had nice toes. Long, with a dusting of dark hair on each of his big toes. Not enough to veer into Hobbit-hood, but enough to make his feet interesting.
“I moved here from Chicago,” she said. The silence between them was starting to get on her nerves. Someone had to lead the conversation, and he wasn’t going to do it.
He nodded.
Mina waited for him to offer up his own end of the conversation. Maybe where he’d moved to Missoula from. Maybe that he liked Chicago. Or that he’d never been there. Or that both Montana and Chicago had bad winters, but Montana’s was probably worse.
But he seemed to be done nodding, and he hadn’t opened his mouth again. Since she’d knocked on his door, he hadn’t said anything other than “Levi.”
She could have looked at his mail to learn that.
“I teach at the university, in the Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures Department. I teach Russian. And a course on graphic novels. It’s the first one they’ve offered. My suggestion, really, and the class is full. There was a waiting list, even.” God help her, she was babbling. She’d gone beyond polite conversation with a neighbor and had hit full-on ramble.
“Graphic novels are what I do. I mean, they’re what I write. I’ve written three, all based off Russian novels and folktales.” She was wandering through her life and her history in front of this man who still remained silent. Of course, awareness wasn’t enough to encourage sense and good behavior. Or enough to get her to stop talking.
She took a step back, teetering a little when her heel hit the back of his front steps.
“You can look me up,” she continued. Distance. She had to put distance between her need to fill quiet with words and his gaping silence. She gripped the handrail. “Anyway, it was nice to meet you.”
She had turned to go when she heard him say, “I can’t look you up if I don’t know your last name.”
“Oh!” She spun around to look at him again. “Mina Clements. One M. I’ve got samples of my work on my website.”
She slammed her mouth shut before she was tempted to continue. With a wave and a cascade of embarrassment washing over her, feeling like a complete fool, she hopped down his front steps and scurried back to her house.
* * *
LEVI CLOSED THE door with a soft click as soon as his neighbor—Mina—turned off his property and onto her own. She was even shorter up close. And younger-looking. And she had hazel eyes that danced with life as she talked.
Hell, he wasn’t even sure what all she’d said. He was pretty sure he remembered her saying that she taught at the university, but he couldn’t imagine that she was old enough. Did she teach people her own age?
Or maybe she was older than he thought she was. Which meant he was older than he thought he was.
He turned away from the door, back to his coffee and the paper spread out on the kitchen table.
That he was older made sense, actually. He’d started noticing that he couldn’t have extra fries without adding extra weight a year ago. Last year he’d noticed a creak in his knees when he got out of bed. And one benefit of living alone was that there was no one to watch or poke fun when he plucked the couple of gray hairs from his head.
Kimmie absolutely would have made fun of those hairs.
“When she was well,” he said, flipping the paper open to the horoscopes and pressing the newsprint flat. Thoughts of how Kimmie would or wouldn’t act always included a footnote about her health. Levi had never successfully been able to only remember Kimmie when she was well. Her depressive episodes sneaked into his memories so much that he’d stopped trying to halt them. After all, the weeks she’d spent in bed had been just as much a part of his wife as her laughter and sly sense of humor. Seemed almost like a betrayal not to remember them both.
“Remember her as she’d have wanted you to remember,” people had said to him after her funeral. Well-meaning but ultimately stupid advice. Kimmie hadn’t expected him to even be alive to remember her. She’d thought he’d died first.
The coffee burned down his throat when he took another swig. No second cup. Another side effect of getting older.
Not that he should be surprised. He’d spent a lifetime working with his body, and all those years, especially the ones in mining, were bound to have taken their toll. Yet he still had all his fingers and toes. He was able to laugh without coughing. And the only burn marks on his body were the ones he’d gotten being stupid around the stove.
A car started in the driveway next to his kitchen. His neighbor. No, Mina. She’d gone through all the awkward trouble of coming next door and introducing herself to him. He could at least call her by her name in his head while resisting the temptation to turn around and watch her as she drove off.
Maybe she really was a university professor. Teaching... He strained his brain to remember what she’d said. Russian and graphic novels.
Unlike the physical toll that mining took on him, he supposed people didn’t get old prematurely teaching Russian to college students, even in Montana. He didn’t exactly know what a graphic novel was, but he was sure the same applied. Mina Clements would be fresh and young-looking until the day she fell asleep at the ripe old age of ninety-seven and didn’t wake up. And up until that time, she’d be inviting people into her life, whether they wanted to be there or not.
He skimmed the two horoscopes, only barely paying attention to their meaning. Between learning that it was time for him to open himself up to new experiences and that Kimmie should, if she were alive, let go of the past, the question of what a graphic novel was lingered. His mind had seized on the term graphic, wrapping arms around it and forcing him to face all the graphic things he’d been avoiding contemplating with his pint-size neighbor.
But women, even women from big cities, didn’t go around introducing themselves to their neighbor and immediately saying they wrote pornographic novels and to check out their website. Missoula might be a more liberal area of Montana, but this was still Montana, and people would be offended.
Though even the offended would probably do just what Levi was about to do. He folded up the paper and tossed it into the recycling. Then he grabbed his tablet and searched the internet for Mina Clements. One M.
“Huh,” he said to himself as he scrolled down Mina’s page of books. “She writes comic books.” There didn’t seem to be any capes or superpowers, but his friendly neighbor wrote comic books.
Levi sat back in his chair and crossed his arms, looking at the image of a nose dressed in clothing standing in front of a large, ornate building. The drawings were black-and-white, with thick lines and harsh angles. Not funny or light or chatty at all. In fact, there was a darkness to the illustrations that he wouldn’t have believed existed in the friendly woman with a strong, firm handshake and unguarded, bright smile that had him wanting to walk outside and greet the day with open arms.
He could tell she’d felt a little foolish as she’d walked away, though that wasn’t his problem. He hadn’t had anything to say, and he didn’t want to get to know her. He hadn’t invited her over here, didn’t want her young cheer invading the life he’d made for himself. And when he wanted to feel like the world was a brighter place, he’d pick Solstice and her brother, Skylar, up for some soccer drills.
And, honestly, he had thought Mina had been a little foolish for standing on his front stoop babbling a bit.
But the woman who drew these pictures wasn’t foolish. Or silly. The woman who drew these pictures understood black humor and pain and isolation. The woman who drew these pictures was the kind of person he wanted to get to know.
Despite her external chipperness.
And, if he were being completely honest with himself, because he wanted to know how the woman who drew these pictures was the same woman who’d bounced down his stairs.
His chair legs squeaked as he scooted back to look out the window next door. What had previously been a plain, slightly barren lawn with more weeds than grass had now been broken up into flower beds. Mums, mostly. There wasn’t much else one could plant in the fall in Montana that would flower, but Mina had added life and interest to her house.
He looked until he remembered that he wasn’t interested. Then he tipped back in his chair and closed the blinds, dimming the room.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_97d3f541-66e7-5977-aa3f-5070d22cc8b8)
MINA ONLY REALIZED that she had a doorbell when she heard it ring for the first time. She wasn’t that surprised that she had been too distracted to notice a small white button in the white siding next to her door, but she was surprised to see the outline of her cranky neighbor through the frosted glass window.
“Hello, Levi,” she said as she opened the door. “I didn’t expect to see you standing on my doorstep.”
Inwardly she flinched at the slight implied by her words, but her neighbor didn’t seem to notice. Or, if he had any reaction, the permanent shadow on his face from his stubble hid all the visible signs.
“I got some of your mail.” He handed over a stack of envelopes, most of which looked like they would be junk and she’d be throwing them out anyway. “I saw that you were home and thought I’d bring it over, rather than leave it in your mailbox.”
“That’s nice of you. Thank you.”
They stood on her porch as she waited for him to say something. The change of venue from his front door to her front door didn’t make him any more loquacious. But he was here, and he’d done a nice thing, so she gave him a smile and took the reins of the conversation. “Does the mailman often put mail in the wrong box?”
Inane chatter. She could do better, but his silent presence seemed to knock all cleverness out of her. Between this and her babbling on his porch, he was going to think she was an idiot.
Levi looked relieved rather than dismissive. “No. But this house was empty for two years. He’s probably not used to delivering mail here.”
“Lucky for him, I doubt I’ll get much.” She held up the roll of advertisements and credit-card solicitations. “This looks like a lot of junk.”
“There was an ad for Palmer’s Drug in mine. Best drugstore in town. I tossed everything else.”
“Oh. That’s good to know, actually.” Local pharmacies were often also compounding pharmacies and sometimes she needed the specialized service. Levi’s visit was proving to be more than just an opportunity to appreciate the rough angles of his face and feel like a babbling fool.
“Any other best-in-town places I should know about?”
He shrugged, then looked around, probably at the disrepair of her porch. “I always go to Ace Hardware. Good people over there.”
She laughed. “Will they come over and fix things, too?”
“Nah, but they give good advice. And this house has good bones. You take care of it, and it will take care of you.”
Before she could say anything else, Levi nodded once, then turned on his heel and walked off her porch.
Mina stood in her doorway, watching him until he’d crossed over her lawn and onto his own. His butt looked nice in his jeans, but that wasn’t the only reason she couldn’t take her eyes off him. She also watched him because he was a puzzle of a man. If asked, she would have sworn that he was not a man to take such an ordinary task as returning a neighbor’s mail and make it a personal gesture complete with recommendations. Not when he could have silently stuck it in her mailbox.
* * *
A WEEK LATER, Mina stood on her front lawn cursing her lawn mower. It was new and fancy, and the man at the hardware store Levi recommended had sworn it was easy to use. When she’d gone to the store, she’d “just been looking” and hadn’t yet done any research into brands or reliability. But the salesman had promised next-day delivery and a thirty-day guarantee. He had sounded so reasonable, and she really had needed to mow her lawn or hire someone, so she’d plunked down her credit card.
Now she was the proud owner of a machine that wouldn’t start. Silence was probably not what the man had meant by “runs quiet.”
The lawn mower was electric, so it didn’t need gas, but no matter how many times she followed the directions and tried to start the damn thing, it wouldn’t run.
“Al sell you that?”
Mina jumped at the gruff voice behind her, releasing her hold on the mower and nearly falling backward. She turned to find Levi standing behind her, his arms crossed over a heathered green T-shirt.
“He should know better,” Levi continued, his pink lips barely moving as he spoke; but the disapproval in his voice was clear, despite his quiet tone. “That brand is notorious for having bad starters and needing repair straight out of the box.”
She exhaled a long puff of frustration. “It was cheap.”
He nodded. “They are cheap, and, when it runs, that machine will be as quiet as Al promised. But you can pay a little bit more and get a quiet mower that will run every time.”
“What do you know of lawn mowers? I’ve only ever seen you use a mower that looks like you made it in shop class from spare parts.”
His shoulders bounced as he chuckled. “That’s not far off. But fixing that thing has taught me more about lawn mowers than I ever wanted to know.”
“Why don’t you buy a new one?”
“Because Al has been trying to get me to buy a new one for years,” he said, his voice flat, like she was silly for asking that question, but his eyes had the barest gleam. Her neighbor might have a sly sense of humor hidden under his stony facade.
“You could go somewhere else.” She’d gone to the hardware store he had recommended because she wanted to support a small business, a decision she was rethinking right now.
“I could. But Al knows more about what’s in his store than all the clerks at the other stores combined.”
“He sold me a bum machine.”
Levi bent his head in acknowledgment. “He also sometimes wants a bad decision off his lot so quickly that he forgets he wants customers to return.”
She crossed her arms in front of her chest and looked up at her oddly unhelpful neighbor. “Well, you can call him and tell him to come pick up the lawn mower. I want a refund, and I’ll buy my new machine somewhere else.”
Levi’s lips twitched, and Mina wondered if he was going to smile, and, if so, was he smiling at her or at Al? Imagining him smiling at her didn’t make her feel any less angry, though it meant she wasn’t only angry with Al.
“You can do that,” he said slowly. “Or I can help you pack it up, and we can return it. And see what discounts Al will give you in an attempt to keep you as a customer.”
Mina gave the man standing in front of her a long, slow once-over. She’d seen Levi tinker with his lawn mower and glimpsed the expansive set of tools in his shed. Either he knew what he was talking about when it came to lawn mowers—and Al—or he spent a lot of money to look like Mr. Fix-It. Given the grease stains on his jeans and the slight bit of dirt under his fingernails, she decided to trust that he knew his stuff.
“I need an edge trimmer, too.”
A slow smile crossed his face. “Al has lots of nice trimmers, and I’m sure he’ll give you a good deal.”
“Okay. I’ll give Al another shot.”
Together they got her lawn mower into the back of Levi’s truck. Mina grabbed her purse from inside her house, then climbed into the passenger seat. As Levi shifted into Reverse, she asked, “Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?” he said, looking over his shoulder at the road and not once looking at her.
“Being neighborly and helping me out. When I stood on your porch and introduced myself, I was pretty sure you’d rather I hadn’t bothered.”
“Maybe I’m not helping you out. Maybe I’m helping Al out.”
That cryptic statement silenced Mina the entire drive to the store.
* * *
ON THE WAY home from the hardware store, new lawn mower in the bed of Levi’s truck, Mina asked the question that had been plaguing her the entire time they’d been shopping and Al had suddenly become informative, not just helpful.
“Am I coming home with a better lawn mower because you helped me and Al knows you, or because you helped me and you’re a man?”
Levi’s lips twitched, but he didn’t turn his head to look at her. An annoying habit of his, and one that added to her sense that she didn’t have a good read on him. Grumpy loner? Stoic, independent-minded Westerner? Helpful neighbor? All of the above? None of the above?
“Probably both. Al’s of the generation that thinks you should be inside making pie while your husband is outside pushing the mower. And you’re a city girl, so he’s doubtful that you’ll mow your lawn, so why sell you a nice product when you’re only going to hire someone anyway. But had you come into the store with a different man, Al might have flat-out given you a lawn service recommendation.”
She grunted. His response wasn’t what she wanted to hear, but at least it was honest. And it was along the lines of what she’d expected. Al had looked like a modern mountain hermit, with a grizzled face and coarse white hairs that stuck out of his face and head like electrical wires. “What about you?”
Levi flipped on his blinker and turned down the street leading to their neighborhood. “What about me?”
“What generation are you of?”
“One older than you.” He must have noticed her roll her eyes because his lips curled in what was clearly a hidden smile.
“Do you think I should be inside making a pie while my nonexistent husband is outside mowing the lawn?”
“Does my opinion matter?”
Did it? She hadn’t started teaching yet and was slowly making friends with her colleagues. So right now, Levi was as close to a friend as anyone else in Montana. “I guess I still don’t understand why you’re helping me.”
“Huh,” he said, and Mina realized he didn’t understand why he was helping her, either. He probably saw himself as the cranky loner she had understood him to be during their first meeting. “I guess you should make a pie if you want to make a pie and mow your lawn if you want to mow your lawn. I won’t be surprised if you end up hiring someone, but that’s because mowing your lawn is a pain in the ass, not because you’re a woman.”
She laughed. “Will you come with me next time I need to buy an expensive piece of home equipment from Al?”
“Nah. You won’t need me. Al may be from an older generation than both of us, but he’s not so stupid as to drive a customer to one of those giant home-improvement stores more than once.”
* * *
AFTER THAT TRIP to the hardware store, where Levi had caught himself watching Mina’s hand instead of the road while he was driving—hoping her palm would suddenly rest on his thigh—he shoved his curiosity about her art and her cheer out of his mind and renewed his plan to avoid all thoughts of her. But catching glimpses of her outside had him reconsidering his stance on avoiding relationships because he was too old to risk heartache again. If he wasn’t careful, he’d be shaving every morning just in case she touched his cheek—and double-checking his throat for patches of missed stubble.
But his resolve must have worked, because he didn’t run into her again until Thursday, at the hardware store. She was in earnest discussion with Al over a cordless drill, asking him questions, and—as far as Levi could tell—Al was giving her good advice, rather than simply trying to sell her something.
Mina gave him a wave, and Levi raised his brows in return. When Al noticed, he looked over his shoulder and nodded. Levi nodded back, then caught Mina’s secret smile at their shared joke.
Once Levi got home, he made sure all the blinds were shut on Mina’s side of the house. He’d played friendly neighbor long enough and would have no part of whatever she was planning with her new cordless drill.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_b659687b-436f-54cc-a849-98e67e4d6829)
THE PROBLEM, LEVI realized Sunday morning when he woke up and automatically started opening his blinds, was dark rooms and closed blinds reminded him too much of when Kimmie was feeling at her worst. She would close out the world and couldn’t bear even the little bit of it that Levi would bring home every day when he got back from work. For weeks after her funeral, he’d kept the curtains open 24/7—the neighbors be damned if they saw him drinking coffee naked in the kitchen.
He picked up his pajama bottoms from the floor and pulled them on before padding out to the front door to get his paper. He’d mellowed a bit since Kimmie’s death.
Once back inside, he tossed the paper onto his kitchen table and made himself some coffee before sitting down to the horoscopes. Sometimes he read the rest of the paper, but he always read the horoscopes. Not that the horoscopes ever said anything useful. Once a week—and today was the day—his horoscope told him to embrace a new future. Sometimes he wondered if the astrologer who wrote these simply had a list of generic recommendations for each sign that he or she rotated through.
Kimmie’s horoscope recommended that she go outside and work in the garden. “Start early preparing the beds for your life for the winter,” it said. “The warmth of Mother Nature will provide reassurance in changing times.”
Clearly the writer didn’t know that Kimmie had had a black thumb.
Levi looked up from his paper to the window, noticing that he’d sat facing Mina’s house this morning, not with his back to it like normal. With his blinds open he could see the burst of fall colors her mums provided. Mina, crouched in her front yard, a drill next to her in the grass, was also in full view. She was holding two boards together and screwing down a clamp. When she finished, she picked up a level, held it against the join and shook her head.
He took several sips of his coffee while he watched her undo the work she’d just done and try again. Unsurprisingly, given the uneven surface she was working on, she had to take it apart once more.
He guessed she was making a raised garden bed. The task would be a lot easier if she had some help.
He flipped through the rest of the paper, idly reading the comics—even the terrible soap opera–like ones he should have given up on years ago—and checking the ads. There was nothing worth reading in the rest of the paper, but he skimmed the headlines anyway. For completion’s sake.
Only when he’d finished the paper and his last bit of now cold coffee did he look up again. Mina had apparently gotten the two boards clamped together like she wanted. Now she struggled with holding the boards and predrilling holes for her screws.
Levi sighed. He wasn’t the type of neighbor who liked to do more than wave from his truck when he passed someone on the street. He didn’t want someone interpreting a friendly smile as an invitation to drop by and say hi.
Of course, Mina had already dropped by to introduce herself and before he’d worked himself up to even waving at her from his truck. And, despite helping her with Al, she hadn’t invited herself over for dinner. She’d been friendly but not intrusive.
He sighed again, then stood and put his coffee cup in the sink.
With one last look at his neighbor’s battle against the raised bed, Levi ran his hand through his hair and went upstairs to change into jeans.
She was too young. His heart was still too tender, his memories of Kimmie too fresh. But with no one there to help her, Mina would spend the entire day struggling to produce a garden bed with lopsided joins that would set his teeth on edge every time he stepped out of his front door.
After buttoning his jeans, he dug a work T-shirt out of his drawer. In the long run, going over to help her was a bigger benefit to him than it was to her. Not only did she need the assistance and he had the skills to provide it, but that house had been sitting empty for two years. Helping her fix it up would improve his own house’s value, not to mention what he had to see every time he looked out his windows.
He caught a glimpse of a bullshitting liar in the mirror as his head popped through the neck of the shirt. God, who was he fooling?
In the short bit of time he’d spent with Mina, he had felt more like his old self. The person he’d been before Kimmie’s death, who made plans and had dreams. If he spent more time with her, that man he’d once been would come back, and it was that allure that had him hurrying down the stairs and out the door.
Against his better judgment, he was sure.
* * *
A LARGE, MAN-SHAPED shadow blocked Mina’s view of the marks she’d made in the wood. She sat back on her heels, both in frustration at how long it had taken her to get the stupid boards flush and at the person blocking her view of the part of this process she was really looking forward to—using her new drill.
The shadow didn’t speak, nor did it move. Finally, she turned and looked up into the sun at the man towering over her.
Her sometimes friendly, usually unfriendly neighbor, Levi, had come to watch her be foolish. A better show in person than from the window, no doubt.
“Hey,” she said, throwing a little extra chipper into her voice.
“That’d be easier if you did it on the driveway. Your driveway’s pretty level.” Not much as far as greetings went, but what she could see of his shadowed face was open and friendly. Or as friendly as he got. His now two-day beard and sleep-messed hair didn’t add much welcoming or pleasant to his look, but she’d always preferred brooding to charming.
“I know it would be easier, but if I did this on my driveway, I’d need someone to help me move it once it’s built. And,” she said with a shrug, “I figured it would be easier to get it level on the grass than move it by myself.”
Looking up at him was giving her a crick in her neck. She put her drill down. Much to her surprise, when she looked back up, preparing to stand, his hand was out. She stuck her hand in his, felt a reassuring squeeze and then a pull that was surprisingly gentle considering how quickly she came to her feet.
“Thank you.” She wiped the dirt off her knees.
“Why don’t you have a friend help you?” There was nearly a smile on his face.
A hand and nearly a smile. Even though he hadn’t said a word to her since their trip to the hardware store, Levi wasn’t the cranky neighbor he seemed to so desperately want to be. Under the hair that had fallen down the front of his face again, there might even be a flicker of humor in his eyes.
Spooking him seemed like a possibility, so she didn’t smile back. Or even nearly smile back. “I’ve only lived here a month. No friends yet.”
His brows raised in surprise. “Really? You seem like the kind of person who makes friends in a day. And you’ve been here a whole month.” He said everything but the last word drily, and she wondered if he were making fun of her until she remembered the near twinkle in his eye and the twitch of a smile she might have seen on his face.
“Well,” she corrected herself, “no friends who could help me today. Ivan, the guy I share an office with, is going out of town this weekend. Perry and Susan are at church, and I guess there was a thing after church. And Caroline doesn’t do power tools. When I said I’d use the drill and she only had to hold the boards, she counter-offered with alcohol when I was done.”
She glanced at the boards that were not yet the rectangle she’d thought they would be by now and laughed. “I think I’m going to need at least a beer. Maybe three.”
Levi looked longingly across the two driveways to his house. For a long moment she thought he was going to shrug and walk back into his home. But he blinked, shook his head against some invisible foe and turned back to her. “I’ll help you.”
She didn’t have to wonder if he wanted to. There was no smile on his face and no light in his eyes.
“What makes you qualified?” she asked, more curious than suspicious.
He raised an eyebrow. “I’m a contractor. Normally people pay for my help.”
“Well, I didn’t ask and you don’t have to help me.” Help was help, but begrudging help was almost worse than no help at all. “If I don’t get it done today, Ivan can help me next week. He’s already offered.”
“Yeah, but if I leave you here, I’m going to know you’re struggling, and I’m going to think about it every time I look out a window. I’ll get nothing done.” From his deadpan delivery, she couldn’t tell if he was joking.
“So, really, I’m doing you a favor.” His backward logic brought a smile to her face. “After you help me with this, you’ll owe me a beer.”
Surprise opened his face for a brief second before he barked out a laugh. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”
“That’s a fair deal.” She stuck out her hand to shake on it. And so she could feel his hand in hers again. Touch him again. Rugged, handsome, and he laughed at her bargaining skills. Suddenly she wanted to start touching him and never stop.
His hand lingered in hers, and with it the possibility of more intimate touches. Though, if that happened, she’d have to tell him about her HIV. And even if he didn’t back away in horror—and most people didn’t—he’d still want her to stop touching him so he could think about what she’d said. That everyone did.
Not that she blamed anyone for needing time to think, but, well, it always ruined the mood.
But Levi was helping her with her raised bed, not slipping his hand around to cup her head and bring her in for a kiss. There was no mood to ruin, only this stupid raised bed that she’d half destroyed in the process of building it.
As they sank down to the grass together, Mina kept her rash decision to build the garden bed at the forefront of her mind. The fact that she’d looked helpless enough for Levi to offer to help was a clear sign that she’d not thought the project through. And she knew better than to rush into things, men included—especially rugged neighbors with an air of tragedy about them. Lack of thinking things through made for bad decisions, and bad decisions made her parents worry. They would suggest she get on the job market again. They would call more. They would question every decision they knew about.
She’d moved to Montana for some independence, not to develop an unsubstantiated crush on a neighbor.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_f9e18baa-bd80-5068-abbd-338008a2546c)
LEVI GATHERED THE materials while Mina moved her car out of her driveway. Together they moved everything to the flat surface.
“You’re right,” she said as he tightened the clamps on the boards. “This does make everything easier.”
“The driveway or another person to help?” Levi held his hand out for the drill.
“Both,” she said, though she was shaking her head. “But you’ve only promised to stick around to build the thing. I neglected to ask you to help me move it in place.”
“That’ll cost you a beer.” He gestured for the drill and grunted when she shook her head again. “What, I don’t get beer for my labors?”
She laughed. “I’m not shaking my head at the beer. I’m shaking my head at giving you the drill.” She crab-walked around the driveway, the weight of the drill obviously pulling down at her hand, until she was next to him. Then she bumped him with her shoulder. “Move over. This is my raised bed and my drill. I get to use the power tools.”
“I’ll give up my beer in exchange for power-tool responsibility.”
The way her nose wrinkled as she pretended to consider his request made him want to laugh. “No dice,” she said, with another nudge. “I’ll pay you two beers for a lesson in power tools.”
He gave up with a bark that didn’t quite cover up his laugh and scooted to where he could hold the wood steady while she drilled.
It took Mina a few times with the drill to figure out how to control the power. Levi was pretty sure she was muttering and swearing under her breath each time the drill slipped and she had to release her fingers, but she managed to control any cursing by the time the whirl of the tool stopped. And each time she wrinkled her nose in frustration, took a deep breath and leaned forward with renewed concentration. When she had finally gotten all the holes predrilled and the screws in to attach the first short side of the bed to the post, she looked up at him in triumph.
“You didn’t give me any instruction, so I’m not sure I owe you the beers. But I got it done anyway, and I’m feeling generous. One beer, not two.”
He smiled at her continued reevaluation of their bargain. If he didn’t pay attention, he’d end the day having built a raised bed and offering to make dinner, too. “Your first lesson in power tools is that it would have been faster if you’d let me do it.”
“Does that mean you’d rather not have any beers?” She took the clamps off the board, then slid down and started clamping that end to the post.
“No,” he said, slipping into his role as assistant. To his surprise, he was having fun. “Just being honest. I have experience with this. You don’t.”
“But I’ll never get experience if I don’t do it. And if I mess it up, the store has more boards I can buy.”
“But you can’t pick up another helper.”
“Like I said, Ivan can help me next weekend.” She said the man’s name again, as if he should know who Ivan was. Her boyfriend? He hadn’t seen anyone regularly coming to the house—or noticed her spending nights away. Not that it mattered to him if his cute neighbor had a boyfriend. He was over here to be neighborly—trying something new like the horoscopes always suggested—not because he was interested in anything else.
Liar, liar, pants on fire, as his nephew Skylar would say.
“Besides, I don’t see you leaving in a huff because I won’t let you hold the power tools.” Her smile had turned into an impish smirk, and Levi knew he was staying, beer or no beer, power tools or no power tools.
“I said I’d help you build this bed, and I will,” he said with conviction that surprised even himself. “I’m a man of my word.” He paused. “Around household projects, at least.”
“A caveat of household projects? Is that a promise or a warning?” Figuring out how to put her whole body into the push of the drill didn’t seem to change her ability to keep that playful smile on her face.
Levi hadn’t enjoyed watching a woman’s face move so much since...well, since he’d first met Kimmie all those years ago. That realization hit at the same time Mina finished drilling and released the body-weight pressure she was putting into the wood. The sudden change knocked him off balance and on his ass, his hand flying out behind him for an equilibrium he couldn’t seem to find.
When he looked up, Mina was staring at him, her mouth and eyes wide in surprise. Amusement shone in her eyes. She recovered well enough to close her lips, but one corner of her mouth stayed lifted in surprise. Levi pushed himself back upright, chuckling at his clumsiness, and it seemed to be all the break Mina needed to laugh herself.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Yes. I didn’t expect...” He’d expected to spend the afternoon thinking about his house and his chores and being anywhere other than here. He hadn’t expected to have an offer to get more wood so they could build another raised bed lingering on the tip of his tongue. “You moved sooner than I expected.”
“Well, Levi of no last name and worn hems, you’re less grumpy than I expected.”
Levi laughed, not a bark, not a chuckle or an acknowledging grunt. The laugh escaping his mouth was a full belly laugh that made his stomach muscles hurt but lightened the weight of his head on his shoulders. “Worn hems, huh? I guess my pajama pants are a bit old.”
“So is the T-shirt you were wearing.”
“You don’t let up, do you?”
“Not when I’m winning,” she said, her face bright with both the sunlight shining down on her and the pleasure radiating from within her.
“Let’s get this bed finished so I can have the beers that you owe me,” he said, emphasizing the s on the end of beers.
As they built the rest of the raised bed and dug holes for the posts, Mina chattered along, much like she had when standing on his front porch. Chatter was her default setting, he realized, and it had only been mindless and haphazard on his porch because he’d been silent, and she’d been nervous. Now, as he occasionally asked questions and bantered back, her conversation was still light, but it was also interesting. Levi had never expected to care about the glories of Russian curses, but so long as Mina was the one talking about them, he was eager to become an expert.
* * *
THE LEGS OF the wheelbarrow sank into the grass when Mina let go of the handles. The bed was done. It was even full of dirt. Levi had called someone he knew who ran a rock and soil yard, and they’d gone in his truck to pick up a load of topsoil and compost mix. She might, might, be able to squeeze in a few fast-growing greens and harvest something before the bitter cold weather set in.
But that was a task for another day. Despite the cool air hinting at fall, all the work they’d put in meant dirt stuck to the sheen of sweat on her skin like those minuscule brambles that stick to your socks after a hike. Her hair had fallen out of the bobby pins and was adhering to her face in clumps. And sniffing herself wasn’t required; she knew she stank.
Levi grimaced as he ran his hand along the back of his neck and gave his shoulder a few hard rubs. The world could be deeply unfair. Mina was pretty sure she looked like something the cat dragged in. Levi, who had to be just as dirty and probably also stank, looked rugged and capable. The streak of dirt across his cheek made the light brown of his eyes stand out, and his teeth looked whiter when he smiled at her.
“I’m going to be sore tomorrow,” he said with another rub at his neck.
“Since you weren’t happy giving over responsibility for the drill, I assume you do this sort of thing on a regular basis.” Maybe she just liked to imagine what he would look like chopping wood. “Or was that just because you’re a man and like to be in the driver’s seat?”
He let out a low sound, somewhere between a snort and a chuckle. The outright laughter that had caught her by surprise earlier was gone but not forgotten. She didn’t need it to know he was having a good time. “I supervise more than I hammer, so if you want to drive, I’m man enough to be a passenger and enjoy the scenery.”
“How long have you lived in Missoula?”
“Three years.”
“Is that long enough for you to be able to show me some cool places? Places I wouldn’t discover unless I had also lived here for three years?”
She had tried to make her question airy—and tried for a light smile to match—but she could see in the cock of his head that he was trying to understand if she was truly asking or being flirty. Hell, she didn’t know if she was looking for suggestions from someone who’d lived in the city longer than she had or if she was hunting around for the likelihood of a date. She’d promised herself that from now on she’d get to know someone casually before getting serious. No more rushing into relationships or hopes or dreams. Rushing led to hurts, and she was trying to cut down on hurts.
But emotional caution just wasn’t and never had been a strength of hers.
“I know some places,” he said finally, each word carefully measured out as if he was also trying to figure out what she was asking and what he was offering. “And I know locals who know more places.”
“I’ve not met many locals. The university seems to be full of transplants like me, at least among the professors.” Different universities had different cultures and different feels, but the hodgepodge of people from around the globe remained the same. The academic job market was tough, especially for someone who studied a language, and everyone took what they could get.
“But before I ask you for more favors,” she said, giving them both an out, “I should probably get you that beer I promised. I’ll make you dinner, too, if you’re interested. You helped me out a lot today, and feeding you is the least I can do.”
Again he looked at her, obviously evaluating her words with a slow blink.
“It’s just dinner, I promise,” she said with a low laugh to cover the awkwardness. “I’m not trying to put a down payment on future yard work.”
He snorted. “I don’t believe that, but I also don’t care. Give me a chance to shower first, and then dinner sounds great.”
“A shower is a good idea.” Maybe cleaning the dirt off her body would clear the confused dust out of her mind. And, if she decided she really was trying to explore the potential for a date, at least she wouldn’t be worried about armpit smell.
“Give me at least a half an hour to get myself cleaned up, and you can come over anytime after that. I’ll leave the door unlocked, but give a knock so I don’t jump when you walk in the door.”
“Deal,” he said. Then he smiled, and his face and shoulders relaxed. Hers did, too.
* * *
FRESHLY SHOWERED AND in clean clothes, Levi stood in his kitchen watching the clock. It had been twenty minutes since he’d left Mina’s front yard, and he figured he had ten minutes to kill before he could walk through her front door without risking her still being in the shower. He emptied his dishwasher, then turned his attention to the paper still lying open to the astrology section.
He was supposed to try to embrace a new future today. If Kimmie were alive, she was supposed to go outside and garden. Not that he believed in the nonsense of the stars covering his fate, but today’s horoscope seemed uncomfortably close to the truth. Kimmie couldn’t go outside and garden, but Levi was alive, and getting outside seemed good advice for all the living.
And then there was that new future...
Levi glanced up at the window to where Mina was out of the shower and closing her curtains. She didn’t look embarrassed at all as she caught him looking while she was wearing only her towel. Instead, she smiled and waved. He waved back, then reached up and closed his own blinds.
Dennis was right that maybe he should get out and explore the world of women. Brook was right that he should do so with more seriousness. He’d never imagined that he’d be in his midthirties and single. He’d been excited to marry Kimmie and talk about having kids. He’d wanted to settle down. He still wanted to. But it wouldn’t happen if he avoided women who seemed more interested in relationships than in just sex.
Mina didn’t have to be the one or even the maybe, and dinner tonight didn’t have to lead to anything more than friendly greetings between neighbors, but he’d never know unless he tried. Mina was the first woman he’d felt more than a sexual interest in since Kimmie, and she was at least a good place to start, even if she seemed impossibly young.
He sniffed at his shoulder, which smelled like dryer sheets and deodorant. He reached up and unbuttoned his shirt, draping it across the chair as he headed to the bathroom to shave. Cologne would be overkill—besides which, he didn’t own any—but shaving for a woman was a nice gesture, even if dinner was just dinner.
After his shave and before heading out the door, Levi stopped by the kitchen, folded up the paper and tossed it in the recycling bin before the stars carried him away from reality.
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_f96dd6e7-06df-5c9e-84d7-421859c64fe1)
MINA WAS PUTTING the butternut squash and leeks into the oven to roast when she heard a knock at the front door, followed by a squeak of the hinges.
“Hello?” Levi called, his footsteps quiet and uncertain on her wood floors.
“I’m in the kitchen,” she called. “Head to the back. It’s a small house—you can’t miss me,” she said, shutting the oven door and grabbing a towel for her hands. Levi’s head stuck around the corner just as she was tucking the towel back on the oven handle.
He’d shaved. She was, momentarily, speechless. The sharp contours of his face and squareness of his chin were worth a moment of silence, but that wasn’t what stopped her tongue. Not only had he taken the time and effort to shave, but he was wearing nice jeans and a neat dark blue button-down that showed off a trim, muscular figure, especially with the sleeves rolled up and his forearms on display.
Levi had gone to some effort. Like this was a date.
“I feel underdressed,” she said, recovering her speech and looking down at her worn gray yoga pants and white tank top. Since she wanted to get the vegetables in to roast as quickly as possible, she’d just rinsed the sweat off her body. Barrettes and sweat were keeping her hair off her face, and shaving... Well, the state of her leg hair was better not considered. Probably for the best. Looking at him now, she needed to put brakes on her libido.
He shrugged. “You look fine to me” was all he said, but there was warmth in his eyes, so she brushed away her feelings about looking sloppy. “What’s for dinner?”
“Butternut-squash lasagna and a salad. It’s not a quick meal, but it’s one of my favorites, and I had all the stuff on hand. Plus, it’s filling after a long day of working outside.”
“No meat?” he asked with the disappointed face of a child who’s been denied candy.
“No.” She shook her head with a laugh. “I have sausages in the freezer, but they would have taken too long to defrost. The lasagna will be good, I promise, and if you miss the meat, I’ll make sure the sausages come out for the next time I cook you dinner.”
“Next time,” he said, his voice caressed with approval. “I like that idea. Where did you learn to cook?”
With that simple question, Mina eased into conversation, talking about cooking with her mom when she was a kid and some of the terrible food experiments and impossible diets she’d tried in both college and graduate school. “I don’t know how I found the time or energy to eat a raw food diet, but I managed it for six months.”
She didn’t mention that she’d tried many of these diets in an attempt to keep her flagging energy or stave off upset stomachs or to control all the other side effects of either HIV or the meds that kept her virus count low. Desperation over a chronic illness had been her motivation to prepare raw carrot crackers every week. Then there had been the macrobiotic diet. And the gluten-free one. And hopping back and forth between several other less popular options before she’d settled back into moderation and mostly vegetables.
“I don’t like the sound of a raw food diet. There’s no way that could include enough meat for someone born and raised in Montana,” he said, one side of his mouth kicked up in a half smile.
Good—she wasn’t boring him. Mina was a talker. She talked when she was nervous; she talked when she was relaxed; she talked when she was tired... She just talked. She even talked to herself as she wandered her house. The near never-ending stream of chatter had driven more than one boyfriend crazy—at least that was what they said. But there had been a few that had been amused. She could hope Levi was the latter.
She sneaked a peek over her shoulder at him as she stirred the béchamel sauce. If she was reading his shave and nice shirt correctly, well...the more she talked, the more his eyes seemed to shine and his lips stayed in the amused position.
This could lead somewhere. If she was thoughtful and deliberate and purposeful, she could turn one dinner into two.
Mina, if you’re thinking about anything past dinner, then you’re already rushing into something. Get through dinner first, then worry about what comes next. Good advice, but not nearly so much fun.
“The lack of meat wasn’t the problem I had with eating raw foods,” she said, steering her mind back to the conversation.
“Not born and raised in Montana.”
“No. And far too interested in trying new fads to stick with the tried-and-true method of eating meat and three square meals. Though that’s how I grew up.” She turned her attention away from the handsome man standing in her kitchen and back to the food. The béchamel had thickened, and it was time to layer the lasagna and get it in the oven.
“Do you need help?”
“No. Grab another beer and we’ll go sit in the living room while this bakes. It’s more comfortable in there.”
Mina joined Levi in the living room as soon as the lasagna was in the oven. He was on the couch, not in one of the two armchairs, and he’d sat near the middle of it. Unless she chose one of the armchairs, she’d have to sit near him.
She joined him on the couch and put her beer on the coffee table in front of them, turning her body toward him. He’d turned toward her, too. They weren’t touching, but she was close enough to smell the brisk notes of his aftershave and to see some stubble along his jawline that he’d missed. His intense gaze sent good shivers down her spine, shivers that reinforced that she hadn’t been wrong about his more intimate intentions.
After her diagnosis, Mina had become more thoughtful about her interactions with men. She hadn’t yet managed to make accurate predictions about their intentions from her careful study of their movements, but she kept trying. Trial and error would surely pay off eventually, and she’d be right about a man one day.
If nothing else, the careful study of men slowed her down a little.
“I’m glad you came over and introduced yourself,” he said, his rich voice coating her skin in warmth.
She smiled. “Me, too.”
“I checked out your website. That was the first time I’d heard about graphic novels. The drawings were neat and, uh, darker than I would have guessed.”
“Yeah.” She laughed. “I’m so bubbly and short that everyone expects me to have light, fluffy drawings. Something cute, with bunnies. When I do talks and festivals, the most common comment I get after ‘I love your work’ is ‘I thought you’d be taller.’ It used to bother me, but I’ve stopped worrying about it. Honestly, my art used to be lighter.”
Levi took a drink from his beer bottle, and his Adam’s apple moved as he swallowed. How had she not noticed what a sexy part of the male anatomy the neck was until now? “What changed?”
She shrugged. “My drawings were always macabre and obsessed with the strange, but in college my lines got darker and thicker and I started having fewer curves in my art and more sharp corners. It’s better, actually. One of the things I tell my students is that they don’t have to be an amazing artist to write comics or graphic novels, but their art has to match their subjects. Like Kate Beaton, who draws these hilarious comics with random historical and pop-culture references. Her drawings appear to be rough sketches and, if you ignore the adult content, almost something a kid would draw. But it makes the punch of her jokes that much stronger. Or Tom Gauld, who wrote this beautiful book on Goliath, where Goliath was an innocent victim. The bare landscapes mean the reader focuses on Goliath’s simplicity and how he is used by both his friends and his enemies. Scott McCloud has this great book where he talks about comics with a focus on form versus comics with a focus on idea or purpose, and I was really so focused on form that I forgot my ideas.”
When she took a deep breath, all the words she had to say about comics clouded up her lungs, and she had to exhale slowly before she could say another word. Just to be safe, she waved all the excess words out from between them. “Anyway. Before, well, before my art and my subject matter were a mismatch. Not completely wrong for each other, but wrong enough that the stories lost their power.”
“Do you have more of your books?” he asked, his brows raised in genuine curiosity.
“Sure,” she said, pleased. “You want to see?”
“Of course. I’ve never known anyone who made money drawing pictures.”
“Oh, I don’t make much money. It’s certainly not a living.” She doubted that she’d ever make a living doing it. Russian stories were interesting to people, and people liked her art, but it wasn’t commercial, really.
She pushed herself off the couch and headed over to her bookshelf, feeling his gaze on her the entire way. When she got back, he set his beer on the table and accepted the two volumes from her.
While he examined her books, she examined him. The ridges of his spine starting at his hairline and disappearing into the neckline of his shirt. The curves of his ear and softness of his earlobe. A faint scar across his cheek that she hadn’t noticed under his previous scruff.
Her scrutiny didn’t seem to make him uneasy. He didn’t seem to notice it at all. He was a steady man, she realized, and someone could easily mistake his composure for shallowness, but his stillness suggested the lastingness of a mountain lake, not the transience of a rain puddle.
Better, he was taking the time to really study her art and the words, not just flip through and look at the pictures.
The timer beeped. Mina got up and went to the kitchen to take the lasagna out of the oven. While it rested, she set the table as Levi continued to study her books. When she called him over for dinner, he asked a few questions about her art, then sat back and let her talk. Still flattered by his interest, Mina monopolized the entire dinner talking about herself, her theories about comics and all the plans she had for books to come. And it felt right, because when she stopped chattering to take a breath, Levi asked her a question and then looked interested when she jumped back in.
She felt, well, she felt comfortable being herself with him, which was the best thing you could want in a man.
After they finished eating, Mina directed Levi around the kitchen as she washed dishes, and he dried and put them away. Then she offered him the choice of five different kinds of Sweet Peaks Ice Cream from her freezer. As he looked at the row of cartons on the countertop, he had the faintest possible smile, and she felt silly in the best, warmest possible way.
This casual, no-expectations dinner was quickly turning into something else. At least for her, and she was pretty sure she wasn’t misreading him.
Which meant it was time to relax. Be funny. Friendly. Open. Charming.
With their bowls of ice cream in hand, they returned to the living room couch, almost in the same spots that they had been sitting before. Almost, because now they sat closer to one another, their knees not quite touching as they faced each other.
There on the couch, their knees a hope and a prayer from being intertwined, Mina couldn’t hear the question Levi asked her over the beating of her heart and the rush of blood in her ears. She asked him to repeat himself. She tried to smile and tried to make it look natural. The world must be smiling down on her, because suddenly she thought of a question to ask him, something to take the pressure off her and give her time to take a deep breath.
Time to stop the panic welling up inside her.
More important, time to stop herself from acting on the panic.
“Are you okay?” Levi asked, his brows crossed in confusion over her sudden change of behavior.
“I’m fine.” Her voice sounded breathy and dismantled to her ears, but he only nodded.
“Let me take your bowl,” he said, and she released her grip on her ice cream. She wasn’t finished with it, but she had stopped tasting it several minutes ago.
Levi’s eyes had grown hot during the time they’d been sitting on the couch. Intent had softened his jaw and, she saw as he set both their bowls on the coffee table, his shoulders. As he sat back up, the coming kiss dulled the world around them. Mina stopped being able to hear the tick of the clock on her wall, and the outlines of the furniture got fuzzy.
He leaned into her, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m sure,” she reassured him, trying to lie to them both and failing miserably.
But Levi didn’t seem to notice her failure. Or, if he did, he didn’t care. Every skin cell burned as he trailed his finger along her jawline. The panic beating inside her couldn’t hide the intensity with which she wanted his lips pressed against hers. The fear didn’t stop her from leaning into him, from meeting him halfway.
Just as his lips were a whisper away from hers, the panic that had risen inside her surged out, shoving charming and flirty and casual out of the way. “I have HIV,” she said, then sat back against the cushions before he could reject the kiss. Reject her.
“What?” he asked. His entire face had folded in on itself in confusion.
“I’m HIV positive. I thought you should know, before we, well...” That last part was a lie. She didn’t think he should know before they kissed. He didn’t need to know before they kissed. HIV wasn’t spread through saliva. They could make out all night, and he wouldn’t be any more at risk than if he’d sat in a church praying.
But Mina had never mastered the timing of the tell, if there was a way to master it. She’d read books and articles on living and dating with HIV. She’d read everything she could find in an attempt to find the balance between telling someone about the skeletons in your closet early enough in the relationship, so you could judge if they were a person who could handle your particular set of baggage, and not telling them so soon that you were pushing them away.
She always told too soon. Or too casually. Or didn’t prepare them for big news coming. Like everything else, she rushed into it.
“Okay. Um, thanks for telling me, I guess.” Levi leaned away from her, looking her over for a long minute. Then he nodded once with a finality that might as well have been a slap across the face and stood. Mina watched as he gathered the ice-cream bowls and walked into the kitchen. When he returned, she hadn’t moved an inch.
“I’m going to head home. If you need help building another raised bed—”
She braced herself for the final rejection.
“—give me a call.”
“Okay.” Her voice was barely audible to her own ears, even though she had no heartbeat to drown it out.
He nodded again. He shut the front door behind him, and the possibility of their relationship clicked closed, too.
CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_40eb710b-f8bb-5f23-bbae-59cd1741eedc)
LEVI’S BLINDS WERE still open when he got home. The lights were on in Mina’s house, and he could see right through from his kitchen into hers. The ice-cream bowls were on the counter where he’d put them.
Mina only had good ice cream in her freezer. Dinner had been delicious, even if there hadn’t been any meat. Levi pulled everything out of his pockets and plopped his keys and his phone on the table, before dropping into a chair facing her house. He’d enjoyed himself at Mina’s. She’d been funny and interesting, and her face moved when she talked, and he hadn’t wanted her to stop talking, because he hadn’t wanted to stop watching her face move.
But then he’d been leaning in to kiss her, and she’d told him about her HIV, and the animation in her face had turned into pill bottles on the bathroom counter and blinds that were always closed and doctor’s visits and the heavy weight of watching someone slowly withdraw until the day you came home, and they weren’t there at all.
Levi rested his forehead in his hand, feeling the weight of his head and the way it pressed his elbow into the table. He’d caught his skin on the table in a weird way and he should move his elbow, but the pinching kept him from disappearing into the past. Into what he should have done better, the times he should have reminded Kimmie to take her pills and the times he’d reminded her too much. Into the last day when she’d said, “Don’t go to work today. I feel like something bad is going to happen,” and he’d been frustrated because he couldn’t find his keys, and he’d said, “You always feel like something bad is going to happen.”
Only this time, Kimmie had been right.
He dropped his palm to the wood with a slap, his head bouncing once before he righted it and stared again at Mina’s house.
Knowing what he knew now, knowing how everything ended, he still wouldn’t go back and change anything about the day he’d walked up to Kimmie and asked for her phone number. He’d loved her more than he thought was possible—still did. Every minute they’d been together had been the best minute of his life.
A love like that was possible, and he believed lightning could strike twice.
But he didn’t know if he could go through the pain of loving someone who was slowly dying again. He had doubted he was strong enough for more heartbreak. Was he strong enough for worse?
The screen on his phone flashed on with his sister’s face, then vibrated on the table.
“Hey, sis,” he said.
“I’ve been trying to call you all day. Where have you been?”
“Yeah, sorry.” He’d felt the phone vibrate in his pocket but hadn’t wanted to interrupt Mina to even check who it was. “I was over at my neighbor’s, helping her build a raised garden bed. She made me dinner.”
“Oh? The neighbor Dennis mentioned?”
“Don’t go getting any ideas,” he warned, hearing ideas she already had in the oh. If she got ideas, she’d call and text him nonstop to ask how the relationship was going. Eventually he’d turn off his phone just to get a break.
At some point when they were kids and she’d been stuck being Mom, she’d apparently gotten the idea that Moms smothered, and she hadn’t let go.
“Nothing is going to happen,” he said, before she could start planning his future wedding. “Mina is HIV positive.”
“Oh.” This oh was flat, not yet judgmental but edging that way. Brook was no longer getting any ideas. “I guess it’s best, then, that you’re not yet over Kimmie’s death.”
“What?” He regretted answering the phone, regretted saying anything. He especially regretted saying anything about Mina. Her disease was not his sister’s business, and it had not been his information to share, even if he’d thought Brook would understand his hesitation.
Which she clearly didn’t. “Maybe it’s not so bad if she’s one of those poor souls who’s had it since birth or got it from a blood transfusion or something. But what do you know about your neighbor? Maybe she got it from sharing a needle or she slept around in college or... I don’t know. How else do people get AIDS?”
“I think there’s a difference between HIV and AIDS,” he said slowly, realizing he didn’t know for sure. He didn’t know the answer to any of his sister’s questions. And the question of how Mina got HIV didn’t matter.
Did it?
“Well, you’re not going to be seeing her again to find out, are you?”
“Brook, less than a minute ago you were hopeful I was over Kimmie, would fall in love with Mina, get married and produce nieces and nephews for you to spoil.”
“All I said was ‘Oh.’”
“Yeah, but we both know where that oh was going.”
“Well,” she huffed, “you had always wanted to get married and have kids. Maybe you could marry someone with HIV, but you couldn’t have kids with them. It would be wrong to knowingly bring kids with AIDS into the world.”
I think HIV and AIDS are different. He didn’t bother repeating himself. She hadn’t listened the first time, and she wouldn’t listen a second. “I think someone with HIV can have children who don’t have the disease. Isn’t that part of what they talk about on the news when they talk about AIDS in Africa?”
“Honestly, Levi, you think a lot of things, but what do you know? About the disease or your neighbor?”
He bristled at her tone. She was his older sister, and her tone had likely been condescending since the day he was born.
At least, that was how he remembered it.
Most of the time he was able to remind himself that she was his sister, and she cared about him, and she fussed and bossed over everyone she cared about, from Dennis to her children to their aging father.
But tonight, he wasn’t in the mood. “Look, Brook, I get that you want me to get married again—”
“You liked being married,” she interrupted. “Even if...”
“Yes. Even if Kimmie had entire weeks where she didn’t leave the house, I did like being married. But I’m thirty-seven years old, and I get to pick the women I date.” Even as the words came out of his mouth, he felt like her baby brother.
“And if you want to hear about any of them, you have to reserve judgment. At least until you meet them. And you have to pretend that I’m an adult and might pick out someone good. After all, I picked Kimmie.”
Silence reigned through the phone as Levi waited for Brook to point out that Kimmie’s clinical depression had eventually killed her. He could feel his phone shudder at the effort his sister was putting forth to keeping her mouth shut.
“Kimmie was great,” she said finally, her voice soft with affection. Because Kimmie had been great. She had been unable to be a light in her own life, but she’d been the sun, moon and stars for many others.
“Good night, Brook. Go remind Dennis to take his high blood pressure medicine or something.”
“I worry.”
Whether it was about him, or Dennis’s health, or any number of things, Brook didn’t say, and it didn’t matter. “I know.”
“Someone has to.”
“But it doesn’t always have to be you.”
On that note they finished their goodbyes, and Levi ended the call. Then he slouched in his chair to catch his breath. Talking to his sister for ten minutes was more exhausting than an entire day spent building a raised bed with Mina. For all Mina’s chatter and energy, Levi had felt better after building the raised bed than he had before.
This was why he didn’t call his family and only occasionally answered the phone when they called him.
His breathing back to normal, Levi glanced up at his windows. Mina’s blinds had all been closed, and her house was dark.
It was too late to go over and apologize, but he could at least prove his sister wrong about the baby thing. He sighed. He knew the growing list of items he needed to apologize to Mina for, though he didn’t know what he wanted out of it. To be back on her couch kissing? To be friends and neighbors? To make the barest effort at not being a total ass?
Or did he need to apologize simply because he was wrong and sorry about it?
Levi rolled his eyes at himself. No matter what he was sorry for and why, he could at least be less ignorant when he apologized. Gathering his phone, he went in search of his laptop.
* * *
IT WASN’T UNTIL Friday that Mina was finally able to be outside after work, hands shoved in the new dirt in her new raised garden bed. Even though the nights were getting cooler, the sun had shone on the dark dirt all day, and it pressed warmth and possibility against her skin. She didn’t even care if the greens she was planting grew into anything edible, so long as she had the excuse to be out here, away from her thoughts and her work and her problems.
The past week had been rough. Classes were starting, increasing the amount of work she needed to do and the amount of time she had to spend on campus. Departmental meetings, syllabi, double-checking on the assigned readings and that the bookstore and library both carried what the students would need, etc. The meetings were the worst. She could work on the syllabi from home, but the department wasn’t yet willing to hold meetings through Skype. She’d always suspected that her emotions played a big role in the side effects of all her meds, and this week had done nothing to disprove her theory.
She’d spent more time on the toilet than she cared to admit to herself. Today wasn’t just the first day she’d been able to be outside in the sun, it was the first day her stomach had felt like it belonged to a normal human being. Or mostly normal. She’d gotten accustomed to the base level of nausea her meds caused.
She patted the soil down over the seeds, trying not to let her feelings press down too hard.
Her emotions and her side effects fed off each other, making everything worse. She felt self-conscious about the time spent in the bathroom, which brought her thoughts back to Levi walking out on her, almost without a word. She’d stay later in her office, hunched over her desk, hand cramped from her tight control on her drawing—which meant her drawings were shit. And she’d both wish she were home where she would be more comfortable and be glad that she couldn’t see if Levi’s truck was pulling into his driveway and wondering if she’d catch a glimpse of him.
It had taken her three days of concentrated effort on what her therapist had said about thoughts just being thoughts before she had been able to say, “I’m better off knowing his true stripes now,” and mean it. Only then had she been okay with leaving her office and spending time at home, in her garden and near her own bathroom.
Of course, when her emotions had settled down, so had her nausea.
“Hey, Mina,” a woman’s voice called from behind her. Mina stood and turned around to see her neighbor Echo standing on the sidewalk with her fluffy little dog on the other end of the leash, the dog’s tongue flipping in and out of its mouth in exaggerated, adorable pants. “Nice garden bed.”
“Thank you.” Mina took advantage of the opportunity for a break. She and Echo had spoken a couple of times when her neighbor walked past with her dog. The woman seemed friendly and interesting and worth getting to know a little better.
“Was that Levi I saw helping you build it?”
“Yeah...” Mina replied, not sure where this was going.
Echo looked right and left, as if checking for spies in the bushes. “I’ve barely gotten Levi to say hi to me when Noodle and I walk by.”
Noodle? The dog with the papillon ears and dachshund body and Pomeranian coat was named Noodle? Echo might be even more interesting than Mina had thought.
“I’m not sure he wanted to help,” Mina said, feeling the lie stick on her tongue as she tried to make Sunday sound like no big deal. Echo caught the lie, too, because her eyebrows lifted up to her hairline.
“Okay, so he wanted to. And he’s brought over my mail and helped me buy a lawn mower, but there’s nothing more.”
Given the continued elevation of her eyebrows, Echo understood the subtext of there might have been something more as easily as she’d recognized the lie. “I want to hear about this. You have dinner plans?”
Other than pasta with butter and Parmesan cheese? “No.”
“The store had some nice-looking salmon. I bought myself a piece for tonight and a piece for tomorrow, but one indulgent dinner with a friend is better than two indulgent nights in by myself. Come over for dinner and a glass of wine, and you can tell me all about how Silent-Neighbor Levi ended up building you a garden bed.”
“Honestly, Echo, there’s not much to tell.” And Mina wasn’t certain she was comfortable sharing what information there was. After all, blurting out “I’m HIV positive” rarely went as well as she hoped with possible friends, too. And she still hadn’t figured out how not to overshare.
“Do you not like salmon? Or wine?” A teenager rode by on a bicycle, and Echo’s little dog barked and jumped about like the devil himself had been on those two wheels. “Or little barky dogs?”
“I like salmon. And I like wine. I’m okay with little barky dogs that aren’t coming home with me.” And she needed to make friends. So she needed to trust a little. Dinner and boy talk wasn’t a bad place to start. “Is there anything I can bring?”
“Bring dessert. Come over in about an hour.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
“Gossip in the neighborhood.” Echo tapped the tips of her fingers against one another. “This is doubly exciting because no one ever tells me anything.” The movement of her fingers stopped, and she looked down at her dog, who looked up expectantly. “Probably because gossip is always a trade, and I only like to take. Greedy, my ex-husband always said.”
Mina laughed at the blatant attempt to reassure her. “I’ll be over in an hour, with ice cream.” She was less sure about bringing gossip.
CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_ed5372b6-9f7c-58e7-a409-7829dd3f3c66)
MINA STOOD ON Echo’s front stoop, ice cream in a plastic bag in one hand while attempting not to clench her nerves too tightly in the other. Once, in another lifetime, she would have been bouncing with excitement at a new friend. Her body still remembered those times, and wanting them back was the reason she’d made a point to introduce herself to as many people as she could in her new town, including her cranky, handy-with-a-drill-and-friends-with-the-hardware-store-guy neighbor.
But that Mina had a different, naive understanding of the world. She’d grown up in a happy household, with parents who loved each other and their children. Maybe they were too intrusive in their kids’ lives, maybe they just cared a lot; it didn’t matter. All Mina had known about the world was that it was a place full of nice people you could trust.
The world had acquired shadows since her diagnosis. She didn’t want to go back, really, because shadows added depth and interest, but she occasionally wished she could sink into her old happy-go-lucky self, the one who found the world to be full of friends rather than potential hurts. The one fascinated by the macabre but who didn’t understand it.
She took a deep breath and knocked. Noodle started yapping from deep inside the recesses of the house, a sound which got louder and louder until the front door opened, and the dog spun and leaped at Echo’s feet.
“Welcome,” Echo said with an expansive wave of her hand and a surreptitious sweep of her foot to push the dog out of the way. “Let me take the bag from you and get the ice cream in the freezer. Come in.”
“It smells delicious,” Mina said as she stepped through the doorway and waited to be sniffed and approved by the dog. “What is it?”
“Salmon in a cilantro sauce. Given how much cream is in the dish, it should be delicious. There’s rice and sautéed squash, too.”
Mina followed Echo and the aroma to the kitchen, waiting off to the side while her neighbor put the ice cream in the freezer.
“Dinner’s pretty much ready,” Echo said, balling up the plastic bag and tossing it to the back of the counter. “The table’s even set. And there’s a bottle of wine out there, if you want to pour us some. I’ll feed the beast, so she doesn’t try to get in your lap, then bring the food out, and we can serve ourselves.”
The table was set with matching floral china, silverware and what Mina assumed to be crystal. Despite the casualness of the invitation and Echo’s manner, she felt underdressed in her jeans and cream tank top with a big black bow. It was the flats. A girls’ night in with crystal deserved heels.
“Like my china?” Echo asked as she came from the kitchen into the living room. Noodle was chomping happily on kibble in the background. “When my ex left me, I got to keep all the trappings of having once been married. The china, the crystal, the silverware. For a long time after I moved, it stayed in the cupboards, and I ate off regular plates and drank out of cheap glasses. Then I decided I was worth fancy, and I haven’t looked back.”
With a closer look, Mina realized Echo was not only older, but older than Mina had thought. “It’s nice. I won’t feel underdressed, then.”
“Feel like you deserve better. And sit, sit. Let’s eat.”
Maybe it was the wine, maybe it was the good food, and maybe it was that Mina felt like herself for the first time in a week, but she relaxed into dinner and conversation with Echo like they were old friends. Well, not quite like old friends, because they were sharing basic bits of information with each other such as where they were from and what brought them to Missoula. But, much like she had felt with Levi on Sunday, Mina was immediately comfortable with Echo.
They laughed and joked as they cleaned up the kitchen together and scooped ice cream into bowls. Mina had purposely brought over different kinds of ice cream than she’d had last week, not wanting to make dinner at Echo’s feel too much like dinner with Levi. Not that she would confuse the neighbors, but one of those dinners hadn’t turned out as she’d planned.
They ate their ice cream at the dining room table, and this time Noodle got to help with the cleanup. When those bowls were put in the dishwasher, Echo poured them each a full glass of wine, and they moved to her living room for a chat.
“So,” Echo said as she curled her legs around her on the couch, and her dog settled into her lap. “Tell me how Levi came to be at your house swinging a mighty hammer.”
Mina sank into a deep armchair with plush cushions and a high back and sides. She’d probably had a little too much to drink, because the armchair felt like the closest thing she’d had to a hug in ages. “I don’t know. I introduced myself to him shortly after I moved in and was trying to meet my neighbors. He helped me get a good deal on a new lawn mower, and I was outside struggling with the raised bed when he came over to help. He said he couldn’t concentrate if he knew I was outside struggling so much. He seemed gruff and standoffish when I first met him, but after that he just seemed gruff.”
“I’ve lived here for two years, and he’s still standoffish to me.” Echo’s lips were pursed in disappointment, and Noodle looked up at her with disgust at the heavy pat on the head she got.
“Did you want something more?”
Echo shrugged and went back to petting Noodle in a way that made the dog relax in her lap again. “In reality, probably not. In my fantasy world, yes. I was newly divorced and thought the solution to my problems was someone who would stick around. Levi always struck me as the kind of guy who sticks.”
“Yeah. He does seem that way, doesn’t he?” It was the jawline, Mina decided. And the broad shoulders. The handiness with tools and that stupid hodgepodge lawn mower of his. A man who would stick with that lawn mower had to be a man who would stick in a relationship.
That was the same kind of reasoning that made a known jerk seem like a nicer person because he got a chocolate Lab puppy. That kind of reasoning got women into relationships that went nowhere but in downward spirals.
Or out the front door.
“Do you know something about him that I don’t, Mina?” Echo was looking intently at her glass of wine, as if the light bouncing off the crystal held the secrets to the universe.
Mina wasn’t the only one who’d had too much to drink tonight. She was grateful that tomorrow was Saturday, and she could sleep off whatever headache she was sure to get.
Which didn’t stop her from reaching forward and pouring more wine in her glass. At Echo’s gesture, Mina topped off her glass, as well. She drank deeply out of the garnet courage, giving the buzz time to reach her brain and cloud her thinking. She wanted the edges of her mind to go fuzzy, to stop thinking, can I trust this person?
If she didn’t say anything to Echo, then she continued to be just-Mina. The friendship would develop as if Mina were another neighbor, and, depending on how close their friendship got, eventually Mina might tell her. Maybe Echo would be upset that she hadn’t been told until then, and maybe she wouldn’t be. The problem was you never knew. Rarely did the opportunity come up naturally for Mina to hear someone’s ignorance or otherwise on HIV, and, as she’d learned the hard way, people’s words and their actions could be diametrically opposed.
Mina took another sip. But alcohol never could dull her mind. All it ever did was make her riskier.
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Jennifer Lohmann
If only attraction always led to happily ever after…Mina Clements wants to grab life with both hands. With a fixer-upper and a fresh start in Montana, the graphic novelist is ready to do just that. Plus, having handsome handyman Levi Pardo next door could be a bonus… But even though sparks sizzle when Levi helps with her renovations, the widower’s in no hurry to fall in love again. Still, he’s much more than the neighbour who looks good swinging a hammer. He’s a man she wants to trust with her biggest secret—one that can either bring them closer or wreck the new beginning they both need.
If only attraction always led to happily ever after...
Mina Clements wants to grab life with both hands. With a fixer-upper and a fresh start in Montana, the graphic novelist is ready to do just that. Plus, having handsome handyman Levi Pardo next door could be a bonus... But even though sparks sizzle when Levi helps with her renovations, the widower’s in no hurry to fall in love again. Still, he’s much more than the neighbor who looks good swinging a hammer. He’s a man she wants to trust with her biggest secret—one that can either bring them closer or wreck the new beginning they both need.
Mina couldn’t hear over the beating of her heart and the rush of blood in her ears.
“Are you okay?” Levi said, his forehead creased in confusion over her sudden change of behavior.
“I’m fine.” Her voice sounded breathy and disjointed to her ears, but he only nodded.
Levi’s gaze had become intense with emotion during the time they’d been sitting on the couch. Intent had softened his jaw and, she saw as he set both their bowls on the ice cream table, his shoulders. As he sat back up, the coming kiss dulled the world around them.
He leaned in to her, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. “Are you sure you’re feeling okay?”
“I’m sure,” she reassured him, her lie failing miserably.
But Levi didn’t seem to notice her failure. Or, if he did, he didn’t care. Every skin cell burned as he trailed his finger along her jawline. The panic beating inside her couldn’t hide the intensity with which she wanted his lips pressed against hers. The fear didn’t stop her from leaning in to him, from meeting him halfway.
Dear Reader (#u7bdb9760-fbfd-5cc9-b506-7280383145af),
Love on Her Terms is one of those books that was born from many places yet somehow came together perfectly. There’s no question this book is influenced by the many times I’ve watched the 1966 movie A Man and a Woman (my mom’s favorite). And for years I’d wanted to write about a young woman who moves in next door to a cranky widower. She brings new sparkle to his life, but she has a chronic illness, and my hero’s not sure he can handle it. Of course, the heroine’s illness kept eluding me. Then while ruminating on a different novel where the heroine has HIV, a friend asked on Twitter if there were any heterosexual romances where one character has HIV. I knew then that I had to put the two ideas together! Sometimes—okay, often—authors need a friendly push.
My heroine, Mina, is also a graphic novelist so I can’t resist recommending Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. It’s a wonderful exploration of the art form whether you’ve read comics and graphic novels or are new to the format entirely. Some of his theories made my jaw drop in awe. And seriously, if you do pick up the book and want to talk about it—shoot me an email! And for a real-life love story similar to Love on Her Terms, read Blue Pills: A Positive Love Story by Frederik Peeters. It’s Peeters’s graphic novel memoir about falling in love with an HIV-positive woman, who also has an HIV-positive son. As a librarian and book lover, suggesting books is one of my favorite pastimes, and these are two good ones!
Love on Her Terms was a powerful book for me to write and I hope it’s just as powerful for you to read.
Enjoy,
Jennifer
Love on Her Terms
Jennifer Lohmann
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
JENNIFER LOHMANN is a Rocky Mountain girl at heart, having grown up in southern Idaho and Salt Lake City. When she’s not writing or working as a public librarian, she wrangles two cats and a flock of backyard chickens (the dog is better behaved). She currently lives in Durham, North Carolina. She has one published comic strip, which you can find in a collection called The Durham Comics Project.
To Amy, Kirill and Yuri.
Thanks for all your support over the
past couple years and for bringing comics
and drawing into my life.
Contents
COVER (#ud4c1f3b8-b1b6-5457-b894-f9bf35938a49)
BACK COVER TEXT (#u683cfcbb-91b4-5fe8-801a-471bc5fc6d21)
INTRODUCTION (#u8d9eff5e-e5ff-51ff-8474-a58bbc810cc6)
Dear Reader
TITLE PAGE (#uac375ed4-21ae-5546-ab20-554fccb495c0)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#uabd21910-039e-53d4-ad79-a3b6144ee23c)
DEDICATION (#u68effae7-ed3d-538a-904c-6bf4d9bae0ea)
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
EXTRACT (#litres_trial_promo)
COPYRIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#u7bdb9760-fbfd-5cc9-b506-7280383145af)
THE SOUND OF a heavy vehicle pulling into the driveway next door broke Levi Pardo’s concentration, forcing him to look up from the newspaper spread out on the kitchen table. A small, ridiculously young-looking woman was hopping out of the driver’s seat of a truck onto the narrow strip of grass between her driveway and his property. She’d parked too close to the lawn, which didn’t surprise him. He was amazed she could see over the dash and touch the pedals at the same time.
He looked back down at the horoscope he’d been reading, some bullshit about expressing what you’re feeling or else suffer the consequences. He didn’t believe in astrology and found the Missoulian’s particularly annoying, but he still read two signs, Taurus and Cancer, every day. Habit, after years of marriage. Even if Kimmie wasn’t around to care.
The woman moving in next door sure had a lot of energy, he thought, taking a sip of lukewarm, slightly oily coffee. He preferred to drink his coffee with flavored creamer, but he’d run out two days ago and hadn’t yet made it to the store. Through his kitchen windows he saw the woman bound to the back of the truck and, with more power than he expected from someone so small, throw the door up and open. When a car drove up and parked along the curb, the woman leaped across the lawn like a pronghorn to greet her new arrivals.
Levi needed another sip of caffeine just to keep up with her. Maybe the process of unloading everything from the back of the truck would slow her down.
He shifted his chair over a couple of inches for a better angle. The house next door had been empty for almost two years and, as far as he knew, was as run-down on the inside as it was on the outside. It had good bones, though.
So did she, he thought, as the woman turned her head and faced his window. Long, dark bangs and a fringe of hair around her chin framed high cheekbones, a sharply pointed chin and a nose that looked like something out of a marble statue in those travel books about Greece that Kimmie used to bring home, back when she was feeling good and planning their adventures. Before he’d seen his neighbor’s face full-on, he would have described her as cute. Short women were cute. Now beautiful was the only appropriate adjective.
Levi shook that thought out of his mind and turned back to his morning paper. He was about as interested in short women as he was in astrology.
* * *
TWO HOURS LATER Levi wiped down the kitchen counter, and, with the drape of a washcloth over the faucet, the second part of his Sunday ritual was done. Paper, first. Clean the house, second. It was midsummer, so he still had outdoor chores to do. He put sunscreen on his face and neck, covered his hair with a ratty Broncos cap, shoved his sunglasses on and went out to his garage for the lawn mower.
His ancient lawn mower, more Frankenstein’s monster than anything resembling the machines currently lining the entrances of home-improvement stores, clanged as he pushed it down the driveway.
Even with his sunglasses and ball cap, he had to squint against the harsh sun.
He was leaning over to start the mower when voices caught his attention.
“I just don’t get why you had to move here, of all places,” an older woman’s voice said, loudly enough that Levi could hear her, even though he couldn’t see anyone when he looked around. He could picture the woman inspecting the neighborhood of old bungalows in varying states of repair with her hands on her hips and a slight sneer on her lips.
Though Levi couldn’t understand what there was in this neighborhood to sneer at.
“Because the University of Montana offered me a job.” A younger woman’s voice this time, probably the bubbling one he’d seen driving the moving truck.
“So did the University of Richmond. If you had accepted their offer, you’d be near home.” The older woman’s voice again. Maybe the woman’s mother. They must have been standing just on the other side of the moving truck.
Levi let go of the lawn mower’s pull cord and folded his arms, giving in to the eavesdropping. He wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to get to know his neighbor, without the burden of going over and introducing himself.
“Which is exactly why I accepted the Montana job,” the woman said, too bright and cheery for someone who was arguing with her mother. “Montana. Just the word conjures up adventure. Moose. Grizzly bears. Cowboys.”
“Referring to grizzly bears as an adventure doesn’t make me feel any more confident about your decision. Grizzly bears kill people,” the older woman said.
“So does sitting, but you didn’t offer to drive the U-Haul while I rode a bicycle alongside,” the younger woman said smartly, while Levi bit back a smile.
“Don’t talk back to your mother,” a man said, a snap to his voice, which softened when he spoke again. “She’s worried about you is all. We both are. If something were to happen, you’ll be so far from home.”
“Franklin married the most organized and efficient woman on earth. If something happens to either of you, she’ll have flowers delivered to your room before you even get to the hospital.” A laugh underpinned the woman’s voice, though her humor had a sharp edge. Hidden, like the lid on a can of chili opened with a rusty can opener—familiar and domestic and safe, until you sliced a finger because you weren’t paying attention.
“You know it’s not us your mother is worried about,” the man said, the sharpness of his voice less concealed than his daughter’s. He sounded as if he’d cut himself on that can of humor before. “If something were to happen to you...”
“This is Montana, Mom, not the jungles of the Amazon. I’ll be fine. Promise. There are good hospitals here. And my health has been good for years.”
Levi shook his head. He shouldn’t be eavesdropping, especially not on conversations involving hospitals. Resolving to return to his decision that he wasn’t interested in short women, he gripped the pull cord and yanked until the ancient motor turned over, drowning out the conversation next door.
* * *
THE PROBLEM, LEVI THOUGHT, as he slipped a Pardo and Saupp Construction T-shirt over his head while looking out the window at the house next door, was that his new neighbor was always outside. It was hard to ignore a woman who seemed to think every beverage should be drunk on her front porch.
This evening, as she had for the past two weeks, she sat in the rocking chair with her feet up on the railing and a coffee cup in hand. The hems of her loose cotton shorts gapped. If he were at a different angle, he could follow the line of her skin down to her panties. She had nice legs. Not overly long, but shapely. He had no interest in women with thin legs.
She set her cup down and stretched her hands over her head. Her shirt lifted, and a little line of skin appeared between the elastic waistband of her plaid shorts and the bottom of her T-shirt. It was the type of movement he imagined her doing first thing in the morning, as she swung her legs over the side of the bed and welcomed the day. Intimate. Personal.
And he was staring out his window at her like a creep.
Levi jerked at the hem of his shirt, as if the movement could do anything to erase the image of his young neighbor with hair mussed by a long day. Not that that particular mental image was so bad, but he also imagined his hand slipping under the back of her shirt, her skin warm and soft on his cool palm and a glimpse of her face as she looked over her shoulder and smiled at him.
He reached up and closed the blinds.
He had to pick up his niece for soccer practice. Since he’d taken over coaching her youth soccer team two years ago, watching those girls tear up the field, fight, celebrate, fail and succeed had become the highlight of his fall. Solstice, his niece, seemed to have grown another three inches over the summer and would be all limbs. Helping her figure out how to manage all the new length in her arms and legs was a challenge he looked forward to.
* * *
THE NEXT FRIDAY, Levi climbed into his truck and looked next door with resignation. If he didn’t want to watch his neighbor move about his life, he had to learn to ignore her better. That and keep his kitchen blinds closed. Actually, all the blinds on this side of the house. Today she had come home from work, disappeared only long enough to change into shorts and grab a glass of what looked like iced tea. Now the ice in her tea was melting as it sat in the sun on her front porch while she was elbow deep in soil, shoving mums into the dirt. When she leaned forward, she stretched like a cat, her back long and her ass high in the air.
God, he definitely had to learn how not to watch her, because he didn’t want to shutter his entire house. He liked the sunlight coming in through the windows, especially the afternoon summer sun. The big, south-facing windows were one of the reasons he’d bought this house.
He shoved the gearshift into Reverse, looked over his shoulder with barely a glance at his neighbor’s ass, backed out of the driveway and sped down the street.
* * *
“YOU’RE LATE,” DENNIS SAID, lifting up his eyebrow and his phone at the same time. Both pointed comments on the time.
“Barely.” Levi slid into the booth and motioned to Mary for a beer. The two of them had been coming to O’Reilly’s and sitting in this booth every Friday night for three years. The first six months, she’d come over to ask what beer he wanted. He’d said “whatever” enough times that she brought over whatever she or Brian, the bar’s owner, felt like bringing to him. Sometimes he drank the entire beer and sometimes only a sip or two.
A little adventure, in his otherwise boring life.
A safer adventure than watching his neighbor.
Dennis coughed, a bad one that collapsed his shoulders in on his ears and shook the table. The kind of cough that would have his sister rushing to her husband to see what was wrong and Dennis struggling to both catch his breath and shake off Brook.
If he and Dennis were being honest with themselves, a surprise beer was probably the only adventure either of them needed, since the mine accident. And Dennis didn’t even seem to need that. He always got the same bottle of Bud Light with a Jameson chaser. Had for years. Since before Missoula. Since before everything.
“You ain’t been late since the day you were born,” Dennis said, his bottle resting against his bottom lip. “And this ain’t a big city, so you can’t blame traffic.”
“I’ve got a new neighbor.”
Levi hadn’t meant the comment by way of explanation, but he could tell by how Dennis lifted his eyebrows that it was the way his brother-in-law took the information. “He park in your driveway?”
“No. My neighbor’s not why I’m late,” he said, though he didn’t have a better explanation for his tardiness, because “No matter how close I am to my new neighbor, I want to take at least one step closer, so it took me a while to drive away” would sound pretty stupid.
“Why’d you mention it, then?”
She was on his mind. “I’m not used to having a neighbor. It’s distracting.”
“So, not a sixty-year-old with a gut. You wouldn’t be distracted by that.”
“Ha!” Levi rubbed his own stomach. It was still flat but, at the age of thirty-seven, he was starting to think more about carrots and less about French fries and beer. “We’ll both be lucky not to be that in twenty years.”
“I’ll be lucky to be that in twenty years.” Dennis took a long pull on his beer, draining the bottle and signaling for another one. It was going to be one of those nights. Levi and the dishwasher would be hefting Dennis into the passenger seat of Levi’s truck, and sometime around noon tomorrow, Dennis would text him for a ride back to get his car because Brook refused. And Brook would be texting him about letting Dennis get that drunk, because not only did she still think it was her job to monitor Levi’s behavior, but she considered it Levi’s job to monitor Dennis’s behavior.
His sister had gotten taller over the years, but inside she was still a bossy twelve-year-old playing Mom while their dad worked in the mines.
But neither Levi nor Dennis would drive home drunk, so that was progress since their reckless younger years. At least they’d learned something.
Proof that stupidity wasn’t guaranteed to kill you young.
“So, you gonna introduce yourself to this distracting neighbor?” Dennis asked, his second bottle of beer already half-gone. At least the whiskey was untouched.
“What for? To get roped into helping her with home renovations?” Levi shrugged. “That house needs a lot of work, and I’m already too busy as it is.”
“So, she’s cute.”
“She’s a child,” he said, yanking his mind away from her legs and her nose and her ass and everything else about her he’d tried not to admire over the past couple of weeks.
“She bought a house, so I’m guessing she’s at least twenty-five. Hmm. Might be more than cute—hot, even.”
Levi shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t have time. Or interest. I’ve been married already. You should know. You were my best man.”
Dennis shrugged. “Only ’cause no one else would do it.”
A couple of beers between them helped them both laugh at the joke. At the time of Levi’s actual wedding, Dennis—and everyone else—had been dead set against it. Kimmie had been too young, the chorus of noes said. And Dennis had only served as best man because Kimmie had cried when he’d refused. And then everyone had been mad at Levi for making her cry. No one had noticed at that time that his entire goal in his marriage had been to keep Kimmie happy.
All history.
“You gonna ask your neighbor out?” Dennis asked with disarming openness. Both he and Brook regularly pushed Levi to date women. Dennis suggested women like the girls who worked the registers at the hardware store or the ski shop. While Brook had a never-ending supply of friends who would be perfect for him.
Sometimes he said yes to Brook’s friends, and he’d even gone on more than one date with a couple; but there had never been any spark that compared to what he’d felt for Kimmie. Anything less would be doing both of them a disservice.
“I don’t know her name.” The least of the things he didn’t know about her, though he was very familiar with the shape of her calves.
He had to figure out how to stop looking at her without closing his damn blinds.
“Don’t see why that should stop you.”
“I’m not interested in being married again.” One time had been hard enough, even without the spectacularly tragic ending.
Dennis signaled for his third beer. Levi was still on his first. A part of him wished his friend would finish the shot sitting on the table so he would fall over, and they could both go home already, but his friend seemed determined to get drunk nice and slow. Which usually meant mean. He’d have to warn Brook.
“Hey, man, I’m not suggesting marriage,” he said, draining the last of the bottle while Mary brought a new one.
No, Dennis never suggested marriage. But that was always Levi’s first thought after seeing a woman who attracted him.
Or second, after the she’s got nice legs thought.
He just wasn’t interested in a stand, one-night or otherwise. Once attached, he stuck.
“Maybe you should ask her,” he suggested to his brother-in-law, as useless a suggestion to Dennis as Dennis’s had been to him. “Brook wouldn’t be at all mad.”
Dennis’s shoulders started to shake with a laugh, which turned into a hacking cough. It sounded worse tonight. They each waited until it passed, pretending it wasn’t happening. The one time Levi had offered Dennis sympathy and a pat on the shoulder, he’d been angrily shrugged off, which only exacerbated the hacking fit. The next time they’d gone out for beers, both had been short and angry with each other.
Levi hadn’t offered anything resembling sympathy for Dennis’s coughing since.
Like Kimmie’s suicide, they both found it easier not to acknowledge its existence. Kimmie died and Dennis had a chronic cough. Every Friday night, Dennis came out to the bar to drink and forget, climbing out of bed every Saturday afternoon back in the guise of a devoted husband and father. Levi had learned long ago how to hold on to your drink despite shit things happening in the world around you, rather than letting your drink hold on to you.
He tipped his bottle, watching the liquid slosh around while Dennis recovered himself. Levi was half-done with his beer. It would be his one and only tonight. His heavy drinking days were over, and the days he was willing to watch Dennis pickle himself were numbered. Time to go home.
“Brook doesn’t want to be with me when I’m coughing like this. And you think another woman would?” Dennis asked after he’d recovered from coughing and had been able to take another drink of his beer. He shrugged, and his smile was bitter. “Maybe you’re right—Brook might not mind after all.”
Levi shouldn’t have brought the subject up. Coal dust from the mine accident lingered in every decision they made, obscuring any view at happiness. That was what this conversation was really about. Between Levi’s dead wife and Dennis’s dead lungs, could either of them be happy again? As much as Brook and Dennis suggested Levi ask women out and encouraged him to go on dates, he wondered what they would do if he found himself happily settled.
And, hell, what would he do if he wasn’t spending his Friday nights with Dennis? They were in this wreck together.
“I’m going home,” Levi said. No reason to finish his beer. He wasn’t enjoying it any more than he was enjoying the conversation. “Finish your drink and I’ll give you a ride.”
Dennis shook his head. “It’s Friday. There’s more drinking to be had.”
“Not for me.” Could his friend hear his weariness?
“Hot date with the neighbor?”
Levi ignored the slice of resentment cutting through Dennis’s question. “Finish and let’s get going.”
Dennis’s face hardened into belligerence. “I’m staying.” The alcohol had started to hit, and his voice sounded like an angry three-year-old’s.
Levi slid out of the booth. “Fine. If you need a ride back here in the morning to pick up your car, let me know.”
“Maybe I’ll get lucky and take a girl home. Test your theory about Brook minding.” Bitterness leaked from Dennis’s mouth, lingering even after he wiped his chin with the back of his hand.
“Great.” Levi tossed enough cash on the table to cover his beer and at least one of Dennis’s.
On his way out, he stopped by the bar and told Brian and Mary that Dennis was staying. He also told them that Dennis’s car wouldn’t be running, and they should be prepared to call a cab or find someone to give him a ride. Dennis would be pissed, but there was no way Levi was leaving him able to drive home in a drunken, angry fit.
Maybe his friend would get lucky, and Brook wouldn’t be too angry that they had to get his car from the bar parking lot on Saturday. Maybe she would even remember that when he wasn’t busy playing an angry drunk, Dennis was a good guy.
Maybe Levi would get lucky, and his neighbor would still be up and sitting on her porch, reading.
CHAPTER TWO (#u7bdb9760-fbfd-5cc9-b506-7280383145af)
MINA HAD MET all of her neighbors except one. Given how rarely she saw him outside, it seemed like he was determined she not meet him or even lay eyes on him.
Still, she wasn’t used to not knowing her neighbors. Even in graduate school she’d made a point to meet all the people in her apartment building at least once. That way, she figured, even if they avoided her for the rest of their shared time in Chicago, they would be able to tell the paramedics her name if she were found gravely injured on the sidewalk outside the building.
Though how she would have managed being gravely injured on the sidewalk outside her apartment after being hit by a train was still a mystery.
Mina smiled as she crossed the property boundary. A death worthy of Anna Karenina was ridiculous, which was part of the pleasure of thinking about it. She was going to die from something prosaic and boring. A cold that turned into pneumonia. An allergic reaction. Basically, her own body turning against her. Nothing as spectacular as throwing oneself in front of a train after the betrayal of a lover.
She knocked on the door and almost laughed when her neighbor opened it, a death glare on his face that he didn’t even try to hide as he said, “Yes.”
Fortunately, death held little fear for her. It never had. Not even when in the form of a man who stood a head, a neck and a chest taller than her. Every other time she’d seen her neighbor, his black hair had been slicked back against his head, but this morning it was loose about his face, with locks hanging over his eyes. He obviously hadn’t shaved since yesterday at least, and maybe since the day before. One day, once her garden was put in and her bathroom redone, she’d make a study of his facial hair.
Today, she stuck her hand into the void between them, a desperate cover for wanting to push his hair out of his eyes. “I’m Mina. I moved in next door a couple weeks ago and wanted to introduce myself.”
His eyes were a surprisingly light brown, given how dark his hair was. She noticed this as she realized her hand...still hung in the air. She had offered him a strong handshake, like her dad had taught her. No weak wrists. People judged you on your handshake.
Or most people did. Her neighbor might never shake her hand, and he wouldn’t know that she’d practiced her handshake with strangers since she was five.
She was about to give up when his calloused hand slid into hers and gripped tightly enough that her knees went weak in the best possible way.
“Levi,” he said, his voice deep with sleep.
It seemed his dad had taught him to have a good handshake, too. His grip revealed shapely forearms with just a hint of vein under the skin. Enough that Mina wanted to see more. More forearms. More biceps.
More everything of her neighbor.
Though there was plenty to see—or, at least, to imagine. His white T-shirt had a couple of holes scattered about the cotton and worn hems. His cotton pajama pants weren’t much better. She sneaked a long enough peek to notice that the tie at the waist had been washed into a tight knot and he had to keep them loose enough to pull over his hips and butt without undoing the knot. What she could see of the hem of his pants was as worn as the hems of his T-shirt, maybe more so.
Had she woken him up? It was ten in the morning on a Saturday, so it was possible. But she’d seen him up earlier on Saturdays. And Sundays. And, from what she could tell when she closed her blinds before going to bed, he was also early to bed.
Oh, well. Too late now. If she’d woken him, the damage was already done. Best just to go on. Deciding to meet her neighbor on Saturday morning was yet another decision she couldn’t redo.
“Nice to meet you, Levi,” she said, returning her hand to her hip and her gaze to the scruff on his face.
When he rested his hand on his door, the movement raised his shirt a little, revealing both a little skin and some of the elastic sticking out from his worn pajama pants. Her gaze snapped back to his face. One eyebrow was up and, from the way he looked down at her, she couldn’t tell if he was amused, irritated or both.
She looked down at his bare toes before she could feel self-conscious about knocking on his door and waking him up. He had nice toes. Long, with a dusting of dark hair on each of his big toes. Not enough to veer into Hobbit-hood, but enough to make his feet interesting.
“I moved here from Chicago,” she said. The silence between them was starting to get on her nerves. Someone had to lead the conversation, and he wasn’t going to do it.
He nodded.
Mina waited for him to offer up his own end of the conversation. Maybe where he’d moved to Missoula from. Maybe that he liked Chicago. Or that he’d never been there. Or that both Montana and Chicago had bad winters, but Montana’s was probably worse.
But he seemed to be done nodding, and he hadn’t opened his mouth again. Since she’d knocked on his door, he hadn’t said anything other than “Levi.”
She could have looked at his mail to learn that.
“I teach at the university, in the Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures Department. I teach Russian. And a course on graphic novels. It’s the first one they’ve offered. My suggestion, really, and the class is full. There was a waiting list, even.” God help her, she was babbling. She’d gone beyond polite conversation with a neighbor and had hit full-on ramble.
“Graphic novels are what I do. I mean, they’re what I write. I’ve written three, all based off Russian novels and folktales.” She was wandering through her life and her history in front of this man who still remained silent. Of course, awareness wasn’t enough to encourage sense and good behavior. Or enough to get her to stop talking.
She took a step back, teetering a little when her heel hit the back of his front steps.
“You can look me up,” she continued. Distance. She had to put distance between her need to fill quiet with words and his gaping silence. She gripped the handrail. “Anyway, it was nice to meet you.”
She had turned to go when she heard him say, “I can’t look you up if I don’t know your last name.”
“Oh!” She spun around to look at him again. “Mina Clements. One M. I’ve got samples of my work on my website.”
She slammed her mouth shut before she was tempted to continue. With a wave and a cascade of embarrassment washing over her, feeling like a complete fool, she hopped down his front steps and scurried back to her house.
* * *
LEVI CLOSED THE door with a soft click as soon as his neighbor—Mina—turned off his property and onto her own. She was even shorter up close. And younger-looking. And she had hazel eyes that danced with life as she talked.
Hell, he wasn’t even sure what all she’d said. He was pretty sure he remembered her saying that she taught at the university, but he couldn’t imagine that she was old enough. Did she teach people her own age?
Or maybe she was older than he thought she was. Which meant he was older than he thought he was.
He turned away from the door, back to his coffee and the paper spread out on the kitchen table.
That he was older made sense, actually. He’d started noticing that he couldn’t have extra fries without adding extra weight a year ago. Last year he’d noticed a creak in his knees when he got out of bed. And one benefit of living alone was that there was no one to watch or poke fun when he plucked the couple of gray hairs from his head.
Kimmie absolutely would have made fun of those hairs.
“When she was well,” he said, flipping the paper open to the horoscopes and pressing the newsprint flat. Thoughts of how Kimmie would or wouldn’t act always included a footnote about her health. Levi had never successfully been able to only remember Kimmie when she was well. Her depressive episodes sneaked into his memories so much that he’d stopped trying to halt them. After all, the weeks she’d spent in bed had been just as much a part of his wife as her laughter and sly sense of humor. Seemed almost like a betrayal not to remember them both.
“Remember her as she’d have wanted you to remember,” people had said to him after her funeral. Well-meaning but ultimately stupid advice. Kimmie hadn’t expected him to even be alive to remember her. She’d thought he’d died first.
The coffee burned down his throat when he took another swig. No second cup. Another side effect of getting older.
Not that he should be surprised. He’d spent a lifetime working with his body, and all those years, especially the ones in mining, were bound to have taken their toll. Yet he still had all his fingers and toes. He was able to laugh without coughing. And the only burn marks on his body were the ones he’d gotten being stupid around the stove.
A car started in the driveway next to his kitchen. His neighbor. No, Mina. She’d gone through all the awkward trouble of coming next door and introducing herself to him. He could at least call her by her name in his head while resisting the temptation to turn around and watch her as she drove off.
Maybe she really was a university professor. Teaching... He strained his brain to remember what she’d said. Russian and graphic novels.
Unlike the physical toll that mining took on him, he supposed people didn’t get old prematurely teaching Russian to college students, even in Montana. He didn’t exactly know what a graphic novel was, but he was sure the same applied. Mina Clements would be fresh and young-looking until the day she fell asleep at the ripe old age of ninety-seven and didn’t wake up. And up until that time, she’d be inviting people into her life, whether they wanted to be there or not.
He skimmed the two horoscopes, only barely paying attention to their meaning. Between learning that it was time for him to open himself up to new experiences and that Kimmie should, if she were alive, let go of the past, the question of what a graphic novel was lingered. His mind had seized on the term graphic, wrapping arms around it and forcing him to face all the graphic things he’d been avoiding contemplating with his pint-size neighbor.
But women, even women from big cities, didn’t go around introducing themselves to their neighbor and immediately saying they wrote pornographic novels and to check out their website. Missoula might be a more liberal area of Montana, but this was still Montana, and people would be offended.
Though even the offended would probably do just what Levi was about to do. He folded up the paper and tossed it into the recycling. Then he grabbed his tablet and searched the internet for Mina Clements. One M.
“Huh,” he said to himself as he scrolled down Mina’s page of books. “She writes comic books.” There didn’t seem to be any capes or superpowers, but his friendly neighbor wrote comic books.
Levi sat back in his chair and crossed his arms, looking at the image of a nose dressed in clothing standing in front of a large, ornate building. The drawings were black-and-white, with thick lines and harsh angles. Not funny or light or chatty at all. In fact, there was a darkness to the illustrations that he wouldn’t have believed existed in the friendly woman with a strong, firm handshake and unguarded, bright smile that had him wanting to walk outside and greet the day with open arms.
He could tell she’d felt a little foolish as she’d walked away, though that wasn’t his problem. He hadn’t had anything to say, and he didn’t want to get to know her. He hadn’t invited her over here, didn’t want her young cheer invading the life he’d made for himself. And when he wanted to feel like the world was a brighter place, he’d pick Solstice and her brother, Skylar, up for some soccer drills.
And, honestly, he had thought Mina had been a little foolish for standing on his front stoop babbling a bit.
But the woman who drew these pictures wasn’t foolish. Or silly. The woman who drew these pictures understood black humor and pain and isolation. The woman who drew these pictures was the kind of person he wanted to get to know.
Despite her external chipperness.
And, if he were being completely honest with himself, because he wanted to know how the woman who drew these pictures was the same woman who’d bounced down his stairs.
His chair legs squeaked as he scooted back to look out the window next door. What had previously been a plain, slightly barren lawn with more weeds than grass had now been broken up into flower beds. Mums, mostly. There wasn’t much else one could plant in the fall in Montana that would flower, but Mina had added life and interest to her house.
He looked until he remembered that he wasn’t interested. Then he tipped back in his chair and closed the blinds, dimming the room.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_97d3f541-66e7-5977-aa3f-5070d22cc8b8)
MINA ONLY REALIZED that she had a doorbell when she heard it ring for the first time. She wasn’t that surprised that she had been too distracted to notice a small white button in the white siding next to her door, but she was surprised to see the outline of her cranky neighbor through the frosted glass window.
“Hello, Levi,” she said as she opened the door. “I didn’t expect to see you standing on my doorstep.”
Inwardly she flinched at the slight implied by her words, but her neighbor didn’t seem to notice. Or, if he had any reaction, the permanent shadow on his face from his stubble hid all the visible signs.
“I got some of your mail.” He handed over a stack of envelopes, most of which looked like they would be junk and she’d be throwing them out anyway. “I saw that you were home and thought I’d bring it over, rather than leave it in your mailbox.”
“That’s nice of you. Thank you.”
They stood on her porch as she waited for him to say something. The change of venue from his front door to her front door didn’t make him any more loquacious. But he was here, and he’d done a nice thing, so she gave him a smile and took the reins of the conversation. “Does the mailman often put mail in the wrong box?”
Inane chatter. She could do better, but his silent presence seemed to knock all cleverness out of her. Between this and her babbling on his porch, he was going to think she was an idiot.
Levi looked relieved rather than dismissive. “No. But this house was empty for two years. He’s probably not used to delivering mail here.”
“Lucky for him, I doubt I’ll get much.” She held up the roll of advertisements and credit-card solicitations. “This looks like a lot of junk.”
“There was an ad for Palmer’s Drug in mine. Best drugstore in town. I tossed everything else.”
“Oh. That’s good to know, actually.” Local pharmacies were often also compounding pharmacies and sometimes she needed the specialized service. Levi’s visit was proving to be more than just an opportunity to appreciate the rough angles of his face and feel like a babbling fool.
“Any other best-in-town places I should know about?”
He shrugged, then looked around, probably at the disrepair of her porch. “I always go to Ace Hardware. Good people over there.”
She laughed. “Will they come over and fix things, too?”
“Nah, but they give good advice. And this house has good bones. You take care of it, and it will take care of you.”
Before she could say anything else, Levi nodded once, then turned on his heel and walked off her porch.
Mina stood in her doorway, watching him until he’d crossed over her lawn and onto his own. His butt looked nice in his jeans, but that wasn’t the only reason she couldn’t take her eyes off him. She also watched him because he was a puzzle of a man. If asked, she would have sworn that he was not a man to take such an ordinary task as returning a neighbor’s mail and make it a personal gesture complete with recommendations. Not when he could have silently stuck it in her mailbox.
* * *
A WEEK LATER, Mina stood on her front lawn cursing her lawn mower. It was new and fancy, and the man at the hardware store Levi recommended had sworn it was easy to use. When she’d gone to the store, she’d “just been looking” and hadn’t yet done any research into brands or reliability. But the salesman had promised next-day delivery and a thirty-day guarantee. He had sounded so reasonable, and she really had needed to mow her lawn or hire someone, so she’d plunked down her credit card.
Now she was the proud owner of a machine that wouldn’t start. Silence was probably not what the man had meant by “runs quiet.”
The lawn mower was electric, so it didn’t need gas, but no matter how many times she followed the directions and tried to start the damn thing, it wouldn’t run.
“Al sell you that?”
Mina jumped at the gruff voice behind her, releasing her hold on the mower and nearly falling backward. She turned to find Levi standing behind her, his arms crossed over a heathered green T-shirt.
“He should know better,” Levi continued, his pink lips barely moving as he spoke; but the disapproval in his voice was clear, despite his quiet tone. “That brand is notorious for having bad starters and needing repair straight out of the box.”
She exhaled a long puff of frustration. “It was cheap.”
He nodded. “They are cheap, and, when it runs, that machine will be as quiet as Al promised. But you can pay a little bit more and get a quiet mower that will run every time.”
“What do you know of lawn mowers? I’ve only ever seen you use a mower that looks like you made it in shop class from spare parts.”
His shoulders bounced as he chuckled. “That’s not far off. But fixing that thing has taught me more about lawn mowers than I ever wanted to know.”
“Why don’t you buy a new one?”
“Because Al has been trying to get me to buy a new one for years,” he said, his voice flat, like she was silly for asking that question, but his eyes had the barest gleam. Her neighbor might have a sly sense of humor hidden under his stony facade.
“You could go somewhere else.” She’d gone to the hardware store he had recommended because she wanted to support a small business, a decision she was rethinking right now.
“I could. But Al knows more about what’s in his store than all the clerks at the other stores combined.”
“He sold me a bum machine.”
Levi bent his head in acknowledgment. “He also sometimes wants a bad decision off his lot so quickly that he forgets he wants customers to return.”
She crossed her arms in front of her chest and looked up at her oddly unhelpful neighbor. “Well, you can call him and tell him to come pick up the lawn mower. I want a refund, and I’ll buy my new machine somewhere else.”
Levi’s lips twitched, and Mina wondered if he was going to smile, and, if so, was he smiling at her or at Al? Imagining him smiling at her didn’t make her feel any less angry, though it meant she wasn’t only angry with Al.
“You can do that,” he said slowly. “Or I can help you pack it up, and we can return it. And see what discounts Al will give you in an attempt to keep you as a customer.”
Mina gave the man standing in front of her a long, slow once-over. She’d seen Levi tinker with his lawn mower and glimpsed the expansive set of tools in his shed. Either he knew what he was talking about when it came to lawn mowers—and Al—or he spent a lot of money to look like Mr. Fix-It. Given the grease stains on his jeans and the slight bit of dirt under his fingernails, she decided to trust that he knew his stuff.
“I need an edge trimmer, too.”
A slow smile crossed his face. “Al has lots of nice trimmers, and I’m sure he’ll give you a good deal.”
“Okay. I’ll give Al another shot.”
Together they got her lawn mower into the back of Levi’s truck. Mina grabbed her purse from inside her house, then climbed into the passenger seat. As Levi shifted into Reverse, she asked, “Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?” he said, looking over his shoulder at the road and not once looking at her.
“Being neighborly and helping me out. When I stood on your porch and introduced myself, I was pretty sure you’d rather I hadn’t bothered.”
“Maybe I’m not helping you out. Maybe I’m helping Al out.”
That cryptic statement silenced Mina the entire drive to the store.
* * *
ON THE WAY home from the hardware store, new lawn mower in the bed of Levi’s truck, Mina asked the question that had been plaguing her the entire time they’d been shopping and Al had suddenly become informative, not just helpful.
“Am I coming home with a better lawn mower because you helped me and Al knows you, or because you helped me and you’re a man?”
Levi’s lips twitched, but he didn’t turn his head to look at her. An annoying habit of his, and one that added to her sense that she didn’t have a good read on him. Grumpy loner? Stoic, independent-minded Westerner? Helpful neighbor? All of the above? None of the above?
“Probably both. Al’s of the generation that thinks you should be inside making pie while your husband is outside pushing the mower. And you’re a city girl, so he’s doubtful that you’ll mow your lawn, so why sell you a nice product when you’re only going to hire someone anyway. But had you come into the store with a different man, Al might have flat-out given you a lawn service recommendation.”
She grunted. His response wasn’t what she wanted to hear, but at least it was honest. And it was along the lines of what she’d expected. Al had looked like a modern mountain hermit, with a grizzled face and coarse white hairs that stuck out of his face and head like electrical wires. “What about you?”
Levi flipped on his blinker and turned down the street leading to their neighborhood. “What about me?”
“What generation are you of?”
“One older than you.” He must have noticed her roll her eyes because his lips curled in what was clearly a hidden smile.
“Do you think I should be inside making a pie while my nonexistent husband is outside mowing the lawn?”
“Does my opinion matter?”
Did it? She hadn’t started teaching yet and was slowly making friends with her colleagues. So right now, Levi was as close to a friend as anyone else in Montana. “I guess I still don’t understand why you’re helping me.”
“Huh,” he said, and Mina realized he didn’t understand why he was helping her, either. He probably saw himself as the cranky loner she had understood him to be during their first meeting. “I guess you should make a pie if you want to make a pie and mow your lawn if you want to mow your lawn. I won’t be surprised if you end up hiring someone, but that’s because mowing your lawn is a pain in the ass, not because you’re a woman.”
She laughed. “Will you come with me next time I need to buy an expensive piece of home equipment from Al?”
“Nah. You won’t need me. Al may be from an older generation than both of us, but he’s not so stupid as to drive a customer to one of those giant home-improvement stores more than once.”
* * *
AFTER THAT TRIP to the hardware store, where Levi had caught himself watching Mina’s hand instead of the road while he was driving—hoping her palm would suddenly rest on his thigh—he shoved his curiosity about her art and her cheer out of his mind and renewed his plan to avoid all thoughts of her. But catching glimpses of her outside had him reconsidering his stance on avoiding relationships because he was too old to risk heartache again. If he wasn’t careful, he’d be shaving every morning just in case she touched his cheek—and double-checking his throat for patches of missed stubble.
But his resolve must have worked, because he didn’t run into her again until Thursday, at the hardware store. She was in earnest discussion with Al over a cordless drill, asking him questions, and—as far as Levi could tell—Al was giving her good advice, rather than simply trying to sell her something.
Mina gave him a wave, and Levi raised his brows in return. When Al noticed, he looked over his shoulder and nodded. Levi nodded back, then caught Mina’s secret smile at their shared joke.
Once Levi got home, he made sure all the blinds were shut on Mina’s side of the house. He’d played friendly neighbor long enough and would have no part of whatever she was planning with her new cordless drill.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_b659687b-436f-54cc-a849-98e67e4d6829)
THE PROBLEM, LEVI realized Sunday morning when he woke up and automatically started opening his blinds, was dark rooms and closed blinds reminded him too much of when Kimmie was feeling at her worst. She would close out the world and couldn’t bear even the little bit of it that Levi would bring home every day when he got back from work. For weeks after her funeral, he’d kept the curtains open 24/7—the neighbors be damned if they saw him drinking coffee naked in the kitchen.
He picked up his pajama bottoms from the floor and pulled them on before padding out to the front door to get his paper. He’d mellowed a bit since Kimmie’s death.
Once back inside, he tossed the paper onto his kitchen table and made himself some coffee before sitting down to the horoscopes. Sometimes he read the rest of the paper, but he always read the horoscopes. Not that the horoscopes ever said anything useful. Once a week—and today was the day—his horoscope told him to embrace a new future. Sometimes he wondered if the astrologer who wrote these simply had a list of generic recommendations for each sign that he or she rotated through.
Kimmie’s horoscope recommended that she go outside and work in the garden. “Start early preparing the beds for your life for the winter,” it said. “The warmth of Mother Nature will provide reassurance in changing times.”
Clearly the writer didn’t know that Kimmie had had a black thumb.
Levi looked up from his paper to the window, noticing that he’d sat facing Mina’s house this morning, not with his back to it like normal. With his blinds open he could see the burst of fall colors her mums provided. Mina, crouched in her front yard, a drill next to her in the grass, was also in full view. She was holding two boards together and screwing down a clamp. When she finished, she picked up a level, held it against the join and shook her head.
He took several sips of his coffee while he watched her undo the work she’d just done and try again. Unsurprisingly, given the uneven surface she was working on, she had to take it apart once more.
He guessed she was making a raised garden bed. The task would be a lot easier if she had some help.
He flipped through the rest of the paper, idly reading the comics—even the terrible soap opera–like ones he should have given up on years ago—and checking the ads. There was nothing worth reading in the rest of the paper, but he skimmed the headlines anyway. For completion’s sake.
Only when he’d finished the paper and his last bit of now cold coffee did he look up again. Mina had apparently gotten the two boards clamped together like she wanted. Now she struggled with holding the boards and predrilling holes for her screws.
Levi sighed. He wasn’t the type of neighbor who liked to do more than wave from his truck when he passed someone on the street. He didn’t want someone interpreting a friendly smile as an invitation to drop by and say hi.
Of course, Mina had already dropped by to introduce herself and before he’d worked himself up to even waving at her from his truck. And, despite helping her with Al, she hadn’t invited herself over for dinner. She’d been friendly but not intrusive.
He sighed again, then stood and put his coffee cup in the sink.
With one last look at his neighbor’s battle against the raised bed, Levi ran his hand through his hair and went upstairs to change into jeans.
She was too young. His heart was still too tender, his memories of Kimmie too fresh. But with no one there to help her, Mina would spend the entire day struggling to produce a garden bed with lopsided joins that would set his teeth on edge every time he stepped out of his front door.
After buttoning his jeans, he dug a work T-shirt out of his drawer. In the long run, going over to help her was a bigger benefit to him than it was to her. Not only did she need the assistance and he had the skills to provide it, but that house had been sitting empty for two years. Helping her fix it up would improve his own house’s value, not to mention what he had to see every time he looked out his windows.
He caught a glimpse of a bullshitting liar in the mirror as his head popped through the neck of the shirt. God, who was he fooling?
In the short bit of time he’d spent with Mina, he had felt more like his old self. The person he’d been before Kimmie’s death, who made plans and had dreams. If he spent more time with her, that man he’d once been would come back, and it was that allure that had him hurrying down the stairs and out the door.
Against his better judgment, he was sure.
* * *
A LARGE, MAN-SHAPED shadow blocked Mina’s view of the marks she’d made in the wood. She sat back on her heels, both in frustration at how long it had taken her to get the stupid boards flush and at the person blocking her view of the part of this process she was really looking forward to—using her new drill.
The shadow didn’t speak, nor did it move. Finally, she turned and looked up into the sun at the man towering over her.
Her sometimes friendly, usually unfriendly neighbor, Levi, had come to watch her be foolish. A better show in person than from the window, no doubt.
“Hey,” she said, throwing a little extra chipper into her voice.
“That’d be easier if you did it on the driveway. Your driveway’s pretty level.” Not much as far as greetings went, but what she could see of his shadowed face was open and friendly. Or as friendly as he got. His now two-day beard and sleep-messed hair didn’t add much welcoming or pleasant to his look, but she’d always preferred brooding to charming.
“I know it would be easier, but if I did this on my driveway, I’d need someone to help me move it once it’s built. And,” she said with a shrug, “I figured it would be easier to get it level on the grass than move it by myself.”
Looking up at him was giving her a crick in her neck. She put her drill down. Much to her surprise, when she looked back up, preparing to stand, his hand was out. She stuck her hand in his, felt a reassuring squeeze and then a pull that was surprisingly gentle considering how quickly she came to her feet.
“Thank you.” She wiped the dirt off her knees.
“Why don’t you have a friend help you?” There was nearly a smile on his face.
A hand and nearly a smile. Even though he hadn’t said a word to her since their trip to the hardware store, Levi wasn’t the cranky neighbor he seemed to so desperately want to be. Under the hair that had fallen down the front of his face again, there might even be a flicker of humor in his eyes.
Spooking him seemed like a possibility, so she didn’t smile back. Or even nearly smile back. “I’ve only lived here a month. No friends yet.”
His brows raised in surprise. “Really? You seem like the kind of person who makes friends in a day. And you’ve been here a whole month.” He said everything but the last word drily, and she wondered if he were making fun of her until she remembered the near twinkle in his eye and the twitch of a smile she might have seen on his face.
“Well,” she corrected herself, “no friends who could help me today. Ivan, the guy I share an office with, is going out of town this weekend. Perry and Susan are at church, and I guess there was a thing after church. And Caroline doesn’t do power tools. When I said I’d use the drill and she only had to hold the boards, she counter-offered with alcohol when I was done.”
She glanced at the boards that were not yet the rectangle she’d thought they would be by now and laughed. “I think I’m going to need at least a beer. Maybe three.”
Levi looked longingly across the two driveways to his house. For a long moment she thought he was going to shrug and walk back into his home. But he blinked, shook his head against some invisible foe and turned back to her. “I’ll help you.”
She didn’t have to wonder if he wanted to. There was no smile on his face and no light in his eyes.
“What makes you qualified?” she asked, more curious than suspicious.
He raised an eyebrow. “I’m a contractor. Normally people pay for my help.”
“Well, I didn’t ask and you don’t have to help me.” Help was help, but begrudging help was almost worse than no help at all. “If I don’t get it done today, Ivan can help me next week. He’s already offered.”
“Yeah, but if I leave you here, I’m going to know you’re struggling, and I’m going to think about it every time I look out a window. I’ll get nothing done.” From his deadpan delivery, she couldn’t tell if he was joking.
“So, really, I’m doing you a favor.” His backward logic brought a smile to her face. “After you help me with this, you’ll owe me a beer.”
Surprise opened his face for a brief second before he barked out a laugh. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”
“That’s a fair deal.” She stuck out her hand to shake on it. And so she could feel his hand in hers again. Touch him again. Rugged, handsome, and he laughed at her bargaining skills. Suddenly she wanted to start touching him and never stop.
His hand lingered in hers, and with it the possibility of more intimate touches. Though, if that happened, she’d have to tell him about her HIV. And even if he didn’t back away in horror—and most people didn’t—he’d still want her to stop touching him so he could think about what she’d said. That everyone did.
Not that she blamed anyone for needing time to think, but, well, it always ruined the mood.
But Levi was helping her with her raised bed, not slipping his hand around to cup her head and bring her in for a kiss. There was no mood to ruin, only this stupid raised bed that she’d half destroyed in the process of building it.
As they sank down to the grass together, Mina kept her rash decision to build the garden bed at the forefront of her mind. The fact that she’d looked helpless enough for Levi to offer to help was a clear sign that she’d not thought the project through. And she knew better than to rush into things, men included—especially rugged neighbors with an air of tragedy about them. Lack of thinking things through made for bad decisions, and bad decisions made her parents worry. They would suggest she get on the job market again. They would call more. They would question every decision they knew about.
She’d moved to Montana for some independence, not to develop an unsubstantiated crush on a neighbor.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_f9e18baa-bd80-5068-abbd-338008a2546c)
LEVI GATHERED THE materials while Mina moved her car out of her driveway. Together they moved everything to the flat surface.
“You’re right,” she said as he tightened the clamps on the boards. “This does make everything easier.”
“The driveway or another person to help?” Levi held his hand out for the drill.
“Both,” she said, though she was shaking her head. “But you’ve only promised to stick around to build the thing. I neglected to ask you to help me move it in place.”
“That’ll cost you a beer.” He gestured for the drill and grunted when she shook her head again. “What, I don’t get beer for my labors?”
She laughed. “I’m not shaking my head at the beer. I’m shaking my head at giving you the drill.” She crab-walked around the driveway, the weight of the drill obviously pulling down at her hand, until she was next to him. Then she bumped him with her shoulder. “Move over. This is my raised bed and my drill. I get to use the power tools.”
“I’ll give up my beer in exchange for power-tool responsibility.”
The way her nose wrinkled as she pretended to consider his request made him want to laugh. “No dice,” she said, with another nudge. “I’ll pay you two beers for a lesson in power tools.”
He gave up with a bark that didn’t quite cover up his laugh and scooted to where he could hold the wood steady while she drilled.
It took Mina a few times with the drill to figure out how to control the power. Levi was pretty sure she was muttering and swearing under her breath each time the drill slipped and she had to release her fingers, but she managed to control any cursing by the time the whirl of the tool stopped. And each time she wrinkled her nose in frustration, took a deep breath and leaned forward with renewed concentration. When she had finally gotten all the holes predrilled and the screws in to attach the first short side of the bed to the post, she looked up at him in triumph.
“You didn’t give me any instruction, so I’m not sure I owe you the beers. But I got it done anyway, and I’m feeling generous. One beer, not two.”
He smiled at her continued reevaluation of their bargain. If he didn’t pay attention, he’d end the day having built a raised bed and offering to make dinner, too. “Your first lesson in power tools is that it would have been faster if you’d let me do it.”
“Does that mean you’d rather not have any beers?” She took the clamps off the board, then slid down and started clamping that end to the post.
“No,” he said, slipping into his role as assistant. To his surprise, he was having fun. “Just being honest. I have experience with this. You don’t.”
“But I’ll never get experience if I don’t do it. And if I mess it up, the store has more boards I can buy.”
“But you can’t pick up another helper.”
“Like I said, Ivan can help me next weekend.” She said the man’s name again, as if he should know who Ivan was. Her boyfriend? He hadn’t seen anyone regularly coming to the house—or noticed her spending nights away. Not that it mattered to him if his cute neighbor had a boyfriend. He was over here to be neighborly—trying something new like the horoscopes always suggested—not because he was interested in anything else.
Liar, liar, pants on fire, as his nephew Skylar would say.
“Besides, I don’t see you leaving in a huff because I won’t let you hold the power tools.” Her smile had turned into an impish smirk, and Levi knew he was staying, beer or no beer, power tools or no power tools.
“I said I’d help you build this bed, and I will,” he said with conviction that surprised even himself. “I’m a man of my word.” He paused. “Around household projects, at least.”
“A caveat of household projects? Is that a promise or a warning?” Figuring out how to put her whole body into the push of the drill didn’t seem to change her ability to keep that playful smile on her face.
Levi hadn’t enjoyed watching a woman’s face move so much since...well, since he’d first met Kimmie all those years ago. That realization hit at the same time Mina finished drilling and released the body-weight pressure she was putting into the wood. The sudden change knocked him off balance and on his ass, his hand flying out behind him for an equilibrium he couldn’t seem to find.
When he looked up, Mina was staring at him, her mouth and eyes wide in surprise. Amusement shone in her eyes. She recovered well enough to close her lips, but one corner of her mouth stayed lifted in surprise. Levi pushed himself back upright, chuckling at his clumsiness, and it seemed to be all the break Mina needed to laugh herself.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Yes. I didn’t expect...” He’d expected to spend the afternoon thinking about his house and his chores and being anywhere other than here. He hadn’t expected to have an offer to get more wood so they could build another raised bed lingering on the tip of his tongue. “You moved sooner than I expected.”
“Well, Levi of no last name and worn hems, you’re less grumpy than I expected.”
Levi laughed, not a bark, not a chuckle or an acknowledging grunt. The laugh escaping his mouth was a full belly laugh that made his stomach muscles hurt but lightened the weight of his head on his shoulders. “Worn hems, huh? I guess my pajama pants are a bit old.”
“So is the T-shirt you were wearing.”
“You don’t let up, do you?”
“Not when I’m winning,” she said, her face bright with both the sunlight shining down on her and the pleasure radiating from within her.
“Let’s get this bed finished so I can have the beers that you owe me,” he said, emphasizing the s on the end of beers.
As they built the rest of the raised bed and dug holes for the posts, Mina chattered along, much like she had when standing on his front porch. Chatter was her default setting, he realized, and it had only been mindless and haphazard on his porch because he’d been silent, and she’d been nervous. Now, as he occasionally asked questions and bantered back, her conversation was still light, but it was also interesting. Levi had never expected to care about the glories of Russian curses, but so long as Mina was the one talking about them, he was eager to become an expert.
* * *
THE LEGS OF the wheelbarrow sank into the grass when Mina let go of the handles. The bed was done. It was even full of dirt. Levi had called someone he knew who ran a rock and soil yard, and they’d gone in his truck to pick up a load of topsoil and compost mix. She might, might, be able to squeeze in a few fast-growing greens and harvest something before the bitter cold weather set in.
But that was a task for another day. Despite the cool air hinting at fall, all the work they’d put in meant dirt stuck to the sheen of sweat on her skin like those minuscule brambles that stick to your socks after a hike. Her hair had fallen out of the bobby pins and was adhering to her face in clumps. And sniffing herself wasn’t required; she knew she stank.
Levi grimaced as he ran his hand along the back of his neck and gave his shoulder a few hard rubs. The world could be deeply unfair. Mina was pretty sure she looked like something the cat dragged in. Levi, who had to be just as dirty and probably also stank, looked rugged and capable. The streak of dirt across his cheek made the light brown of his eyes stand out, and his teeth looked whiter when he smiled at her.
“I’m going to be sore tomorrow,” he said with another rub at his neck.
“Since you weren’t happy giving over responsibility for the drill, I assume you do this sort of thing on a regular basis.” Maybe she just liked to imagine what he would look like chopping wood. “Or was that just because you’re a man and like to be in the driver’s seat?”
He let out a low sound, somewhere between a snort and a chuckle. The outright laughter that had caught her by surprise earlier was gone but not forgotten. She didn’t need it to know he was having a good time. “I supervise more than I hammer, so if you want to drive, I’m man enough to be a passenger and enjoy the scenery.”
“How long have you lived in Missoula?”
“Three years.”
“Is that long enough for you to be able to show me some cool places? Places I wouldn’t discover unless I had also lived here for three years?”
She had tried to make her question airy—and tried for a light smile to match—but she could see in the cock of his head that he was trying to understand if she was truly asking or being flirty. Hell, she didn’t know if she was looking for suggestions from someone who’d lived in the city longer than she had or if she was hunting around for the likelihood of a date. She’d promised herself that from now on she’d get to know someone casually before getting serious. No more rushing into relationships or hopes or dreams. Rushing led to hurts, and she was trying to cut down on hurts.
But emotional caution just wasn’t and never had been a strength of hers.
“I know some places,” he said finally, each word carefully measured out as if he was also trying to figure out what she was asking and what he was offering. “And I know locals who know more places.”
“I’ve not met many locals. The university seems to be full of transplants like me, at least among the professors.” Different universities had different cultures and different feels, but the hodgepodge of people from around the globe remained the same. The academic job market was tough, especially for someone who studied a language, and everyone took what they could get.
“But before I ask you for more favors,” she said, giving them both an out, “I should probably get you that beer I promised. I’ll make you dinner, too, if you’re interested. You helped me out a lot today, and feeding you is the least I can do.”
Again he looked at her, obviously evaluating her words with a slow blink.
“It’s just dinner, I promise,” she said with a low laugh to cover the awkwardness. “I’m not trying to put a down payment on future yard work.”
He snorted. “I don’t believe that, but I also don’t care. Give me a chance to shower first, and then dinner sounds great.”
“A shower is a good idea.” Maybe cleaning the dirt off her body would clear the confused dust out of her mind. And, if she decided she really was trying to explore the potential for a date, at least she wouldn’t be worried about armpit smell.
“Give me at least a half an hour to get myself cleaned up, and you can come over anytime after that. I’ll leave the door unlocked, but give a knock so I don’t jump when you walk in the door.”
“Deal,” he said. Then he smiled, and his face and shoulders relaxed. Hers did, too.
* * *
FRESHLY SHOWERED AND in clean clothes, Levi stood in his kitchen watching the clock. It had been twenty minutes since he’d left Mina’s front yard, and he figured he had ten minutes to kill before he could walk through her front door without risking her still being in the shower. He emptied his dishwasher, then turned his attention to the paper still lying open to the astrology section.
He was supposed to try to embrace a new future today. If Kimmie were alive, she was supposed to go outside and garden. Not that he believed in the nonsense of the stars covering his fate, but today’s horoscope seemed uncomfortably close to the truth. Kimmie couldn’t go outside and garden, but Levi was alive, and getting outside seemed good advice for all the living.
And then there was that new future...
Levi glanced up at the window to where Mina was out of the shower and closing her curtains. She didn’t look embarrassed at all as she caught him looking while she was wearing only her towel. Instead, she smiled and waved. He waved back, then reached up and closed his own blinds.
Dennis was right that maybe he should get out and explore the world of women. Brook was right that he should do so with more seriousness. He’d never imagined that he’d be in his midthirties and single. He’d been excited to marry Kimmie and talk about having kids. He’d wanted to settle down. He still wanted to. But it wouldn’t happen if he avoided women who seemed more interested in relationships than in just sex.
Mina didn’t have to be the one or even the maybe, and dinner tonight didn’t have to lead to anything more than friendly greetings between neighbors, but he’d never know unless he tried. Mina was the first woman he’d felt more than a sexual interest in since Kimmie, and she was at least a good place to start, even if she seemed impossibly young.
He sniffed at his shoulder, which smelled like dryer sheets and deodorant. He reached up and unbuttoned his shirt, draping it across the chair as he headed to the bathroom to shave. Cologne would be overkill—besides which, he didn’t own any—but shaving for a woman was a nice gesture, even if dinner was just dinner.
After his shave and before heading out the door, Levi stopped by the kitchen, folded up the paper and tossed it in the recycling bin before the stars carried him away from reality.
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_f96dd6e7-06df-5c9e-84d7-421859c64fe1)
MINA WAS PUTTING the butternut squash and leeks into the oven to roast when she heard a knock at the front door, followed by a squeak of the hinges.
“Hello?” Levi called, his footsteps quiet and uncertain on her wood floors.
“I’m in the kitchen,” she called. “Head to the back. It’s a small house—you can’t miss me,” she said, shutting the oven door and grabbing a towel for her hands. Levi’s head stuck around the corner just as she was tucking the towel back on the oven handle.
He’d shaved. She was, momentarily, speechless. The sharp contours of his face and squareness of his chin were worth a moment of silence, but that wasn’t what stopped her tongue. Not only had he taken the time and effort to shave, but he was wearing nice jeans and a neat dark blue button-down that showed off a trim, muscular figure, especially with the sleeves rolled up and his forearms on display.
Levi had gone to some effort. Like this was a date.
“I feel underdressed,” she said, recovering her speech and looking down at her worn gray yoga pants and white tank top. Since she wanted to get the vegetables in to roast as quickly as possible, she’d just rinsed the sweat off her body. Barrettes and sweat were keeping her hair off her face, and shaving... Well, the state of her leg hair was better not considered. Probably for the best. Looking at him now, she needed to put brakes on her libido.
He shrugged. “You look fine to me” was all he said, but there was warmth in his eyes, so she brushed away her feelings about looking sloppy. “What’s for dinner?”
“Butternut-squash lasagna and a salad. It’s not a quick meal, but it’s one of my favorites, and I had all the stuff on hand. Plus, it’s filling after a long day of working outside.”
“No meat?” he asked with the disappointed face of a child who’s been denied candy.
“No.” She shook her head with a laugh. “I have sausages in the freezer, but they would have taken too long to defrost. The lasagna will be good, I promise, and if you miss the meat, I’ll make sure the sausages come out for the next time I cook you dinner.”
“Next time,” he said, his voice caressed with approval. “I like that idea. Where did you learn to cook?”
With that simple question, Mina eased into conversation, talking about cooking with her mom when she was a kid and some of the terrible food experiments and impossible diets she’d tried in both college and graduate school. “I don’t know how I found the time or energy to eat a raw food diet, but I managed it for six months.”
She didn’t mention that she’d tried many of these diets in an attempt to keep her flagging energy or stave off upset stomachs or to control all the other side effects of either HIV or the meds that kept her virus count low. Desperation over a chronic illness had been her motivation to prepare raw carrot crackers every week. Then there had been the macrobiotic diet. And the gluten-free one. And hopping back and forth between several other less popular options before she’d settled back into moderation and mostly vegetables.
“I don’t like the sound of a raw food diet. There’s no way that could include enough meat for someone born and raised in Montana,” he said, one side of his mouth kicked up in a half smile.
Good—she wasn’t boring him. Mina was a talker. She talked when she was nervous; she talked when she was relaxed; she talked when she was tired... She just talked. She even talked to herself as she wandered her house. The near never-ending stream of chatter had driven more than one boyfriend crazy—at least that was what they said. But there had been a few that had been amused. She could hope Levi was the latter.
She sneaked a peek over her shoulder at him as she stirred the béchamel sauce. If she was reading his shave and nice shirt correctly, well...the more she talked, the more his eyes seemed to shine and his lips stayed in the amused position.
This could lead somewhere. If she was thoughtful and deliberate and purposeful, she could turn one dinner into two.
Mina, if you’re thinking about anything past dinner, then you’re already rushing into something. Get through dinner first, then worry about what comes next. Good advice, but not nearly so much fun.
“The lack of meat wasn’t the problem I had with eating raw foods,” she said, steering her mind back to the conversation.
“Not born and raised in Montana.”
“No. And far too interested in trying new fads to stick with the tried-and-true method of eating meat and three square meals. Though that’s how I grew up.” She turned her attention away from the handsome man standing in her kitchen and back to the food. The béchamel had thickened, and it was time to layer the lasagna and get it in the oven.
“Do you need help?”
“No. Grab another beer and we’ll go sit in the living room while this bakes. It’s more comfortable in there.”
Mina joined Levi in the living room as soon as the lasagna was in the oven. He was on the couch, not in one of the two armchairs, and he’d sat near the middle of it. Unless she chose one of the armchairs, she’d have to sit near him.
She joined him on the couch and put her beer on the coffee table in front of them, turning her body toward him. He’d turned toward her, too. They weren’t touching, but she was close enough to smell the brisk notes of his aftershave and to see some stubble along his jawline that he’d missed. His intense gaze sent good shivers down her spine, shivers that reinforced that she hadn’t been wrong about his more intimate intentions.
After her diagnosis, Mina had become more thoughtful about her interactions with men. She hadn’t yet managed to make accurate predictions about their intentions from her careful study of their movements, but she kept trying. Trial and error would surely pay off eventually, and she’d be right about a man one day.
If nothing else, the careful study of men slowed her down a little.
“I’m glad you came over and introduced yourself,” he said, his rich voice coating her skin in warmth.
She smiled. “Me, too.”
“I checked out your website. That was the first time I’d heard about graphic novels. The drawings were neat and, uh, darker than I would have guessed.”
“Yeah.” She laughed. “I’m so bubbly and short that everyone expects me to have light, fluffy drawings. Something cute, with bunnies. When I do talks and festivals, the most common comment I get after ‘I love your work’ is ‘I thought you’d be taller.’ It used to bother me, but I’ve stopped worrying about it. Honestly, my art used to be lighter.”
Levi took a drink from his beer bottle, and his Adam’s apple moved as he swallowed. How had she not noticed what a sexy part of the male anatomy the neck was until now? “What changed?”
She shrugged. “My drawings were always macabre and obsessed with the strange, but in college my lines got darker and thicker and I started having fewer curves in my art and more sharp corners. It’s better, actually. One of the things I tell my students is that they don’t have to be an amazing artist to write comics or graphic novels, but their art has to match their subjects. Like Kate Beaton, who draws these hilarious comics with random historical and pop-culture references. Her drawings appear to be rough sketches and, if you ignore the adult content, almost something a kid would draw. But it makes the punch of her jokes that much stronger. Or Tom Gauld, who wrote this beautiful book on Goliath, where Goliath was an innocent victim. The bare landscapes mean the reader focuses on Goliath’s simplicity and how he is used by both his friends and his enemies. Scott McCloud has this great book where he talks about comics with a focus on form versus comics with a focus on idea or purpose, and I was really so focused on form that I forgot my ideas.”
When she took a deep breath, all the words she had to say about comics clouded up her lungs, and she had to exhale slowly before she could say another word. Just to be safe, she waved all the excess words out from between them. “Anyway. Before, well, before my art and my subject matter were a mismatch. Not completely wrong for each other, but wrong enough that the stories lost their power.”
“Do you have more of your books?” he asked, his brows raised in genuine curiosity.
“Sure,” she said, pleased. “You want to see?”
“Of course. I’ve never known anyone who made money drawing pictures.”
“Oh, I don’t make much money. It’s certainly not a living.” She doubted that she’d ever make a living doing it. Russian stories were interesting to people, and people liked her art, but it wasn’t commercial, really.
She pushed herself off the couch and headed over to her bookshelf, feeling his gaze on her the entire way. When she got back, he set his beer on the table and accepted the two volumes from her.
While he examined her books, she examined him. The ridges of his spine starting at his hairline and disappearing into the neckline of his shirt. The curves of his ear and softness of his earlobe. A faint scar across his cheek that she hadn’t noticed under his previous scruff.
Her scrutiny didn’t seem to make him uneasy. He didn’t seem to notice it at all. He was a steady man, she realized, and someone could easily mistake his composure for shallowness, but his stillness suggested the lastingness of a mountain lake, not the transience of a rain puddle.
Better, he was taking the time to really study her art and the words, not just flip through and look at the pictures.
The timer beeped. Mina got up and went to the kitchen to take the lasagna out of the oven. While it rested, she set the table as Levi continued to study her books. When she called him over for dinner, he asked a few questions about her art, then sat back and let her talk. Still flattered by his interest, Mina monopolized the entire dinner talking about herself, her theories about comics and all the plans she had for books to come. And it felt right, because when she stopped chattering to take a breath, Levi asked her a question and then looked interested when she jumped back in.
She felt, well, she felt comfortable being herself with him, which was the best thing you could want in a man.
After they finished eating, Mina directed Levi around the kitchen as she washed dishes, and he dried and put them away. Then she offered him the choice of five different kinds of Sweet Peaks Ice Cream from her freezer. As he looked at the row of cartons on the countertop, he had the faintest possible smile, and she felt silly in the best, warmest possible way.
This casual, no-expectations dinner was quickly turning into something else. At least for her, and she was pretty sure she wasn’t misreading him.
Which meant it was time to relax. Be funny. Friendly. Open. Charming.
With their bowls of ice cream in hand, they returned to the living room couch, almost in the same spots that they had been sitting before. Almost, because now they sat closer to one another, their knees not quite touching as they faced each other.
There on the couch, their knees a hope and a prayer from being intertwined, Mina couldn’t hear the question Levi asked her over the beating of her heart and the rush of blood in her ears. She asked him to repeat himself. She tried to smile and tried to make it look natural. The world must be smiling down on her, because suddenly she thought of a question to ask him, something to take the pressure off her and give her time to take a deep breath.
Time to stop the panic welling up inside her.
More important, time to stop herself from acting on the panic.
“Are you okay?” Levi asked, his brows crossed in confusion over her sudden change of behavior.
“I’m fine.” Her voice sounded breathy and dismantled to her ears, but he only nodded.
“Let me take your bowl,” he said, and she released her grip on her ice cream. She wasn’t finished with it, but she had stopped tasting it several minutes ago.
Levi’s eyes had grown hot during the time they’d been sitting on the couch. Intent had softened his jaw and, she saw as he set both their bowls on the coffee table, his shoulders. As he sat back up, the coming kiss dulled the world around them. Mina stopped being able to hear the tick of the clock on her wall, and the outlines of the furniture got fuzzy.
He leaned into her, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m sure,” she reassured him, trying to lie to them both and failing miserably.
But Levi didn’t seem to notice her failure. Or, if he did, he didn’t care. Every skin cell burned as he trailed his finger along her jawline. The panic beating inside her couldn’t hide the intensity with which she wanted his lips pressed against hers. The fear didn’t stop her from leaning into him, from meeting him halfway.
Just as his lips were a whisper away from hers, the panic that had risen inside her surged out, shoving charming and flirty and casual out of the way. “I have HIV,” she said, then sat back against the cushions before he could reject the kiss. Reject her.
“What?” he asked. His entire face had folded in on itself in confusion.
“I’m HIV positive. I thought you should know, before we, well...” That last part was a lie. She didn’t think he should know before they kissed. He didn’t need to know before they kissed. HIV wasn’t spread through saliva. They could make out all night, and he wouldn’t be any more at risk than if he’d sat in a church praying.
But Mina had never mastered the timing of the tell, if there was a way to master it. She’d read books and articles on living and dating with HIV. She’d read everything she could find in an attempt to find the balance between telling someone about the skeletons in your closet early enough in the relationship, so you could judge if they were a person who could handle your particular set of baggage, and not telling them so soon that you were pushing them away.
She always told too soon. Or too casually. Or didn’t prepare them for big news coming. Like everything else, she rushed into it.
“Okay. Um, thanks for telling me, I guess.” Levi leaned away from her, looking her over for a long minute. Then he nodded once with a finality that might as well have been a slap across the face and stood. Mina watched as he gathered the ice-cream bowls and walked into the kitchen. When he returned, she hadn’t moved an inch.
“I’m going to head home. If you need help building another raised bed—”
She braced herself for the final rejection.
“—give me a call.”
“Okay.” Her voice was barely audible to her own ears, even though she had no heartbeat to drown it out.
He nodded again. He shut the front door behind him, and the possibility of their relationship clicked closed, too.
CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_40eb710b-f8bb-5f23-bbae-59cd1741eedc)
LEVI’S BLINDS WERE still open when he got home. The lights were on in Mina’s house, and he could see right through from his kitchen into hers. The ice-cream bowls were on the counter where he’d put them.
Mina only had good ice cream in her freezer. Dinner had been delicious, even if there hadn’t been any meat. Levi pulled everything out of his pockets and plopped his keys and his phone on the table, before dropping into a chair facing her house. He’d enjoyed himself at Mina’s. She’d been funny and interesting, and her face moved when she talked, and he hadn’t wanted her to stop talking, because he hadn’t wanted to stop watching her face move.
But then he’d been leaning in to kiss her, and she’d told him about her HIV, and the animation in her face had turned into pill bottles on the bathroom counter and blinds that were always closed and doctor’s visits and the heavy weight of watching someone slowly withdraw until the day you came home, and they weren’t there at all.
Levi rested his forehead in his hand, feeling the weight of his head and the way it pressed his elbow into the table. He’d caught his skin on the table in a weird way and he should move his elbow, but the pinching kept him from disappearing into the past. Into what he should have done better, the times he should have reminded Kimmie to take her pills and the times he’d reminded her too much. Into the last day when she’d said, “Don’t go to work today. I feel like something bad is going to happen,” and he’d been frustrated because he couldn’t find his keys, and he’d said, “You always feel like something bad is going to happen.”
Only this time, Kimmie had been right.
He dropped his palm to the wood with a slap, his head bouncing once before he righted it and stared again at Mina’s house.
Knowing what he knew now, knowing how everything ended, he still wouldn’t go back and change anything about the day he’d walked up to Kimmie and asked for her phone number. He’d loved her more than he thought was possible—still did. Every minute they’d been together had been the best minute of his life.
A love like that was possible, and he believed lightning could strike twice.
But he didn’t know if he could go through the pain of loving someone who was slowly dying again. He had doubted he was strong enough for more heartbreak. Was he strong enough for worse?
The screen on his phone flashed on with his sister’s face, then vibrated on the table.
“Hey, sis,” he said.
“I’ve been trying to call you all day. Where have you been?”
“Yeah, sorry.” He’d felt the phone vibrate in his pocket but hadn’t wanted to interrupt Mina to even check who it was. “I was over at my neighbor’s, helping her build a raised garden bed. She made me dinner.”
“Oh? The neighbor Dennis mentioned?”
“Don’t go getting any ideas,” he warned, hearing ideas she already had in the oh. If she got ideas, she’d call and text him nonstop to ask how the relationship was going. Eventually he’d turn off his phone just to get a break.
At some point when they were kids and she’d been stuck being Mom, she’d apparently gotten the idea that Moms smothered, and she hadn’t let go.
“Nothing is going to happen,” he said, before she could start planning his future wedding. “Mina is HIV positive.”
“Oh.” This oh was flat, not yet judgmental but edging that way. Brook was no longer getting any ideas. “I guess it’s best, then, that you’re not yet over Kimmie’s death.”
“What?” He regretted answering the phone, regretted saying anything. He especially regretted saying anything about Mina. Her disease was not his sister’s business, and it had not been his information to share, even if he’d thought Brook would understand his hesitation.
Which she clearly didn’t. “Maybe it’s not so bad if she’s one of those poor souls who’s had it since birth or got it from a blood transfusion or something. But what do you know about your neighbor? Maybe she got it from sharing a needle or she slept around in college or... I don’t know. How else do people get AIDS?”
“I think there’s a difference between HIV and AIDS,” he said slowly, realizing he didn’t know for sure. He didn’t know the answer to any of his sister’s questions. And the question of how Mina got HIV didn’t matter.
Did it?
“Well, you’re not going to be seeing her again to find out, are you?”
“Brook, less than a minute ago you were hopeful I was over Kimmie, would fall in love with Mina, get married and produce nieces and nephews for you to spoil.”
“All I said was ‘Oh.’”
“Yeah, but we both know where that oh was going.”
“Well,” she huffed, “you had always wanted to get married and have kids. Maybe you could marry someone with HIV, but you couldn’t have kids with them. It would be wrong to knowingly bring kids with AIDS into the world.”
I think HIV and AIDS are different. He didn’t bother repeating himself. She hadn’t listened the first time, and she wouldn’t listen a second. “I think someone with HIV can have children who don’t have the disease. Isn’t that part of what they talk about on the news when they talk about AIDS in Africa?”
“Honestly, Levi, you think a lot of things, but what do you know? About the disease or your neighbor?”
He bristled at her tone. She was his older sister, and her tone had likely been condescending since the day he was born.
At least, that was how he remembered it.
Most of the time he was able to remind himself that she was his sister, and she cared about him, and she fussed and bossed over everyone she cared about, from Dennis to her children to their aging father.
But tonight, he wasn’t in the mood. “Look, Brook, I get that you want me to get married again—”
“You liked being married,” she interrupted. “Even if...”
“Yes. Even if Kimmie had entire weeks where she didn’t leave the house, I did like being married. But I’m thirty-seven years old, and I get to pick the women I date.” Even as the words came out of his mouth, he felt like her baby brother.
“And if you want to hear about any of them, you have to reserve judgment. At least until you meet them. And you have to pretend that I’m an adult and might pick out someone good. After all, I picked Kimmie.”
Silence reigned through the phone as Levi waited for Brook to point out that Kimmie’s clinical depression had eventually killed her. He could feel his phone shudder at the effort his sister was putting forth to keeping her mouth shut.
“Kimmie was great,” she said finally, her voice soft with affection. Because Kimmie had been great. She had been unable to be a light in her own life, but she’d been the sun, moon and stars for many others.
“Good night, Brook. Go remind Dennis to take his high blood pressure medicine or something.”
“I worry.”
Whether it was about him, or Dennis’s health, or any number of things, Brook didn’t say, and it didn’t matter. “I know.”
“Someone has to.”
“But it doesn’t always have to be you.”
On that note they finished their goodbyes, and Levi ended the call. Then he slouched in his chair to catch his breath. Talking to his sister for ten minutes was more exhausting than an entire day spent building a raised bed with Mina. For all Mina’s chatter and energy, Levi had felt better after building the raised bed than he had before.
This was why he didn’t call his family and only occasionally answered the phone when they called him.
His breathing back to normal, Levi glanced up at his windows. Mina’s blinds had all been closed, and her house was dark.
It was too late to go over and apologize, but he could at least prove his sister wrong about the baby thing. He sighed. He knew the growing list of items he needed to apologize to Mina for, though he didn’t know what he wanted out of it. To be back on her couch kissing? To be friends and neighbors? To make the barest effort at not being a total ass?
Or did he need to apologize simply because he was wrong and sorry about it?
Levi rolled his eyes at himself. No matter what he was sorry for and why, he could at least be less ignorant when he apologized. Gathering his phone, he went in search of his laptop.
* * *
IT WASN’T UNTIL Friday that Mina was finally able to be outside after work, hands shoved in the new dirt in her new raised garden bed. Even though the nights were getting cooler, the sun had shone on the dark dirt all day, and it pressed warmth and possibility against her skin. She didn’t even care if the greens she was planting grew into anything edible, so long as she had the excuse to be out here, away from her thoughts and her work and her problems.
The past week had been rough. Classes were starting, increasing the amount of work she needed to do and the amount of time she had to spend on campus. Departmental meetings, syllabi, double-checking on the assigned readings and that the bookstore and library both carried what the students would need, etc. The meetings were the worst. She could work on the syllabi from home, but the department wasn’t yet willing to hold meetings through Skype. She’d always suspected that her emotions played a big role in the side effects of all her meds, and this week had done nothing to disprove her theory.
She’d spent more time on the toilet than she cared to admit to herself. Today wasn’t just the first day she’d been able to be outside in the sun, it was the first day her stomach had felt like it belonged to a normal human being. Or mostly normal. She’d gotten accustomed to the base level of nausea her meds caused.
She patted the soil down over the seeds, trying not to let her feelings press down too hard.
Her emotions and her side effects fed off each other, making everything worse. She felt self-conscious about the time spent in the bathroom, which brought her thoughts back to Levi walking out on her, almost without a word. She’d stay later in her office, hunched over her desk, hand cramped from her tight control on her drawing—which meant her drawings were shit. And she’d both wish she were home where she would be more comfortable and be glad that she couldn’t see if Levi’s truck was pulling into his driveway and wondering if she’d catch a glimpse of him.
It had taken her three days of concentrated effort on what her therapist had said about thoughts just being thoughts before she had been able to say, “I’m better off knowing his true stripes now,” and mean it. Only then had she been okay with leaving her office and spending time at home, in her garden and near her own bathroom.
Of course, when her emotions had settled down, so had her nausea.
“Hey, Mina,” a woman’s voice called from behind her. Mina stood and turned around to see her neighbor Echo standing on the sidewalk with her fluffy little dog on the other end of the leash, the dog’s tongue flipping in and out of its mouth in exaggerated, adorable pants. “Nice garden bed.”
“Thank you.” Mina took advantage of the opportunity for a break. She and Echo had spoken a couple of times when her neighbor walked past with her dog. The woman seemed friendly and interesting and worth getting to know a little better.
“Was that Levi I saw helping you build it?”
“Yeah...” Mina replied, not sure where this was going.
Echo looked right and left, as if checking for spies in the bushes. “I’ve barely gotten Levi to say hi to me when Noodle and I walk by.”
Noodle? The dog with the papillon ears and dachshund body and Pomeranian coat was named Noodle? Echo might be even more interesting than Mina had thought.
“I’m not sure he wanted to help,” Mina said, feeling the lie stick on her tongue as she tried to make Sunday sound like no big deal. Echo caught the lie, too, because her eyebrows lifted up to her hairline.
“Okay, so he wanted to. And he’s brought over my mail and helped me buy a lawn mower, but there’s nothing more.”
Given the continued elevation of her eyebrows, Echo understood the subtext of there might have been something more as easily as she’d recognized the lie. “I want to hear about this. You have dinner plans?”
Other than pasta with butter and Parmesan cheese? “No.”
“The store had some nice-looking salmon. I bought myself a piece for tonight and a piece for tomorrow, but one indulgent dinner with a friend is better than two indulgent nights in by myself. Come over for dinner and a glass of wine, and you can tell me all about how Silent-Neighbor Levi ended up building you a garden bed.”
“Honestly, Echo, there’s not much to tell.” And Mina wasn’t certain she was comfortable sharing what information there was. After all, blurting out “I’m HIV positive” rarely went as well as she hoped with possible friends, too. And she still hadn’t figured out how not to overshare.
“Do you not like salmon? Or wine?” A teenager rode by on a bicycle, and Echo’s little dog barked and jumped about like the devil himself had been on those two wheels. “Or little barky dogs?”
“I like salmon. And I like wine. I’m okay with little barky dogs that aren’t coming home with me.” And she needed to make friends. So she needed to trust a little. Dinner and boy talk wasn’t a bad place to start. “Is there anything I can bring?”
“Bring dessert. Come over in about an hour.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
“Gossip in the neighborhood.” Echo tapped the tips of her fingers against one another. “This is doubly exciting because no one ever tells me anything.” The movement of her fingers stopped, and she looked down at her dog, who looked up expectantly. “Probably because gossip is always a trade, and I only like to take. Greedy, my ex-husband always said.”
Mina laughed at the blatant attempt to reassure her. “I’ll be over in an hour, with ice cream.” She was less sure about bringing gossip.
CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_ed5372b6-9f7c-58e7-a409-7829dd3f3c66)
MINA STOOD ON Echo’s front stoop, ice cream in a plastic bag in one hand while attempting not to clench her nerves too tightly in the other. Once, in another lifetime, she would have been bouncing with excitement at a new friend. Her body still remembered those times, and wanting them back was the reason she’d made a point to introduce herself to as many people as she could in her new town, including her cranky, handy-with-a-drill-and-friends-with-the-hardware-store-guy neighbor.
But that Mina had a different, naive understanding of the world. She’d grown up in a happy household, with parents who loved each other and their children. Maybe they were too intrusive in their kids’ lives, maybe they just cared a lot; it didn’t matter. All Mina had known about the world was that it was a place full of nice people you could trust.
The world had acquired shadows since her diagnosis. She didn’t want to go back, really, because shadows added depth and interest, but she occasionally wished she could sink into her old happy-go-lucky self, the one who found the world to be full of friends rather than potential hurts. The one fascinated by the macabre but who didn’t understand it.
She took a deep breath and knocked. Noodle started yapping from deep inside the recesses of the house, a sound which got louder and louder until the front door opened, and the dog spun and leaped at Echo’s feet.
“Welcome,” Echo said with an expansive wave of her hand and a surreptitious sweep of her foot to push the dog out of the way. “Let me take the bag from you and get the ice cream in the freezer. Come in.”
“It smells delicious,” Mina said as she stepped through the doorway and waited to be sniffed and approved by the dog. “What is it?”
“Salmon in a cilantro sauce. Given how much cream is in the dish, it should be delicious. There’s rice and sautéed squash, too.”
Mina followed Echo and the aroma to the kitchen, waiting off to the side while her neighbor put the ice cream in the freezer.
“Dinner’s pretty much ready,” Echo said, balling up the plastic bag and tossing it to the back of the counter. “The table’s even set. And there’s a bottle of wine out there, if you want to pour us some. I’ll feed the beast, so she doesn’t try to get in your lap, then bring the food out, and we can serve ourselves.”
The table was set with matching floral china, silverware and what Mina assumed to be crystal. Despite the casualness of the invitation and Echo’s manner, she felt underdressed in her jeans and cream tank top with a big black bow. It was the flats. A girls’ night in with crystal deserved heels.
“Like my china?” Echo asked as she came from the kitchen into the living room. Noodle was chomping happily on kibble in the background. “When my ex left me, I got to keep all the trappings of having once been married. The china, the crystal, the silverware. For a long time after I moved, it stayed in the cupboards, and I ate off regular plates and drank out of cheap glasses. Then I decided I was worth fancy, and I haven’t looked back.”
With a closer look, Mina realized Echo was not only older, but older than Mina had thought. “It’s nice. I won’t feel underdressed, then.”
“Feel like you deserve better. And sit, sit. Let’s eat.”
Maybe it was the wine, maybe it was the good food, and maybe it was that Mina felt like herself for the first time in a week, but she relaxed into dinner and conversation with Echo like they were old friends. Well, not quite like old friends, because they were sharing basic bits of information with each other such as where they were from and what brought them to Missoula. But, much like she had felt with Levi on Sunday, Mina was immediately comfortable with Echo.
They laughed and joked as they cleaned up the kitchen together and scooped ice cream into bowls. Mina had purposely brought over different kinds of ice cream than she’d had last week, not wanting to make dinner at Echo’s feel too much like dinner with Levi. Not that she would confuse the neighbors, but one of those dinners hadn’t turned out as she’d planned.
They ate their ice cream at the dining room table, and this time Noodle got to help with the cleanup. When those bowls were put in the dishwasher, Echo poured them each a full glass of wine, and they moved to her living room for a chat.
“So,” Echo said as she curled her legs around her on the couch, and her dog settled into her lap. “Tell me how Levi came to be at your house swinging a mighty hammer.”
Mina sank into a deep armchair with plush cushions and a high back and sides. She’d probably had a little too much to drink, because the armchair felt like the closest thing she’d had to a hug in ages. “I don’t know. I introduced myself to him shortly after I moved in and was trying to meet my neighbors. He helped me get a good deal on a new lawn mower, and I was outside struggling with the raised bed when he came over to help. He said he couldn’t concentrate if he knew I was outside struggling so much. He seemed gruff and standoffish when I first met him, but after that he just seemed gruff.”
“I’ve lived here for two years, and he’s still standoffish to me.” Echo’s lips were pursed in disappointment, and Noodle looked up at her with disgust at the heavy pat on the head she got.
“Did you want something more?”
Echo shrugged and went back to petting Noodle in a way that made the dog relax in her lap again. “In reality, probably not. In my fantasy world, yes. I was newly divorced and thought the solution to my problems was someone who would stick around. Levi always struck me as the kind of guy who sticks.”
“Yeah. He does seem that way, doesn’t he?” It was the jawline, Mina decided. And the broad shoulders. The handiness with tools and that stupid hodgepodge lawn mower of his. A man who would stick with that lawn mower had to be a man who would stick in a relationship.
That was the same kind of reasoning that made a known jerk seem like a nicer person because he got a chocolate Lab puppy. That kind of reasoning got women into relationships that went nowhere but in downward spirals.
Or out the front door.
“Do you know something about him that I don’t, Mina?” Echo was looking intently at her glass of wine, as if the light bouncing off the crystal held the secrets to the universe.
Mina wasn’t the only one who’d had too much to drink tonight. She was grateful that tomorrow was Saturday, and she could sleep off whatever headache she was sure to get.
Which didn’t stop her from reaching forward and pouring more wine in her glass. At Echo’s gesture, Mina topped off her glass, as well. She drank deeply out of the garnet courage, giving the buzz time to reach her brain and cloud her thinking. She wanted the edges of her mind to go fuzzy, to stop thinking, can I trust this person?
If she didn’t say anything to Echo, then she continued to be just-Mina. The friendship would develop as if Mina were another neighbor, and, depending on how close their friendship got, eventually Mina might tell her. Maybe Echo would be upset that she hadn’t been told until then, and maybe she wouldn’t be. The problem was you never knew. Rarely did the opportunity come up naturally for Mina to hear someone’s ignorance or otherwise on HIV, and, as she’d learned the hard way, people’s words and their actions could be diametrically opposed.
Mina took another sip. But alcohol never could dull her mind. All it ever did was make her riskier.
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Jennifer Lohmann
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: If only attraction always led to happily ever after…Mina Clements wants to grab life with both hands. With a fixer-upper and a fresh start in Montana, the graphic novelist is ready to do just that. Plus, having handsome handyman Levi Pardo next door could be a bonus… But even though sparks sizzle when Levi helps with her renovations, the widower’s in no hurry to fall in love again. Still, he’s much more than the neighbour who looks good swinging a hammer. He’s a man she wants to trust with her biggest secret—one that can either bring them closer or wreck the new beginning they both need.