4. Carmen

CHAPTER 4

CARMEN

Sitting outside, I kept tossing the ball to Stitch while music played through the outdoor speaker system I had splurged on. The misters around the perimeter or the covered deck were on, giving me a bit of relief from the summer heat. Heat I knew was only going to get worse as the summer dragged on.

But no matter what I did, I couldn’t get comfortable.

I couldn’t get my brain to settle and just let me be. And I knew exactly whose fault it was. My eyes moved to the back of my fence as I wondered what the other side looked like. It’d been two days since Andres had asked me to dinner.

Two days since I’d embarrassed myself by flinching away from his touch. A touch I realized I wished I’d get.

“Now you won’t have the chance,” I mumbled under my breath, then took a healthy sip of my white wine.

A part of me had expected the guy not to show up at the library anymore. He knew. He might not have known the gory details, but he would have got the picture. But he hadn’t stopped showing up at the end of my workday.

Turning in one blue alien romance and asking for the next. For two days.

Then, as if that wasn’t enough, like clockwork, he walked home with me.

Stitch licked my hand, snapping me out of my thoughts. I smiled at my boy and picked up the ball he’d dropped at my feet and tossed it again. My thoughts drifted to the man who lived behind me once again. I didn’t like to admit how much I was starting to look forward to our little chats as we walked home. I did miss the way he hadn’t tried to touch me. Not a brush of his arm against mine, nothing. And he also hadn’t asked me to dinner again.

His backyard lights were on.

I hated how my attention kept drifting over to the fence line that separated our properties. I even lowered the volume of my music, my ears strained to hear him in his yard. To make out a sound, anything that would give me a hint he was back there. And if he was, what was he doing? Was he just sitting and enjoying the night, too? Or was he sitting around watching his side of the fence, wondering about me?

“Yeah, right,” I muttered. I was the one with a crush now. And regret.

I was too far away to actually hear anything. Stitch scratched at the French doors, letting me know he was done playing catch and wanted to head back inside. I didn’t blame him. It was later, but it was still warm. I stood and opened the door.

But instead of following him inside like I normally would, I closed it behind me and picked up my glass of wine. Chugging the rest, I found myself doing the stupidest, most stalker-ish, unhinged thing possible. I walked toward my cactus. Not that I didn’t come out here. I did. Every three weeks, I pulled and tugged on my heavy-duty water hose, a gift from my dad, and drenched the succulents to make sure they didn’t die on me.

The closer I got, the more curious I grew. And weirdly enough, the more I resented the fact I’d let my dad talk me into my faux-security system. I wanted to know if he was around, but I couldn’t hear anything.

I moved between two cacti and leaned too close to the fence. My hands by my side moved just a little, and sure enough, I poked myself.

“Ouch!” I yelped, carefully stepping back.

“Someone there?” A deep, all-too-familiar voice broke the silence of the night. Only the soft sound of boleros played on my small speaker.

“Yeah!” I squeaked, then covered my mouth with my uninjured hand. “It’s me!” I winced. What am I doing?! I could have just run away. Instead, I’d been caught snooping red-handed. Or poked red-handed!

“Hey, neighbor.” I could almost make out the smile on his face. Smug and way too cocky for his own good, only making him that more handsome.

“I was checking my cactus,” I blurted out an explanation.

“Cactus?” He wasn’t at all fazed that I’d be checking on my plants at night.

“Yeah.” I smiled, ignoring the way my face was probably pink with embarrassment, glad he couldn’t see me. “When I moved here, my dad insisted we put some in. In case some burglar or weird neighbor tried to jump over the fence.”

“Am I the weird neighbor, then?” he asked, and I laughed.

“No, but you know what I mean. The house had been empty, and he worries.”

“Does he live close?” Andres asked easily, and for some reason, I relaxed.

“Nope. He and my mom and brothers live in Arizona.”

“Oh yeah? What part?” Just like that, I forgot to ask what he was doing out.

We got to talking.

Sharing about my home state and the different places he had visited while trying to recruit new players. Before I knew it, I had dragged my chair over to the end of my backyard, and we kept talking under the stars long past my bedtime.

We talked about our jobs and where we had traveled. I’d let it slip I was divorced, but almost like he sensed it wasn’t my favorite subject, we quickly skipped over the ugly details. Minutes turned to hours under the full moon.

There might have been a fence between us, but the walls around my heart were slowly coming down.

I wasn’t the kind of woman who lied to herself, not anymore at least. Even in the darkness that cloaked the shadows of every reason I shouldn’t let myself feel again, I did.

I couldn’t stop myself from yawning. “You’re tired,” he noted from the other side of the fence. I tried to fight a third yawn but wasn’t strong enough.

“Just a little,” I admitted. I hated knowing the night was coming to an end.

“We should probably head in.” His deep voice was smooth, like a shot of twenty-year-old scotch. I waited a moment for some stupid comment on his end. Something a guy would say to insinuate we should take the conversation a little deeper, like his place or mine. Some kind of lame thing that would help me not like him so much.

But he didn’t say a word.

“You’re right. It is late,” I begrudgingly agreed. I chewed on my bottom lip. Maybe I was no better than those kinds of guys because the idea of him hopping the fence so we could make out under the bright stars sounded really good to me. Maybe more than make out? I shook the thought away and picked up my phone. It had been sitting next to me facedown the entire time, and I hadn’t once picked it up to check it. My eyes widened at the time.

“It’s two thirty in the morning,” I whispered loudly. “I don’t remember the last time I stayed up this late.”

“Me neither,” he chuckled. “But it was fun.”

“It was,” I admitted. For a moment, it felt like I was wearing my heart on my sleeve, somehow showing him my vulnerable underbelly. But it didn’t weird me out. “I have to be up and out of here in five hours.”

“That definitely means it’s time for bed. This was nice. Thanks for the talk, Carmen.”

“Thank you, Andres.” His name rolled off my tongue easily.

I grabbed my chair and dragged it back to my covered patio area before heading inside. I scratched the top of Stitch’s head, who was already sleeping in the living room. I quickly went about and locked the house then headed to bed with a smile on my face and something inside of me that felt lighter. Happier.

Something I was not going to overthink.

When I woke up, I felt weirdly refreshed. Like I’d gotten hours of sleep instead of half of that. I got up and got ready for work. When I opened my front door, there he was. At the end of my front yard, standing on the curb, where he usually left me when he walked me home.

“Andres.” His name slipped past my smiling lips, and that’s when I noticed his hands were full. A familiar white bag in one hand and a drink tray in another, he lifted them up and gave me a smile that made my knees wobble.

“Hungry?”