When the waitress brought the check to the table, Nik handed the
waitress her credit card.
"This one is on me. I'm still mad at you for paying for our drinks
from Saturday. I owed you."
He pursed his mouth and considered.
"Okay, fine, but you get all of the leftovers. Deal?"
He said that like it was a punishment. Which, considering how spicy
some of their leftovers were . . . he might be correct about that.
"Deal. I can have them for lunch tomorrow, in between all of the
cupcakes."
As they walked to her car, he elbowed her.
"Yes?" she said, in answer to his look.
"I know you're pretty nervous about all of the Fisher stuff. Do you
want me to follow you home just to make sure everything is okay? I
mean, I'm sure everything is fine, I just thought I'd—"
"Yeah," she said. "That would be great."
Why had she agreed to this so quickly, she wondered on the short
drive to her house. She usually hated it when men got all protective
about her safety, like she was some delicate flower who didn't know
how to protect herself.
But that hadn't been what Carlos had done, and she'd appreciated
it. After her panic from this afternoon, it would be nice to have backup
for those thirty seconds it took for her to walk through her apartment.
Plus, not to be shallow, but the way Carlos's T-shirt clung to his
biceps . . . she was pretty sure Carlos could take Fisher down easily.
But wait a second. Was she really going to get some dude she hardly
knew to do a walk-through of her apartment just because she got a fewnasty text messages? That was ridiculous. She was a grown woman;
she'd lived on her own for years; she could take care of herself. She
should text him right now and tell him that she was fine and didn't
need his help.
Yeah, she'd do that. She reached in her pocket for her phone. When
she got home, she'd text her girlfriends and tell them how stupid she'd
almost been.
Well, she'd text her girlfriends if she was still around to text them.
She could hear Courtney's voice in her head.
What do you have to lose here? Are you really worried about
looking silly in front of a man you barely know? Who cares?
She cared, damn it.
But her friends would kill her if she sent Carlos away and anything
happened to her.
Okay, fine. She put her phone back in her pocket.
She parked in the lot behind her apartment building and met Carlos
on the front steps.
"Thanks for coming inside with me. I feel like an idiot," she said as
she unlocked the door.
"Don't worry about it," he said. "I'm a pretty impressive dude;
people feel like idiots around me all the time. I'm used to it."
Despite her rising anxiety, she laughed as they walked up the stairs
to her second-floor apartment.
"Did he have a key?" Carlos asked in a low voice.
Nik sighed and stopped on the stairs.
"I never gave him one, but I left my keys around all the time, and
it's easy to get keys copied. And there was one time when I forgot my
keys at his house for a whole weekend and had to get my set of extra
keys back from Dana. I didn't think anything of it at the time, but . . .
I'm paranoid now, I guess."
Carlos put his hand on her shoulder, and she relaxed against it.
"Are you ready to go inside? Or do you need a minute?"She pulled away from him. She never should have done this, but she
had no choice now.
"No, no, I'm fine. Let's go in."
He took the key out of her hand and unlocked the door. She could
have done that herself, but okay. He pushed it open slowly. Why had
she turned off all of the lights before she left her house? Energy-saving
nonsense. Now she felt like one of those women in horror movies. One
of the ones who got killed in the first fifteen minutes.
Wait, no. Those women never had the sense to get someone else to
come with them when they had a bad feeling.
Carlos pushed the door wide open and stepped through it in front of
her.
"If the demon gets me, tell my mother I loved her."
Apparently they watched the same kind of movies.
She followed close at his heels as he walked into the living room and
flicked on the lights. Everything looked the same as when she'd left it
two hours before: her laptop on the desk against her big bay window,
her remote on the floor by her coffee table, her T-shirt and—oops—bra
on the top of the couch where she'd thrown them off after getting
Carlos's text. She saw a smile around his eyes when he turned in that
direction, but he didn't let it reach his mouth.
"Is there anywhere to hide in this room?" he asked her under his
breath. She shook her head.
She started to walk down the hallway that led to her bedroom, but
he put his hand on her shoulder to stop her.
"Let me go first."
He didn't wait for an answer. She stared daggers into his back as
she followed him down the hallway. Just because she'd accepted his
offer to make sure Fisher wasn't around didn't mean she was okay with
him ordering her around in her own apartment. This had been a
terrible idea.
When she walked into her bedroom, he'd already flung open the
closet doors and was running his hands through the crowded coat side
of her closet. He turned around well after she was satisfied that there
was no one hiding among them."Are all of these coats . . . yours?" he asked her. "You do realize you
live in Los Angeles, right?"
"Shut up. It gets cold here sometimes. And I go to New York at least
once or twice a year."
He shook his head, with a smile in his eyes.
"Mmm, yeah, that totally means you need twenty coats, absolutely."
She tried not to grin back at him and failed.
He stepped around to the far side of her bed, then went into the
hallway and threw open the hall closet. She supposed that Fisher could
have hidden in there, if he'd been hiding his contortionist talents from
her. He glanced at the shelves full of extra bedding, towels, and boxes
of sparkling water, and closed the door without a word. He stepped
into the bathroom, and she heard the shower curtain swish across the
rod.
"All clear in the bathroom, too. Anywhere else?"
She walked down the hall to the kitchen, simultaneously so relieved
she was ready to collapse and feeling so stupid she wanted to hide
among all the coats in her closet.
"I mean, I suppose if someone was really trying, they could hide in
the refrigerator, or under the couch, but I somehow doubt that. I think
we're all clear." She opened the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of
wine. "I'm sorry for dragging you along on this wild goose chase. I
don't know what got into me. Wine?" She glanced over at him,
standing in her living room, and saw him peer under the couch. She
smiled and poured two glasses.
"Here." She handed him a glass and sat down on the couch. "Thank
you. I'm not usually . . ." She shook her head. "Anyway, thank you. I
hope you're not too much of a man's man to drink rosé."
He sat down next to her and picked up the wineglass.
"No such thing." He took a sip of the wine and glanced over at her.
"You should get your locks changed."
Okay, that was enough telling her what to do.
"I know I should get my locks changed; I'm not an idiot," she said.
He put his glass down."Hey, I'm sorry. Of course you aren't. I didn't mean to suggest that."
He looked at her, then looked away. "I'm used to taking care of all of
the women in my family, so I have the tendency to go overboard
sometimes. I didn't mean to tell you what to do."
She picked up his wineglass and handed it to him.
"It's okay, really. I didn't mean to snap at you." She closed her eyes.
"I don't usually give in to fits of paranoia like this, and I hate it. Sorry
for taking it out on you."
He smiled at her and patted her thigh. She hated herself for wanting
his hand to linger there a lot longer than it did.
"You have nothing to be ashamed of. Every woman needs a big
strong man to come and protect her; that's not your fault. It's just
because you're naturally weak and helpless, just by virtue of, you know,
being a woman and all. You needed a man like me to do the hard work
of looking under your bed. I understand that you aren't capable of stuff
like that."
She smacked his arm.
"You asshole." She was laughing so hard she had to put her
wineglass down. "You had me going for at least five or six seconds
there! You were so close to me throwing this wine in your face and
literally kicking you out of my apartment."
• • •
Carlos laughed and relaxed against the couch cushions. He'd been a
little worried that she'd get furious at him for that, but he also thought
it might break some of the tension. One of the things that he already
liked so much about Nik was how independent she was; he should have
known that telling her what to do would piss her off. Angela had gotten
mad at him just a few weeks ago for taking her car in to get serviced;
she'd said she was fully capable of doing it for herself. He'd told her it
wasn't that he didn't think she was capable of it, it's just that he'd felt
like it was his job to do it. That hadn't made her less mad.
She waved at his wineglass.
"Drink, drink, I promise I won't knock the glass all over you."
He took another sip. He usually made fun of Angela for drinking
rosé. She could definitely never find out that he drank it with Nik andliked it.
"But really, don't feel bad," he said. "It's totally normal to freak out
about stuff like this. And my stint in the ER during my residency really
opened my eyes to how often this stuff happens to women. I mean,
fine, he wasn't here and you felt silly that you had me come up, no big
deal. But too many women ignore those feelings or don't want to feel
silly, and I've seen some of the aftermaths. Feeling silly is definitely
better."
She took another sip of her wine and leaned back. When she'd sat
down on the couch, she'd sat down right in the middle, so he'd had no
choice but to sit right next to her. They were so close they were almost
touching.
"I almost called you on the way here and told you I didn't need you,
but I knew my friends would have yelled at me and told me not to be a
fool." She paused. "I think I've given other people similar advice, now
that I think about it. It's always easier to give people advice than it is to
take it yourself."
Should he put his arm around her? He really wanted to, but she'd
just had a dramatic breakup a few days ago, and she might smack him
and order him out of her house. But she was curled up on the couch
next to him like that, all cozy with her wine; this seemed like a prime
situation for making a move, right?
"Speaking of giving advice," she said, "you said that you spend a lot
of time giving advice to teenagers, and I'm totally curious about your
job. What does it mean, to be the assistant director of a teen clinic?"
Okay, it seemed like she just wanted to talk, as they sat here
shoulder to shoulder in the dim lighting on her couch while holding
glasses of wine. Great.
"Excellent question, and one that I'm still kind of figuring out the
answer to. I've only been doing it for about six months, but I love it so
far. Basically, all of the health care of the kids that the medical center
serves—who are in the twelve to nineteen age group—is routed through
our clinic. The goal is to recognize that teens are in a special place,
both mentally and physically, and to serve their needs as best as we
can."
"I wish my doctor's office had had a teen clinic when I was a kid,"
she said. "I always remember feeling so grumpy about still going to apediatrician when I was a teenager, surrounded by babies and
toddlers."
She took another sip of wine and picked a piece of lint off of his
shoulder. He felt lulled by her touch, the warm night air, by her
presence.
And also probably the wine.
She stood up to get the bottle of wine from the fridge and brought it
back over to the couch.
"You said you'd only been there for six months—where were you
before that?"
She tipped the wine bottle toward his glass and raised her eyebrows
at him. He nodded. Was she trying to get him to linger? Had the whole
"I'm afraid of my ex" thing just been bullshit to get him to come up to
her apartment? Would he care if that was the case? He grinned to
himself. Would he care if a hot girl made up a story about being scared
of her ex-boyfriend to get him up to her apartment? Hell no, he would
not care.
"I was at St. Elizabeth's Hospital on the Westside. I liked working
there a lot, but this job is different from what I'd been doing there, and
it's a lot of fun. Plus, it was great to come back to the Eastside and be
closer to my family."
But wait. He didn't know this girl that well, but from his few
interactions with her, she seemed pretty forthright and honest, almost
to a fault. He didn't really think she'd make up a story if she wanted
him in her apartment. She would just ask him if he wanted to come
upstairs.
Plus, if someone was pretending to be scared, they would have
acted much more scared than she did when they walked in. She hadn't
been clingy or crying or any of that stuff. She'd just looked tense and
angry. And she even hadn't hinted for him to come over; he'd been the
one to offer.
"I spend so much time with L.A. people who are from somewhere
else; it's always fun to meet a real local," she said. "Do you have a big
family?"
He rested his hand on the couch, right by, but not on, her knee."Yes and no—it's a big extended family, but Angie's my only sibling.
But we grew up right around the corner from my mom's sister, Tia Eva,
and her daughter, my cousin Jessica, who is basically like a sister to
me. She's the one I told you about at the bar who I got the 'Is that you?'
idea from." He smiled. "That's another reason why this was a good
time to move back to the Eastside; Jessie's pregnant now with her first
kid, and my whole family is over the moon."
She tucked her hair behind her ears and looked up at him. He liked
the way she concentrated on him when he was talking, like she was
really listening to what he had to say.
He also liked the way the neckline of her shirt kept dipping lower
and lower. He had to force himself to not let his eyes linger for too long
on her cleavage.
"Are you over the moon about the baby, too?"
Her shirt dipped off one shoulder. He really wanted to reach over
and push it off all the way. It took him a minute to remember what
she'd asked him. Right, right, Jessie's baby.
"Oh yeah, definitely. You'd think that after being a pediatrician for
years now I'd think babies are a dime a dozen, but I can't wait until
Jessie has hers. Not that I'm ready in the least to have one of my own,
but that's what's going to make Jessie's so fun. Being an uncle is going
to be great. All of the fun and none of the responsibility." He laughed.
"Plus, this way, my mom will get off my ass about giving her
grandbabies because she'll have Jessie's baby to hang out with."
She looked at him sideways.
"Or, she'll be on your ass even more because she'll be so excited
about the one baby that she'll want more."
He held his finger up to her lips.
"Shhhhh, don't say that. She knows it's going to be a long time
before that happens. I have too many other people to take care of right
now. I'm just glad that I'm back on the Eastside. I can be closer when
the baby is born, as well as for things like killing spiders—real and
imaginary—late at night for Angela."
She took the last sip of her wine and smiled at him."She's lucky she has you. I was lucky that I had you around tonight,
too." She sat up straight and put her feet on the floor. "Do you have to
be at work super early in the morning? It's getting late."
That sure sounded like his cue to go. Damn it. He looked at his
watch and barely noticed what it said.
"It's getting pretty close to my bedtime." He put his hand on her
arm. "Are you going to be okay tonight?"
Her eyes shot to the door, but she nodded anyway.
"Of course. I'll be fine, don't worry about me."
He'd been on the point of standing up. Instead, he settled back
down on the couch.
"Well, when you say it like that, I'm worried about you. Do you want
me to . . ." He was going to say, "Do you want me to stay?" but that
sounded like he was inviting himself into her bed. And while he'd love
to get an invitation there, he didn't want to look like even more of an
asshole than he already had tonight. "Do you want me to stay until one
of your friends can get here?"
"I feel ridiculous even thinking about doing that, but . . . maybe.
Courtney has to be up at the crack of dawn, so I don't want to call her. I
can call Dana, though. I don't think she's filming tomorrow. Oh God,
that reminds me! Instagram!" She pulled her phone out of her pocket.
He had no idea what the hell that meant in this context.
"Instagram?" he asked.
"Fisher Instagrams his whole life, for 'branding' and his fans or
whatever. If he's updated in the last few hours or so, at least I'll know
what he's up to."
She typed something into the search bar on her phone while she
talked.
"I blocked him on everything, so he can't contact me, but if I'm
logged out, I can still see . . . oh my God, Carlos. Look at this! He's in
Vegas!"
She turned her phone around so he could see the video of Fisher
dancing terribly at some club. He let out a shout of laughter."Wow." He scooted closer to her so they could both watch. My God,
she smelled good. He wanted to stay this close to her on the couch for a
long time. "Is this guy for real? Play it again."
She played his video four or five more times, and they laughed
harder every time.
"This is almost as good as the middle-finger ring picture," she said,
still laughing.
He raised his eyebrows at her.
"What middle-finger ring picture?"
"Oh my God. I'm so sorry. I didn't show you. You and Angela left
before we looked at his texts. Look at this picture he sent me."
She scrolled through her phone and pulled up a photo of a blurry
middle finger with a blue engagement ring on it. He recoiled.
"Oh my God. He seriously texted you this?"
As she'd scrolled to the photo, he'd seen flashes of a few of the texts
Fisher had sent her after the proposal. That fucking bastard.
"I know. I know." She was still looking at the photo, and not at him.
"You don't have to say anything. I have terrible judgment in men; we
all know that now, but this is really incredible, right?"
He stood up. He was glad for her that Fisher was out of town, but
now he had no more excuses to stay here.
"It's so incredible that I need to go home now to process that. And
also because I have to be up, awake, and ready for patients at eight
thirty a.m. tomorrow."
She walked him to the door.
"Sorry for keeping you up, and thanks again."
She reached out to hug him, and he pulled her in tight. Her body
nestled up against his felt so good. He wanted to hold on for much
longer and forced himself to let go.
"Glad I could be here. Good night. And if you want to stack a chair
behind that door after I leave, feel free. No one will know about it but
you."
She laughed and reached up to kiss him on the cheek."I just might do that, thanks."