it was the cherry on top of the sundae of what they’d just shared.
“I prefer the French pronunciation,” he said, “Duh-veed.”
It was an old, old joke between them, a leftover from their high school days, a reminder of the people they both had been, and perhaps, could be again.
“AYE-AYE, DUH-VEED,” she said, and her laughter felt rich and warm and real as she watched him cross the lawn between their two houses. Then she turned and went around her walkway to her back door, Bastigal tucked close to her heart. She was aware of the dog’s heart beating. But even more aware of the beating of her own.
Life.
She was aware she was alive, and glad of it.
A little while later, feeling joyous with her dog back in his little basket watching her, Kayla tried to decide what to wear and what to do with her hair.
Momentarily, guilt niggled at her. What was she doing?
But she brushed the guilt aside and decided right then and there that she had had enough guilt to last her a lifetime. David had said guilt and happiness could not coexist. He had said fear and happiness could not coexist.
When was the last time she had just taken the moments life gave her as a gift? In the past days, lying out under the stars, getting sprayed with yellow globs, swimming fully clothed in the chilly and refreshing waters of the lake she had felt something she had not felt for so long.
Happy.
And then when she had given in to the temptation to taste his lips?
Alive.
And if it was some kind of sin to want that feeling, to chase it, even though it was connected to him, well, then she was going to be a sinner.
She had tried for sainthood for the first twenty-some-odd years of life. She was going to try playing for the other side.
And so, she looked at her wardrobe with a critical eye, and she passed over the knee-length golfing shorts and the button-down blouse.
She put on, instead, shorty-shorts and a tailored plaid top that she left one button more than normal undone on.
She scooped up her hair into a loose bun, letting the tendrils fall out and curl around her face. She dusted her eyes with makeup that made them look like they were the color of emeralds, and she dabbed lip gloss onto her lips and admired how puffy and shiny they looked.
She looked at herself in the mirror. She felt attractive and womanly for the first time in how long?
“What the heck are you doing?” she whispered.
Given the hunger David Blaze made her feel, and the happiness, what the heck was she doing?
It was obvious. She was playing with fire. And she was startled by how much she liked it, especially when she let him into her house a half hour later and saw the deep male appreciation darken the brown of his eyes to near black.
And then he turned his attention, swiftly, to her rickety chair, and to the heap of tools he had unearthed at his mother’s house and brought with him.
For a moment she felt an old wound resurfacing: his turning his attention so deliberately away from her made her feel the same way she had felt after he had kissed her all those years ago, and then turned away.
Suddenly, she wondered about that. Had he turned away then because he felt too little? Or because he had felt too much?
She reminded herself that she had invited him here for him, not for her.
And for now she was going to free herself from all that; she was just going to enjoy the moment. She would navigate the other stuff when it surfaced.
And hope that it didn’t blow everything around it to smithereens!
“There,” he said, a half hour later, righting the chair, resting his hand on the back of it and looking supremely satisfied with himself when it did not wobble. “Done.”
“That’s great, David. Hey, do you think you could mow my lawn? I’ve let it get too deep. I can’t even push the mower through it.”
He shot her a look like he was going to protest. She deliberately busied herself rescuing the remains of the Dandy Lion ice cream, then snuck a look at him.
As she suspected, David looked nothing but relieved that she had given him another excuse not to go home.
* * *
Two days later, on her back deck, Kayla snuck another look at the man in her yard. Terrible as it was to admit—like a weakness, really—it was nice to have a man around. Of course, it didn’t hurt that it was a man like David.
They had fallen into a routine of sorts. He came over in the morning, and she made coffee and toast.
He sat out on her deck with his laptop and used her internet, and then, as if it were a fair trade, did some chores around the house. Her screen door didn’t squeak anymore—he’d replaced and reinforced the latch; the kitchen faucet didn’t drip.
Yesterday, when the hardware store had delivered planks to fix her back deck, she had protested.
“David, no. I feel as if I’m taking advantage of you and all your manly skills.”
He had lifted an eyebrow at her to let her know that he had manly skills she had not begun to test yet. The awareness between them was electric. But despite long, lingering gazes, and hands and shoulders and hips “accidentally” touching, they had not kissed again.
But then his gaze had slid to his own house.
She saw how her initial assessment of the situation had been bang on: he needed to be busy right now.
And his initial assessment of her situation had also been correct: her house was a project that was too big for her to undertake.
“I am so grateful for your help,” she admitted.
He smiled and Kayla appreciated the slow unfolding of the new relationship between them. Even if she would have given in to the temptation, Bastigal had an intuitive sense of when the hum of electricity was growing too intense between them, and would become quite aggressive toward David.
His message was clear: I am the man of this house. But in a way it was a blessing that he was chaperoning them.
She had made the mistake of intimacy too quickly once before and the results had been disastrous.
If there was something here to be explored, she wanted to do it slowly, an unfolding of herself and of him.
Now she watched him out on her lawn. David was doing her lawn in sections, mostly because her lawn mower—which he had dubbed HAL Two—had, like the name suggested, a mind of its own.
It would roar to life, work for
