“What’s a salad spinner?”
“It’s a bowl that you put washed greens in and— Oh stop it, that’s not what this is about!”
“You brought up the salad spinner, it must be something pretty amazing if I’m supposed to be . . . what did you say? Fighting over it? Along with a coffee table?”
“You. Are. Infuriating.” I spat each word out slowly and clearly, not wanting him to miss them.
“Missy used to tell me the same thing.”
I launched myself at him, threw myself on this giant man with his giant shoulders, and literally tried to take him to the ground, my sock-clad feet sliding on the cold wooden planks. My hands struggled to land a blow, to do anything other than hang pitifully from his enormous shoulders, while he simply braced himself and let me tantrum in midair.
When he began to chuckle, I really lost my cool. “Don’t you dare laugh at me, you motherfucker! I can’t believe that you’d laugh at me, after what you did to me tonight at that stupid hoedown!” I swung wildly at him, missing by a mile.
“Okay, that’s it,” he grumbled, grabbing me across my middle, throwing me over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and starting across the lawn. “’Night, Roxie, sorry about the noise,” he called out.
I looked up to see her hanging out of her bedroom window and waving merrily at the two of us.
“Thank goodness, now I can go back to sleep,” she said good-naturedly, starting to close the window. “It used to be so quiet out here in the country.”
He carried me over to his truck, kicking and screaming obscenities. Opening the passenger side, he dumped me inside, then closed the door. As I continued to yell at him, he stood outside the door until I’d exhausted every insult I could think of, which was a lot.
“—until it falls off and rots!” I finally finished, panting. The passenger-side window was almost completely fogged over, but I could see his shape through it, just waiting it out.
I rubbed the tie of my robe over the fog, making a clear spot. He leaned down to look through, his eyes twinkling in the moonlight.
Sonofa— “Let me out.”
He said something, but I couldn’t understand the words.
“What?”
He pantomimed rolling down the window, and I rolled it down a crack. “Let me out,” I repeated.
“I’ll let you out when you calm down.”
“I really don’t take orders well. You should know that about me,” I said, seething.
“Duly noted.” He smiled that damn killer grin. “You ready to talk like normal people now?”
“Define normal.”
He thought a moment. “How about we just shoot for no more yelling?”
I pondered. “Deal. Can I get out now?”
He shook his head. “I’d feel safer with the steel door between us for a little while longer. But maybe you could roll the window down a little more?”
“I can hear you just fine,” I mumbled, but rolled it down all the way. When I looked up, his face was mere inches from mine.
“With the window up, I couldn’t do this,” he whispered, then kissed me slow and sweet. When he pulled away, my lips wanted to follow, but I kept them safely inside the truck. “So you’re really this pissed off about onions?”
“I—” I started to yell, then clamped my mouth shut tightly and tried to think about what I wanted to say. “I was pissed off that your ex-wife couldn’t wait to tell me you didn’t like onions. And believe me, we’re talking about that. But what really pissed me off was that you left, and you never came back. You left me there alone—
“You weren’t alone—”
“I felt alone.”
He was silent outside the truck. I was silent inside the truck.
“I’m sorry that I left, and I’m sorry that you felt alone,” he said after a moment. “But you really hurt Missy’s feelings.”
“I don’t think that—”
“Let me finish.” He waited, and when I nodded, he went on. “You think divorced people should be arguing about things, but I think the opposite. We’d been friends since we were in seventh grade. We dated all through high school. She went with me to USC, and when I got drafted she was cheering me on in the front row. She was with me in Dallas, she was with me in the locker room the day my knee gave out, and she was next to me the entire time I was in rehab, training to get strong again.”
Shit. That was the definition of history.
“So why wouldn’t we be friends after we were no longer married?”
“Why aren’t you still married? It sounds like you two were perfect for each other.” I hated that my words came out as sharp as they did, but I had to know.
“Do you want the same things you wanted when you were seventeen?”
I flashed on that tiny apartment in the Bronx, cooking for Thomas and flinching when he told me I was a fat slob. Yet I’d stayed. I’d wanted it.
“No,” I said vehemently.
“We fell out of love—it happens. But just because we didn’t make it as a couple, I’m supposed to hate her?”
“She sure doesn’t hate you,” I mumbled, and suddenly there was a hand under my chin, tipping my head upward. And warm gray-blue eyes, staring deeply into mine.
“Is she a little dependent on me? Maybe. Maybe I’ve let her get too dependent. But it doesn’t bother me, and it shouldn’t bother you. There’s nothing but friendship between Missy and me. That’s it.”
I started to say something, but wisely bit my tongue. Because those eyes were burning into mine, almost in a hypnotic kind of way, and I wanted to see what he’d say next. Oscar was a man of few words, so when he used them, I liked to hear them all.
Good thing, too, because what he said next . . .
“In case you haven’t noticed, my attention is focused right now on one woman only. And she’s pretty much got me twisted up in knots, in all the best kinds of ways.”
“Twisted?”
“Mmm-hmm,” he breathed, his hands curving over mine on top of the window, his breath puffing against my face as he lowered his head down toward mine. “All twisted up.”
“Twisted up like . . . head over heels?” I asked, holding my breath. He thought a moment, then kissed me on the tip of my nose.