*
At five-fifty on Monday evening, Max sat at the kitchen island, his hands folded in front of him. As a child, he’d coped with anxious waiting by pacing the floor. When his parents had tried to break the habit by making him sit, he’d drummed his fingers on the table. He didn’t particularly like driving his parents crazy, though, so over time he’d learned to sit quietly with his fingers intertwined so he couldn’t drum them.
This was the first time he was having a visitor to his home who wasn’t a sports buddy. They weren’t going to watch a game and munch on potluck snacks. Instead, they were going to have conversations and eat a meal together.
Even though he liked Tori and was already considering her a friend, he wasn’t accustomed to playing the attentive host role. And he’d grown up in a family of social extroverts, so he’d always been able to fade into the background and let them do all the talking.
When he heard her car pull into the driveway five minutes later, he walked to the door and went out to meet her, so she’d know to come into the kitchen. Nobody ever used the front door.
“Did you have any trouble finding the house?” he asked, because people always seemed to ask that the first time they had visitors over.
“It’s Whitford. Believe it or not, I already knew where your house was. I didn’t know it was so cute, though.”
“Oh, good. I always dreamed of having a cute house,” he said, smiling when she rolled her eyes at his sarcasm.
While he’d made some changes to the interior— notably to the basement—he’d left the outside primarily as it was when he bought it, including the window boxes that had started their lives as cranberry, but had faded to a dark shade of pink. Miniature white-picket fencing lined the walkway and surrounded the shrubbery along the front of the ranch-style home. He assumed it was the flower boxes that led her to use the word cute.
“Let me guess,” she said. “It all came with the house.”
“Actually, yes.” He led her into the kitchen, and she looked around in a casual way, as if she was trying not to be too nosy.
“We had movie night on Saturday,” she said. “I talked Hailey into showing My Fair Lady.”
“Ah. So now you get the Professor Higgins and Eliza Doolittle reference.”
“Yes, but at the cost of watching one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.”
Her vehemence surprised him. “While it’s not my favorite musical—which admittedly is not my favorite kind of movie to begin with—I don’t think it was that bad. And I can’t be alone or it wouldn’t be a classic.”
“I don’t care if the whole world loved it. The movie sucked, Max. He finally realizes he loves her and wants her to stay and, instead of pushing her up against the wall, kissing her until she couldn’t breathe and then banging her right there on the floor, he tells her she can fetch his slippers?”
Something about the way she said banging her right there on the floor made it hot in the room all of a sudden, and Max moved to stand on the opposite side of the kitchen island, just in case that wasn’t the only physical reaction her words would invoke. It had obviously been too long since his last relationship, which had ended shortly before he left Connecticut.
“I don’t think banging a woman on the floor was allowed on the big screen in the sixties,” he said.
“But fetching his slippers? She’s not a Labrador retriever.”
“From the sound of it, I should cross a willingness to bring me my slippers off of my list of desirable qualities in a wife, then?” She simply stared at him for so long, he finally gave in and smiled. “That was a joke.”
“I thought it might be. But now I’m wondering if you actually do have a list.”
“Of course I do.” He paused. “But not in writing because that would be weird.”
When she laughed, some of the tension that had gripped him before her arrival eased and he felt like himself again as he led her into the living room, pointing out the bathroom door down the hall in case she should need it later.
“Ah, the infamous couches,” she said when she saw the two oversize leather sofas, one a sectional, and the matching recliner. “And that big TV screen.”
“They’re comfortable. I like a living room that feels lived in, you know?”
“It suits you.” Tori flopped in the corner of the sectional couch, which was Katie’s favorite seat when she was over for a game. Maybe women liked corners. Something to keep in mind, anyway.
“Thank you.”
“So tell me about this list of desirable wifely qualities you have in your head. What kind of woman do you want to date?”
“I’d like to date a woman who’s intelligent, friendly and wants to get married and have children. It would be nice if she likes trains, but that’s probably asking too much.”