“How did you know where I lived?”
He opened his mouth to reply, but then Eureka sensed Brooks behind her in the doorway. His chest brushed her shoulder blade as he rested his left hand against the doorframe. His body spanned hers. He was as wet as she was from the storm. He peered over Eureka’s head at Ander.
“Who’s this?”
The blood drained from Ander’s face, making his already pale skin ghostly. Though his body hardly moved, his whole demeanor changed. His chin lifted slightly, sending his shoulders a centimeter back. His knees bent as if he were about to jump.
Something cold and poisonous had taken hold of him. His glare at Brooks made Eureka wonder if she’d ever seen fury before that moment.
No one fought with Brooks. People fought with his redneck friends at Wade’s Hole on weekends. They fought with his brother, Seth, who had the same sharp tongue that got Brooks into trouble, but none of the brains that got him off the hook. In the seventeen years Eureka had known Brooks, he had never once thrown or received a punch. He edged closer against her, straightening his shoulders as if all that were about to change.
Ander flicked a gaze above Brooks’s eyes. Eureka glanced over her shoulder and saw that Brooks’s open wound was visible. The hair that usually fell across his brow was wet and swept to the side. The bandage he’d peeled back must have come off when they were running through the rain.
“Is there a problem?” Brooks asked, laying a hand on Eureka’s shoulder with more possession than he’d used since their one date to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at the New Iberia Playhouse in fifth grade.
Ander’s face twitched. He released his hands from behind his back, and for a moment Eureka knew he was going to punch Brooks. Would she duck or try to block it?
Instead he held out her wallet. “You left this in my truck.”
The wallet was a faded brown leather bifold that Diana had brought back from a trip to Machu Picchu. Eureka lost and found the wallet—and her keys and sunglasses and phone—with a regularity that bewildered Rhoda, so it wasn’t a huge shock that she’d left it in Ander’s truck.
“Thanks.” She reached to take the wallet from him, and when their fingertips touched, Eureka shivered. There was an electricity between them she hoped Brooks couldn’t see. She didn’t know where it came from; she didn’t want to turn it off.
“Your address was on your license, so I thought I’d come by and return it,” he said. “Also, I wrote down my phone number and put it in there.”
Behind her, Brooks coughed into his fist.
“For the car,” Ander explained. “When you get an estimate, call me.” He smiled so warmly that Eureka grinned back like a village idiot.
“Who is this guy, Eureka?” Brooks’s voice was higher than normal. He seemed to be looking for a way to make fun of Ander. “What’s he talking about?”
“He, uh, rear-ended me,” Eureka mumbled, as mortified in front of Ander as if Brooks were Rhoda or Dad, not her oldest friend. She was getting claustrophobic with him standing over her like that.
“I gave her a lift back to school,” Ander said to Brooks. “But I don’t see what it has to do with you. Unless you’d rather she’d walked?”
Brooks was caught off guard. An exasperated laugh escaped his lips.
Then Ander lurched forward, his arm shooting over Eureka’s head. He grabbed Brooks by the neck of his T-shirt. “How long have you been with her? How long?”
Eureka shrank between them, startled by the outburst. What was Ander talking about? She should do something to defuse the situation. But what? She didn’t realize she was leaning instinctively backward against the safe familiarity of Brooks’s chest until she felt his hand on her elbow.