“Really.” He was still balanced effortlessly on the balls of his feet, looking up at her.
Really looking. This close up she could see the stubble on his jaw, which was an appealing mix of every hue of brown under the sun and made her fingers yearn to touch him.
Bad fingers.
In the low lighting, his eyes seemed to glow and she dropped her gaze to his mouth, which made her remember the taste of his kiss.
“I smell something burning,” he said.
“It’s the cookies.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s your brain. What’s going on, Zoe? You’re not upset over a sitcom.”
Tomorrow night she was going to go with a harmless Saturday Night Live marathon. “It’s nothing,” she said.
“Nothing’s got you wearing pizza sauce and crying over some guy on TV?”
“Not some guy,” she said. “Ross. As in Ross and Rachel.” When Parker just shook his head, clearly clueless, she sighed. “Never mind.” Tipping her head down at herself, she eyed her sweatshirt and the stain on it. “And how do you know this is pizza sauce? Maybe it’s blood from my last tenant who asked too many questions, you ever think of that?”
While he laughed softly, she rubbed a paper towel on the stain that was regrettably not blood but indeed pizza sauce. That was always the danger with perfectly cooked pizza rolls—they tended to explode all over you.
Not that it had ever stopped her.
“You told me that I was your first tenant,” he said.
“You always remember everything?”
“Yes,” he said. “But I also saw the empty pizza roll bag on the kitchen counter when I got the paper towels. That shit’ll kill ya, you know.”
“Hey, I eat healthy six days a week,” she said in her defense. “And then I get one eat-whatever-I-want day. I just believe in making the most of that day.”
His mouth twitched. “Not judging.”
“Good. And I wasn’t crying.”
“Okay,” he said so easily that she had to wonder who’d trained him on how to deal with a woman’s tears so well because he’d navigated through her emotion and the aftermath with shocking ease.
“I wasn’t,” she said. “I just had something in my eye.”
“Whatever you say.” He rose to his feet in one fluid motion, wincing only a little.
She opened her mouth to say something about being careful when she realized that he was fully dressed in the same clothes from earlier in the evening. “You weren’t sleeping?” she asked.
“I was.”
“You sleep in your clothes?”
“No,” he said. “I sleep in nothing.”
Oh boy. Images of that filtered through her head, really great images, too, because since the Shower Incident she didn’t have to imagine him naked; she’d seen the real thing and it was now burned in her brain. The images effectively chased away some of tonight’s odd and inexplicable melancholy, and remembering that, she closed her eyes and breathed for a moment. When she opened them, she was once again alone in the room.
For the best, she decided. The other night she’d apparently scared away the dentist before he’d even shown up. Tonight her tenant. Quite a roll, even for herself— “Here.”
Parker materialized in front of her, this time a bottle of vodka dangling from his fingers. “Made you some laced hot chocolate.” He paused, flashed a smile. “Without the hot chocolate.” He held out the bottle.
She let out a low laugh and tossed a sip back before she could think about it, and then promptly choked. It burned going down, but at least it had the consideration to leave a trail of delicious warmth in its path, completely eradicating the rest of her odd and inexplicable sadness.
Or maybe Parker had done that.
She offered him the bottle back. He took a pull, though he didn’t cough or react other than to let out a breath, as if he were finally relaxing after a long time of being tense, reminding her she hardly knew anything about him.
“You make some pretty excellent laced hot chocolate without the hot chocolate,” she said.