“Easy, Moretti, I’ve been waiting for you. How long does it take to freaking go to the bathroom?”
“There was a line,” he snapped, moving toward the door of Starbucks before she even had a chance to respond.
Jill rolled her eyes and grabbed both her coffee and his, since he apparently expected her to bring it to him.
It would serve the jerk right if she just dropped it in the trash as she walked out the door, but then, if Jill were being totally fair, she’d have to admit that he’d carried her coffee plenty of times when she’d zoned out.
He turned around once outside the coffee shop, his eyes immediately going for his cup as she followed him.
“Thanks,” he muttered, accepting his boring black coffee. “Totally forgot.”
“It’s been a long one,” she said, taking a sip of her drink.
He looked her over. “How you holding up? First day back on the job and we have a murdered celebrity and nobody even approaching what looks like a viable suspect.”
Jill licked away some of the whipped cream from her upper lip, wondering if she imagined the way Vincent’s gaze had tracked the motion.
“Not going to lie, my feet hurt, my back hurts, and my head hurts…”
He nodded. “And you love it.”
Jill didn’t bother to hide the happy grin, her bad mood evaporating, as it usually did.
“I do love it. I’ve really, really missed this,” she said as they began walking toward their car.
Vincent surprised her then by glancing down at his coffee, then tossing it in a nearby garbage can.
She skidded to a halt. “Did you just throw away coffee? Expensive coffee?”
He lifted a shoulder. “It’s six p.m.”
“And that’s stopped you from guzzling caffeine since… when?”
He stared at her for several long seconds, and she cradled her coffee to her chest protectively. “Well I’m not throwing out mine.”
Vincent didn’t seem to hear her. “Do you want to grab a beer?”
It was a casual question.
Nothing special. They’d grabbed drinks a thousand times before after the end of their shift, sometimes without even discussing it. They would just wordlessly find themselves in the same restaurant, sharing a drink or two.
But there was something different tonight. A nervousness, as though he’d been thinking about the question for a while.
It was as though he was afraid she was going to say no. Afraid she was going to choose phone sex with Tom over drinks with him.
Jill glanced down at her coffee. Took one last big sip, then stepped around Vin, dropped the cup in the trash can behind him, and smiled. “Absolutely.”
He didn’t smile back, but his eyes crinkled in the corners, and that was something.
No, not just something. It was a big something.
“Everything okay with you?” Jill asked as she got into the passenger seat. Vincent liked to drive, and she didn’t mind one bit. Driving in the city made her crazy.
“Yeah. Why?” he asked.
“I dunno. You’ve been strange since I’ve gotten back.”
“So, like all of twenty-four hours?”
She studied him.
He gave her a quick glance across the car. “Quit it.”
“Quit what?”
“Staring at me.”
“I’m not staring.”
“You’re looking at me without blinking with those big old eyes. It’s staring.”
She continued to look at him, deliberately trying not to blink now, just to annoy him. “You never told me what you’ve been up to.”
“Huh?”
“While I was gone,” she explained with what she thought was admirable patience. “What did you do? Give me the highlights. Any new women or new restaurants discovered? Did you get that weird squeak in your heater fixed? I mean, three months passed. You must have done something.”
“Three months where you were off getting engaged, you mean.”
His statement hung between them for several moments, although she didn’t really understand why.
“Yeah. Like that.” Her voice was just the tiniest bit touchy, but she really wasn’t loving the way he acted pissed about the fact that she was getting married.
It’s not like she was expecting him to go dress shopping with her or be the one to give her something borrowed, but Vincent Moretti was…
He was her best friend. Not in the traditional sense, of course. He was closed-off and irritable, and most of the time he acted like he didn’t even like her. But over the years, they’d become partners in more than just the work-together kind of way.
They were like two halves of… something.
Or at least they had been. There seemed to be a rift now, and Jill was oddly desperate to fix it.
“I didn’t do much,” he muttered finally. “Watched a lot of football. Fixed the heater myself, because my landlord’s useless.”
She noticed he didn’t answer her question about women, and she should probably just let it go, but… she didn’t.
“Did you date?”
He glanced across her again before easily parallel parking into a spot directly across from one of their favorite pubs on the Lower East Side.