When I wasn’t at the salon or moping around at home, holding my burned hand up high and cussing at it, I went to visit Miss Pearl at the hospital, who was being held there because of all the smoke she’d inhaled and she’d gotten a few burns too.
“How are you doing, Miss Pearl?” I asked the elderly woman after I’d set the vase of flowers I’d bought her at the grocery store on the table in front of her bed.
In a faded mint-green hospital gown, and with her hair limp and flat against her scalp, she’d blinked those milky blue eyes at me and sighed. “Half my house burned down, but I’m alive.”
Well, that wasn’t the positive statement I’d been expecting to get.
But she’d kept going. “You saved my life, Diana, and I never told you thank you—”
“You don’t have to thank me.”
She rolled her eyes. “I do. I’m sorry for messing up your name. You’re a good girl. Dal says I’m bored and like to push people ‘cause of it. I don’t mean any harm.”
Damn it. Sitting down in the chair beside her bed, I reached up and placed my hand over her cool one. “I know you don’t. It’s okay. I’m pushy too.”
That had the old woman smirking. “I heard.”
Before I could ask who she’d heard that from, she continued on. “Dal left, but he’ll be back by Wednesday, he said. That’s when they’re letting me out of this joint.”
He’d already warned me of that on Saturday when he’d woken up at my house and then went ahead to spend half the day with the boys and me, hanging around before he took off to visit Miss Pearl at the hospital.
But he hadn’t told me where he was going, and so I kind of snuck in, “Is he okay?”
You’d figure I would know you can’t bullshit a bullshitter, and Miss Pearl had a lot more experience bullshitting than I did. By the smile she gave me, she knew I was fishing, and the old woman said, “Oh, he’s fine. Just great.”
And that was all she’d given me. Damn it.
So a couple of days later, when I was lying on the couch with a glass of milk on the table and a smores Pop-Tart in one hand, watching television and wondering how the hell I was going to survive two more weeks without working, I was startled by a lawn mower roaring to life.
It took a couple of seconds for me to realize that the loud sound was coming from close by. Really close by. Was someone at my house?
Swinging my legs over the edge of the couch, I peeked over the back of it to look through the window at the side of the house. I saw nothing. I checked my phone as I stood up to make sure my dad hadn’t called and said he was coming over, but there were no missed calls.
Pulling up one single blind on the window, looking out toward the front lawn, I paused, let it drop, and then raised it again. At the same time I was doing this, goose bumps broke out along my spine.
Because on my lawn wasn’t a stranger, especially since he’d let me just about bawl my eyes out in front of him more than once. It also wasn’t just Dallas cutting my lawn like it was no big deal.
It was Dallas on my lawn with his shirt off, pushing his lawn mower.
It was Dallas on my lawn with his shirt off.
More goose bumps rose all over my body. He wasn’t sweating yet, but even that wouldn’t have made him more attractive than he looked in that moment. He didn’t need anything to look more attractive than he did right then and there. A thong or nudity was absolutely not necessary.
Because my eyes saw everything they needed to see; what they had last seen months ago. Everything they would ever need to see. They took in the faint V-shape of muscle right where the elastic band to his sweat pants rested. They took in those cube-shaped, ridged muscles above his belly button that extended into neatly stacked rectangles. Then there were those shoulders that were just perfect. And those arms and forearms.
I loved forearms. Loved them. Especially his. I could even see the veins lining his from my window.
Most of all though, I took in every single inch of tattooed skin covering him. This was my payment for burning the shit out of my palm from the looks of it.
The brown ink I’d seen by his elbow was part of a wing that wrapped around his entire biceps, stretching out onto his chest. Right between his pectorals was the head and beak of an eagle. Another wing seemed to sweep around his opposite arm, almost a perfect mirror of the first one I’d seen.
God help me. The view was even better the second time around.
Was I going to go out there specifically to catch an up-close look of the details of the eagle’s wings? No way in hell.
But was I going to go out there to offer him a glass of water despite the fact he could easily walk across the street to get a drink from his own house? I damn well was.
For one brief moment, I thought about putting on something other than pajamas, but… what was the point? It would be obvious if I did, and despite him being a wonderful friend, person, and neighbor, he was married. Getting a divorce. Same thing.
And he’d disappeared for days somewhere.
There was no harm in using my eyeballs on him. Repeatedly. I just wouldn’t look at his butt or junk. That was crossing the line. Anything from the waist above was fair game, I reasoned.
Leaving my hair loose around my shoulders, I opened the door and stepped out just as he finished a pass down the lawn away from me, turning the mower at the last minute. I must have caught his attention immediately because he looked up from his focus on the grass to gaze at me, and I waved, smiling too wide at someone who wasn’t mine and couldn’t be.
When he didn’t shut off the machine, I made a drinking gesture toward my mouth and he shook his head.
Okay. What was I supposed to do now?
I watched him for a moment, noticing there was something different about him, but I couldn’t figure out what. His lawn mower was bagged, but he had to empty it out. By the time I heard the motor putter to a stop, I had already made it out to the shed to grab a couple of the big, black bags we used for the leaves and opened the gate that led to the front. Dallas was busy taking the bag off the back of the machine when I came up to him.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, telling my eyeballs they better not backstab me right then and there by straying somewhere they had no business going.
“Morning,” he said in that low voice. “Did I wake you?”
“No.” I used my chin to point toward the bag in my hands. “I can hold it with one hand, can you pour and hold the other side of the bag, too?” He nodded and did it, setting the attachment back to the mower while I shook the clippings so they settled at the bottom. “So, can I ask what exactly you’re doing?”
“It’s called mowing a lawn,” he informed me, his attention still centered on the red-painted machine. “I’ve seen you do it before.”
And people thought of me as a smart-ass. “I’m being serious. What are you doing, Professor X? I was planning on laying a guilt trip on the boys so they would do it on their own.”
He eyed me with those golden-brown irises before focusing back on the trash bag in front of him. “I have hair, and your lawn needed mowing. Your hand is fucked. I just got back and don’t have any work scheduled for today.”