I rolled my eyes and sipped from my coffee. “Whatever. I’m sure I’ll be fine in a week or so when I’m used to it.”
“You’ll be under his sheets, you mean.”
“I am not sleeping with Mason again.”
“I beg to differ. I’d sleep with that man if it meant sleeping on the roof.”
“You’ve got issues.”
“Coming from the person who can’t get over someone who hurt her years ago?”
“There was nothing to get over. The only feelings were physical.”
“You cried when he didn’t call you!”
“Out of sexual frustration!” I banged my fist against the table. I would argue that until I was blue in the face and ignore the little bitch inside who told me otherwise. I knew I’d had feelings for Mason back in college, and yes, I was hurt, but I’d be damned if I’d ever admit it to anyone else.
Much less my cousin, who had a terrible habit of always being right.
If I kept enabling that shit, she’d never get her ego through the door.
In fact, that might work in my favor…
“The lady doth protest too much,” Hannah said after a moment’s silence. “I just don’t think you should close the door.”
“I didn’t.” I finished my coffee and slammed the cup down. “He closed the door the day he promised to call and never did. He doesn’t matter anymore, Hannah. He’s just a guy I used to know. That’s it.”
I turned and left the art room, leaving her staring after me with wide eyes.
I didn’t care that it felt as though my heart skipped a beat every single time I lay eyes on him. It was just getting used to him again, the same way the human body acclimatized to a temperature change.
Except Mason Black coming back into my life was an Arctic winter in the middle of an Australian summer.
Sudden. Unexpected. And absolutely, completely, perfectly impossible.
Yet here he was, impossibly in my life, living right next door to me.
And I had absolutely no idea how to handle it.
***
I knew how I was going to handle it.
I was going to pull up my big girl panties and be a civil human being.
I’d been over it a thousand times inside my mind during the eight hours the store had been open. I’d mentally worked over just about every feeling I had toward Mason Black, and being a nice person was the only way I would be able to move past it.
All right, I’d also been on Pinterest and Instagram for some of those ‘be the bigger person’ quote-type things, but I digress.
He was my neighbor. He’d bought the house. I had no intention of moving, and I assumed he didn’t either. It was the one thing in my life I was going to admit was a coincidence—we had no connections. There was no way he’d hunted me down, and even if he did, he had an entire life that I wasn’t a part of.
That I’d never been a part of.
That’s right, world. Imogen Anderson was pulling her stubborn head out of her ass and being an adult.
I was going to start off my new leaf by delivering him something nice. Since my grandma and her erotic book club had the baked goods covered, I was opting for the thing that would make any man smile:
Beer.
Me naked wasn’t an option, although it wasn’t exactly a bad sight, to be perfectly honest. Although it did depend on how many baked goods I had eaten.
Anyway. Back to my point.
I locked the store and took the day’s takings from the register. A lot of the customers were elderly and still preferred to pay in cash, which meant an almost daily stop at the bank. As soon as I’d done that to deposit the cash in the business account, I headed across town to the liquor store for beer.
I was taking a trip down memory lane with this one. I knew his favorite beer from college and I knew our local store stocked it, so I was hoping that he still liked it.
I was also grabbing a bottle of Jack Daniels, because, well, I liked to have a backup plan. And if he didn’t take the Jack, I knew the OAP book club would happily make use of it later in the week.
Not that anyone needed them after Jack Daniels, but I was willing to take the risk.
“Hello, Imogen, dear.” Mrs. Henderson took the bottle from the belt. “Are you stocking up for the book club?”
“No, ma’am,” I replied. “Just a gift for a friend.”
She scanned the beer. “That nice gentleman who moved in next door?”
I smiled tightly. “No.” The lie rolled smoothly from my tongue. The last thing I needed was the local grapevine to know I was taking the ‘nice gentleman’ from next door alcohol. They’d be marrying me off in seconds.
“Right-o,” she sang, giving me my total right after. I paid with some of the cash I’d swiped from the register—it was my business, okay?—and took my alcohol out to the car.
I really should have bought wine.
I eyed the store. Did I really want to go back in there?
No, because then I’d be accused of being a drunk.
God, wasn’t living in a small town fantastic?
I set the alcohol on the front seat and got into the car. After waiting for three of the world’s slowest drivers to pass and park, I pulled out of my parking space and made my way back across town, away from Main Street, and toward home.
It was late enough that all the roads were quiet—not that they ever really got going—and my mind whirred the entire time. What was I supposed to say to Mason?
Here’s alcohol, let’s be friends.
Sorry, I was a bit of a bitch, here’s some booze.
Wanna get drunk?
Yeah. No. Not the last one. That was how the whole shebang had started in the first place.
Drinking was bad.
She said with a six-pack of beer and liquor next to her.
Whatever.
I had no idea what to say to Mason, and that was the long and short of it.
The closer I got to his house, the more obvious it became that I had to wing it.
God, I was going to have to wing it, wasn’t I?
See, if I were a smarter woman, I’d have been nice to him the first time I’d seen him. In all honesty, I’d been too shaken and let my emotions overrule my common sense, but now, it was different.
Imogen Anderson was going to be a slave to her common sense. Amen. Blessed be. Hallelujah.
Did you end a prayer with hallelujah?
God only knew.
I didn’t. I really had to get to church once in a while. Not that Grandma and her band of merry erotica-philes ever went.
The church would go up in flames if Grandma, Kathleen, Evelyn, and Lillian stepped foot inside one.
If anyone had the devil in them, it was those four.
I pulled into the driveway outside my house and frowned. The mailbox was half-open with a brown package sticking out, and I groaned as I got out of the car. I’d told the mailman a thousand times to leave it on the porch if it didn’t fit in the mailbox.
Ugh.
I pulled the package from the mailbox and looked at the name. It was for Grandma, and a shake confirmed it rattled.
I swear if it was Viagra…
Shaking my head, I tossed it into my car where it bounced off the stick onto the floor and turned back to the mailbox. Grandma hadn’t checked it so there were probably three days of mail in there.