Page 15 of Thank you, Next

“She’s family.” It wasn’t technically true, but it was what Will told himself when the overwhelming need to know and protect Alex got the better of him. It was a more acceptable explanation than the real answer—that he couldn’t not think about Alex since his divorce. He’d tried for years and years before meeting April, acutely aware of how messy it would be if they finally gave in to the roiling thing that had been between them nearly from the start. He told himself that it was easier for both of them if Alex believed he was totally indifferent to her—if she thought that he saw her as an annoying sort-of relative that he only tolerated so that he could maintain his relationship with Lexi.

Alex could never know that Will cared about her independent of how he cared for Lexi. That would lead them down a one-way street toward disaster. Neither of them could make a relationship with other people work, and neither of their sets of parents had set a good example. According to his ex-wife, they had “matching avoidant attachment styles,” whatever that meant. April said it made sense because both of them had essentially raised themselves. Maybe April was right, and the way they were raised was how they’d both ended up alone.

Alex was a threat to everything Will held dear because he didn’t feel like himself around her. And he didn’t like how she knew how to knock him off-center with just a look or a flick of her hair. He hated how he got indigestion when she rolled her eyes at him. And he was jealous of her relationship with Lexi. Not because he thought Lexi loved her more, but he hated how jealous he was of the way Alex laughed at Lexi’s jokes. Will didn’t joke. But if he did, he’d want Alex to laugh with him the way she did with other people.

“You like Alex, don’t you?” Andrew asked, with his head cocked to the side, like a raptor assessing his prey.

Will had forgotten where he was. He’d let his mind slip over his long history with Alex Turner and had taken his eye off the ball. He’d been so preoccupied with what Alex might be doing hanging out with a random reality television producer on an ordinary Wednesday that he’d forgotten himself.

Will couldn’t tell this man about what he truly felt about Lexi. She was a like a piece of him that he’d never been able to hold on to. Every time he finally felt as though he had a handle on her, she slipped away from him. He cared about her, but she always managed to infuriate him. He couldn’t have her, but it bothered him that a part of him would always want her. She was sort of like family, but she always boxed him out of really knowing her.

And she could take perfectly good care of herself, even around a douchey reality TV producer who looked at her like she was a black truffle that he wanted to shave a piece off of.

“She’s a pain in the ass.” That was the best that Will could come up with. The only concise way that he could describe what she meant to him. Alex was a pain, but she was a pain that he wouldn’t know that he was alive without.

Luckily, this Andrew douche didn’t know all the stuff packed into that one sentence. So he laughed and pointed to a chair in front of him.

Because Will didn’t think that the man in front of him had it in him to really get someone like Alex and all that made her, he sat down to hear the guy out.

SEVEN

Alex drove up to the building that would become Will’s new restaurant; she didn’t know where he lived anymore. She’d never been invited to the house he’d shared with his ex-wife, but she’d had the address for holiday card purposes.

All she knew about his current living situation was that he’d let his ex keep their little Los Feliz bungalow, and Lexi did not approve of Will’s bachelor pad. Apparently, he’d reverted to sleeping on a mattress on the floor of a studio apartment. She guessed he was so busy with his new restaurant that he didn’t have time to sleep and felt his home was not relevant.

Alex didn’t like to think about where Will Harkness slept, because that would lead to her thinking about Will Harkness not wearing clothes. She would then think about whether Will Harkness had gotten more tattoos since she’d seen him at Lexi’s last Labor Day barbecue. The one he’d attended with his ex-wife, who was nothing like Alex, because Alex was the opposite of Will’s type. This was a point Will had made very clear when he’d rejected her. Thoughts about Will that led to anything other than what he was cooking for her and Lexi for dinner were entirely fruitless.

He was the most frustrating man she’d ever met, and she couldn’t imagine that he had anything nice to say about her. She couldn’t get the image of the two of them talking shit about her after she’d left out of her mind.

Not that she’d ever known Will to talk shit about her. He merely looked right through people he didn’t like or no longer had use for.

Still, she sat in her car in the rare street parking spot she’d found on Fairfax for way too long. She didn’t voluntarily run into Will. She tried to space out their encounters by weeks, if not months. She didn’t spend time that she didn’t have to spare thinking about seeing Will and Andrew together. She didn’t turn their images over in her head, comparing one to the other. She did not think about how real and earthy Will was when compared to Andrew. And she most certainly did not recall that she’d first been attracted to Andrew because he and Will shared a certain shrewdness and way of solving problems and looking at the world that inspired her.

But her curiosity compelled her to figure out what they’d said about her. She would have to be incredibly persistent about getting that information from Will, but he was as prone to glossing over the truth to protect other people’s feelings as Andrew was. Plus, it would be weird if she contacted Andrew again after their last awkward meeting.

She got out of her car and walked around the building that would soon house Will’s restaurant. The front door would be locked for a few more weeks, but the back would likely be accessible given the pace of deliveries at this point. It had been a dumb idea to wear heels today, but she hadn’t exactly planned on skulking around in alleys when she’d gotten dressed. And she hadn’t slept very well the night before, given all the Andrew-and-Will comparison matrices she’d been busy composing in her head. Honestly, she could write a treatise on the topic with how much thought had gone into it.

Predictably, she tripped and fell about twenty steps from the back door to the new restaurant, Solitudine—the Italian word for loneliness. For a few moments, she was frozen in shock, like when a baby fell and didn’t know whether to get up and dust themselves off or start screaming for their mother. She felt searing pain from her injury—almost so much she froze. Tears hit her cheeks, and she picked up a grimy hand to wipe them off. And then she dragged a pebble across her face.

“Ouch.”

“Are you okay?” Alex’s spine stiffened. The last person she wanted to see was standing behind her, watching her sit down in the dirt. And there was a hint of amusement in his voice.

Before she turned, she wiped her face again with her other hand. And then she gathered all the dismissive, haughty energy that she could muster before looking at him. She was glad she did, because he looked good. If she were being honest with herself, she would admit that he always looked good, but she didn’t want to be honest with herself at the moment.

He was the perennial enemy. Or actually, more of an irritant that she could never get to go away. Will Harkness was a chronic ailment that made her itch all over.

“I’m fine.” She’d meant for the words to sound breezy, but they didn’t. And he knew that.

He moved close to her and grabbed her upper arms. He was a lot bigger than her—a lot bigger than he’d been when they’d first met. She felt enveloped by him immediately. He smelled like herbs and expensive soap. When he stood up with her in his arms, the skin on his neck was so close to her lips that she could taste it.

That was why he was so irritating to her. She was so attracted to him that she forgot herself when she got too close. And despite her efforts to avoid him, he always popped up when she least expected it. It was a conundrum. One of the few she couldn’t solve.

“Now you have me wondering if you’re following me around and why.” He still sounded amused, and that made her want to kick him in the balls. The only thing stopping her was that he’d picked her up off the ground and was now ushering her inside the back door to his new restaurant. Hopefully, he already had a first aid kit because she could feel blood running down one of her legs. “These shoes are stupid.”

“These shoes are expensive.”

“And stupid.” He still had ahold of one arm and she had to run on her tiptoes to keep up with him. “You’re tall. I don’t understand what you have against flat shoes.”