Page 43 of This Time Around
The man saw you eating whipped cream from the can. Is it really a big deal if he sees you shopping in a thrift store?
Or maybe that wasn’t what bothered her. Maybe it was the fact that he’d called her out on choosing a dress in a hue that held a special memory for both of them. She’d figured he wouldn’t remember. That it would just be her little inside joke, or a hat-tip to nostalgia. Obviously, she’d been wrong. She’d been wrong about a lot of things.
She stripped off her red jersey-knit dress and kicked her sandals under the bench, grateful at least that she hadn’t gone shopping in old sweatpants. Her underwear wasn’t great—gray cotton, not remotely sexy—but it’s not like he was going to be seeing it.
“Hey, Allie?”
She froze at the sound of his voice so close to her ear, then covered her boobs with her forearm. “Yes?”
“You planning to show me those?”
“My boobs?”
“What?”
The dresses, of course he meant the dresses.
“Um, I wasn’t planning on it.” She yanked the first one off the hanger and pulled it on, struggling in the taffeta for a few moments before realizing she had it on backwards. She righted the dress, then reached behind her to do up the zipper.
Crap! She couldn’t reach. Since when had her arms gotten too short to do up a damn zipper? She wriggled and stretched, wishing like hell she’d made a better effort to do Pilates more regularly. She just didn’t have time and?—
“Need help with any zippers?”
“Dammit, are you spying on me?”
His laugh bounced through the small dressing room space, and Allie felt her cheeks grow hot. “It’s a solid door, Allie. Floor to ceiling, and no keyhole. No, I’m not spying on you. Paranoid much?”
She tossed her hair, not sure whether to be more flustered with herself or with him. She tried the zipper again. Dammit to hell.
“Fine,” she said, yanking open the door. “I could use help with the zipper.”
“Funny, I didn’t hear a please in there.”
“Please.” Allie sighed and turned to present her back to him. He didn’t say anything, and she glanced in the mirror to see his eyes cast downward toward her ass. Embarrassment bubbled in her gut, but she tried to cover. “Yes, I’m wearing granny panties, okay? Sue me. I haven’t had time to do laundry all week and?—”
“I wasn’t judging your underwear, Allie. Just admiring the tattoo.”
“Oh.”
“When did you get it?”
She bit her lip. “A year after college.”
His fingers grazed the small of her back, and for an instant, she thought he was touching the tip of one of the small, orange flames. Then she realized he was reaching for the zipper. He dragged it slowly up her spine, and Allie focused hard on keeping her stomach pulled in, wondering if her muffin top was showing over the top of her awful gray panties.
“It’s very nice. The tattoo, I mean.”
“Thank you.” His hand stayed on the zipper, even though she was pretty sure he had it all the way up. The heat of his hand made her shiver.
“What does it mean?”
“The tattoo?” She shrugged, trying to look casual as she smoothed down the front of the dress in the mirror in front of her. She didn’t look up, not wanting to see Jack’s eyes. “It doesn’t mean anything. Just a pretty, fiery design, that’s all.”
“I know you, Allie.” His voice was low in her ear, so close she could feel his breath ruffling her hair. She let her gaze stray up, and she locked eyes with him in the mirror. “You wouldn’t permanently ink something on your body if it didn’t have meaning.”
She stood frozen with her gaze locked on his, not daring to speak. Desperate to break the spell, she turned to face him with an expression she made as blank as possible. “Maybe I would get a meaningless tattoo. You knew the nineteen-year-old version of Allie, not the twenty-three-year-old one I was when I got the ink.”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “Or the thirty-six-year-old one, apparently.” He studied her for a long while, gaze locked with hers, and Allie found she couldn’t look away.
