Page 40 of Silver Linings
I choke around a laugh. “Sometimes, thoughts are meant to stay inside your head, you know.”
She beams up at me andChrist, she’s beautiful, but also whip smart and mischievous and passionate. I could see the determination in her eyes as she looked around her store, explaining what needed to be fixed to bring her vision to life. There was a drive firing her speech, even as trepidation nipped at her heels.
“And deprive you of the wonders of my mind palace? That would be cruel.” That does pull a laugh out of me.
She steps further into the store, staring around in wonderment with me following closely behind, hands in thepockets of my jeans so I don’t do something stupid like touch her. We’re closer to The Langham now and anyone could walk in and see us together. We’re not doing anything wrong, but it wouldn’t look good.
“The paint is towards the back right corner.” I press a hand to her lower back, urging her forward, the desire to keep my hand on her courses through me before I force myself to drop it.
We walk through long narrow aisles, turning right and left then right again, passing rows of door knobs and sink faucets to gummy bears and a hundred different types of lightbulbs stacked from floor to ceiling.
Silver is on her second inappropriate joke—the first was something to do with screws, and the second about “laying pipe”. She’s doing it to rile me up, I can tell, because each time, she looks over at me in anticipation to see if I caught the innuendo. It’s equal parts charming and frustrating.
She twists around to see my reaction to her most recent joke, not realizing there are bags of concrete powder stacked in the aisle in front of her. I open my mouth to tell her to be careful, but it’s too late. Her shins collide with the stacked bags; she twists her body, and in an effort to catch herself, she reaches out to grab onto a shelf, only to realize there isn’t one. Instead, Silver smacks her hand into a bundle of rakes that crash to the ground with a rattling bang.
She’s in the process of falling over when I shoot out my hand to latch onto her elbow, tugging her towards me to right the trajectory of her fall. But I overcompensate and tug her harder than necessary, and she crashes into me. I wrap my hands around her waist to steady her as her own come to rest on my chest. Our eyes catch, and we’re both breathing hard. Something tells me by the way her cheeks flush, it isn’t from the near fall.
“Who even needs a rake in New York?” Her breath coasts over my mouth from the proximity, and my heart starts to beatfaster. We’re still holding each other, and it feels so nice that I ignore the voice in my head telling me to let go, to stop touching her immediately.
“Maybe Raphael and the Turtles use them to clean up the garbage in the subway tunnels,” I quip.
We’re smiling at each other, only pulling away when Marjorie rounds the corner into the aisle we’re standing in.
She settles her wrinkled hands onto her hips. “What the ever loving hell are you doing back here?”
“We’ll clean it up, don’t worry.”
“I wasn’t talking about the mess. I was referring to the way you guys jumped apart like horny teenagers when I got here.” She smirks, and I look over at Silver, who is grinning like a fiend.
“Oh, I like you.”
“We need paint.” I turn on my heels and head in the direction of the paint section, hoping Silver follows.
“Would you rather be a walrus or an armadillo?”
After what felt like five hours of paint swatch deliberation, Silver settled on a pistachio green for the walls and a simple white for the bookshelves and table fixtures. We’ve been painting for the last five minutes after spending some time clearing the counter, taping the edges, and laying down drop cloths. Wewereworking in companionable silence until now.
“Excuse me?”
“Walrus or armadillo, Hudson?” There’s a look of exasperation lining her features, like she’s telling me to keep up, like it wasn’t the most random question she could have come up with out of absolute thin air.
“Walrus, I suppose.”
“Interesting. Defend your position, please?”
What is happening right now?
“We’re playing twenty questions.”
Apparently I said that last part out loud. “I guess because they live in colder climates and aren’t riddled with diseases.”
“Fair play.” She nods her head, accepting my answer. This is the most bizarre conversation I’ve ever had. I watch her as she dips the bristled brush into the quart-sized paint bucket in her opposite hand. A fierce look of concentration settles over her features as she skirts the edges of the wall in a thin layer. She meets the junction of a corner and bites her plump bottom lip as she fills in the space without it dripping.
God, why am I staring at her painting a wall like it’s the most fascinating thing in the world?
Because she looks hot doing it.
My subconscious mind is an asshole and keeps reminding me of Silver in the most mundane moments, but being in her presence is worse. There’s no escaping my wild thoughts when she’s around, especially because she changed into a pair of pink overall shorts and a strapless banded top that shows just the tiniest sliver of skin on her waist. With floral chucks and her hair half pulled back with a clip, she’s just about the cutest person I’ve ever seen.
