Page 30 of Meeting Mr. Adorkable
Arlo blinked, Lucian’s words blindsiding him for a moment. “Oh, yeah. The night sky around here’s—”
Lucian laughed, a low chuckle. “I’m not talking about the stars in the sky.”
“You’re…?” And then he understood. Lucian had seen stars, but there’d been nothing cosmic about them. Maybe he could make Lucian see some more, but as he leaned in for another kiss, as Lucian let his head fall back, the first bar of the Stars and Stripes ripped through the air, making them both jump as though they’d plunged soaking fingers into a plug socket.
“Mum!” Lucian barked into his cell, rolling his eyes at Arlo. “Everything’s good… Yes, I am eating properly…”
Arlo mimed eating and pointed downstairs, leaving Lucian to his call. Disappointment settled in the pit of his stomach.
The ill timed call had ripped them out of the moment. But, as he put together a selection of salads and cheeses, pretty much a repeat of what they’d eaten before, maybe, perhaps, probably, the intervention hadn’t been such a bad thing, slicing through the moment’s madness. Because he hadn’t come back to the Creek to get involved. He pressed his lips together and chopped down hard on a pepper. Yet the tug of something in his stomach and the tightening in his chest felt like so much mocking laughter.
He took everything out to the porch table, where he’d set down the lemonade in what felt like hours before. The sky was now fully dark. The inky, velvety blackness was ablaze with stars, and a few light clouds scudded across the moon. Flicking a switch, a soft exterior light flooded the porch at the same time strings of tiny, pinpoint, colored lights pulsed softly in the trees and bushes. It was beautiful, even romantic — or it would be, if he let himself think such a thing.
A patter of claws claimed his attention, and he looked down into Peanut’s reproachful gaze.
“Hey, boy. Am I late with your dinner?”
Arlo crouched on his haunches and fussed over his dog, who nuzzled into his hand and then tried to climb into his lap, seeking the cuddles he’d been starved of as a puppy. Chuckling, he stood up before scooping Peanut into his arms and nuzzling into his neck.
“Who’s daddy’s baby boy, eh?” Arlo turned for the house, coming to a halt as Lucian stood on the threshold of the kitchen, a soft smile dancing on his lips. “I forgot this one,” he said, a warm tingle of embarrassment in his cheeks at being caught talking to his mutt of a dog in such sappy terms.
“Dogs and horses first, then the rest of the menagerie, with the two-legged animals limping along as they make up the rear. Those were the rules I grew up with, and with which I fully concur. Go on, feed Peanut.”
“So, your mom’s checking up on you?” Arlo said, when they sat down to eat.
Lucian groaned. “She fusses terribly. I keep telling her I’m a big boy now, but she won’t believe me. I’m sorry I was so long, but she wanted me to tell her where I was and what I was doing, which I had no intention of doing.” Lucian looked down and speared a tomato, but Arlo didn’t miss the faint flush that colored his cheeks.
”She has the most terrible timing, though. Normally, she phones just as I’ve fallen asleep, or when I’m in the shower, or when I’m, erm… Well, you know, just terrible timing,” Lucian muttered. “She also asked me when I’m going to see sense, up sticks, and hightail it to L.A. or somewhere else where she has innumerable contacts.” Lucian put his knife and fork down, his brow creasing into a heavy frown. “Mum was the loudest voice in persuading me to come out to the States, but she’s determined to micromanage me while I’m here.”
“Perhaps she’s trying to do the right thing, or the right thing as she sees it. Maybe she worries?”
“She does. Too much. I’m her baby, as she keeps telling me. Like Peanut’s yours.”
Arlo spluttered and grabbed a glass of water. When the tears had cleared from his vision, Lucian was grinning at him from across the table.
“Peanut’s a dog. He is absolutely not my baby.”
“Hmm, not from what I heard.”
They carried on with dinner, agreeing they’d go back to the studio afterwards so Lucian could look at some of his work. It surprised Arlo that he wanted to show Lucian when, for so long, he’d hidden his art away from the eyes of others.
The evening was easy, companionable, the silences neither strained nor awkward as it so easily could have been after the kiss that definitely, absolutely, shouldn’t have happened. It was good to share dinner with somebody, to hear a voice in his home that wasn’t his. He cast a gaze at Lucian, and smiled as the younger man petted a besotted Peanut, who’d come over to beg for scraps.
Besotted. The word hit him hard in the chest, a sucker punch that knocked the air from his lungs. A word that pulsed with danger and that led only to broken promises and heartbreak.
No involvement, no ties, no emotional ropes to bind him to another before they were inevitably severed, leaving him unbalanced and floundering. A kiss that was all shades of dangerous, no matter how sweet it had been. It would be so, so easy to become besotted with a guy who was ludicrously adorable and who made him throw back his head and laugh out loud, loosening the tension that always seemed to hum just beneath his skin. So, so easy for his heart, once more, to break into a million pieces.
He couldn’t let it happen, not again.
Arlo swallowed down the forkful of food that threatened to stick in his gullet. Lucian was passing through, here for a handful of months at most, and then he’d be gone for good as he headed for some place else, or back to the home he missed so much and a life that was a million miles from Collier’s Creek, leaving him where he’d vowed he’d never be again, shivering in the cold and so damn alone.
He pushed his plate away, all his hunger gone.
“Are you okay?”
Across the table, Lucian tilted his head to the side, concern etched across his face. Arlo dragged up a smile from somewhere and plastered it on his lips.
“I’m fine,” he lied, but Lucian’s stiff smile and the crease in his forehead were all he needed to know that Lucian wasn’t convinced. A light wind whistled through the yard, rustling through the trees and the bushes. Arlo shivered. Somebody was walking over his grave, as his long departed mom had always said.
