He was close enough to warm the air between them. Rachel kept her eyes fixed somewhere between his neck and shoulder. “You do?”
“Yeah.” He didn’t speak until she met his eyes again. “Looking at the world through that lens makes you notice things. Shapes. Colors. Change a setting, and you see something else. Something you might have missed if you weren’t paying attention.” He hesitated, like he was still debating his next words. “I don’t think I ever did that before. Paid attention. Appreciated things.” He paused, studying her face. “I wanted to say thank you.”
A surge of tenderness tightened her throat. She couldn’t speak. Instead she nodded and attempted a small smile that trembled and dissolved as she climbed into the car. Nathan closed her door and stepped back with folded arms, as if he was holding himself in place.
“Try not to fuck the mayor’s wife.”
Nathan nearly choked on a piece of fish. Bobbi didn’t look up at his sputtering and continued stirring a pot of mustard greens with her usual, mildly irritated resting face. He’d suspected that inviting Rachel over wasn’t a good idea. Now he knew it was aggressively stupid. Bobbi could read him like a book, and this one was filthy.
“Excuse me?” He did his best to sound offended.
“You heard me.” She took a bite of greens and grimaced. “Too salty.”
He tapped the table for attention. “Bobbi, come on.”
She sighed and added lemon juice. “It’s obvious. The fact that she came all the way out here to stir mac and cheese says a lot. And your face does this thing when you talk to her. All dreamy and tense at the same time. It’s totally you when you’re into someone.”
Excellent. He was doing a piss-poor job of hiding his feelings and that was probably why Rachel left so fast. Though to be fair, she wasn’t doing a great job at hiding anything either. Talking taste buds and sensitive tongues, swaying into him like a flower seeking light. “There’s nothing going on,” Nathan lied. Fumbling. Flailing.
“Okay, fine,” Bobbi said. “Pretend if you want, but like I said, I know you. Every other word out of your mouth is Rachel. Rachel said. Rachel thinks. Rachel, Rachel, Rachel. The only other time I’ve seen you like this was when you were sixteen and your dad said you couldn’t have that old Mustang. It made you obsessed.”
“I don’t know how you get from me wanting a car to me fucking Rachel Abbott.”
“Not fucking her, remember? You’ve never coped well with being told you can’t have something. And I’m sure you understand that you cannot have someone else’s wife.”
Nathan protested, listing reasons why it made complete sense for Rachel to be on his mind: They were working together. They were friends. Real friends, and he didn’t make those anymore. Rachel understood him. Talking to her was like finally finding someone who spoke the same language.
“Don’t you feel that way too? When you meet someone who loves food as much as you do. Something just falls into place.”
Bobbi’s eyes grew wider while he talked. She covered her mouth with both hands and peered at him over her fingers. “Holy shit, Nettles. This is so much worse than I thought. Are you in love with her?”
“What? No! No. I barely know her.” He was speaking too fast and too loud, but he needed his gut to listen to his brain for once. Rachel had secrets. Things she kept hidden from him on purpose. Love didn’t work that way. You didn’t fall for pieces of someone and gamble on the rest. Love should be sure. Some enlightened knowing. This was a roller coaster he’d never asked to be on in the first place.
Bobbi, convinced she’d solved the mystery of his secret girlfriend, was insufferable the rest of the night. She kept asking questions about his art for the gala, and with every mention of the event, Nathan’s mood got progressively darker. He’d taken hundreds of photographs and still painted nothing. There wasn’t much time left. Which also meant there wasn’t much time left with Rachel. That particular thought stole his appetite completely. He had to leave.
The next day, he woke up and decided to stay away from Rachel for a while. No more camera lessons. No more flirting. He pulled out his sketchbooks and some of the photos he’d taken and opened his laptop to play videos on rendering realistic motion in a scene. With everything spread over his table, he looked productive even if he didn’t feel that way. He was trying to figure out how to use a French press he didn’t know he owned, when he got a text.