Two organizations had the upstairs conference rooms booked for meetings today, which meant I needed to make sure the tables were configured correctly and the whiteboards were free of teenage graffiti.
The fish girl was coming to rebalance the water in the children’s section fish tank. I fired off a quick text to Jamal, the youth services librarian, to ask him if he’d run the UV wand over the floor cushions since the elementary school had reported an outbreak of pink eye yesterday.
Coffee came next.
I stowed my bag under the desk and headed for the coffee counter. We’d sprung for one of those fancy instant espresso machines and a dishwasher to deal with the mugs. Not only did patrons enjoy the step up from regular drip coffee, it was just another experience that encouraged them to stay a little longer. To take a breath and enjoy themselves with a book or socialize with staff and patrons.
Machine levels checked and coffee condiments restocked, I unloaded the previous day’s mugs from the dishwasher and organized them on their hooks.
I wondered if Lucian felt like this when he strode into his offices every morning. Was it pride like I felt?
Not that I was thinking about him again, because I definitely wasn’t.
Except now I definitely was. Had he even thought about me after I’d left his office yesterday?
“Oh my God. Stop!” I said to myself out loud.
“Stop what?”
“Mother of dragons! Where did you come from?” I demanded, immediately dropping the hands I’d raised in a protective stance.
Naomi, pretty in a long-sleeve ribbed dress and tights, stood clutching a gallon-sized to-go coffee.
“That depends on how far back you want to go. I woke up to my naked husband—”
I held up a hand. “New rule in our friendship. No bragging about your stellar sex life when your friend is in the middle of a dry spell.”
“That’s fair,” Naomi agreed. Despite the fact that she already had a cup of coffee in hand, she headed straight for the espresso maker. A swing of chestnut hair fell over her face in a perfect wave.
“Your hair looks good,” I noted.
“Thanks. Waylay did it. Jeremiah got her an astronomically expensive curling iron for Christmas, and she’s already mastered it. So what are we stopping?”
“Hmm?” I feigned innocence.
“You were standing there lost in some sort of reverie and then ordered yourself to stop.”
I hadn’t mentioned yesterday’s “unfortunate incident” with Lucian to Naomi and Lina. Mainly because I didn’t want to deal with their demands for a play-by-play or their misguided hopes that this was the beginning of the end of our feud. I also didn’t want to admit to anyone that Lucian Rollins had made my lady parts feel things they had no business feeling where he was concerned.
“Oh, I’m just all up in my head about…stuff when I really need to be concentrating on…other stuff.” Smooth. Real smooth.
“Yeah. You know I know you’re lying, right? I have a twelve-year-old at home.”
“Pfft. I’m not lying,” I lied.
She pinned me with an earnest look. “You also know I’m here for you whenever you’re ready to talk about whatever it is you’re lying about, right?”
“Yeah. I know.” I said it mostly to my sneakers. I wasn’t required to tell my friends every single thing. I didn’t expect that of them. I did expect them to tell me the big, important things though. Whatever the hell Lucian and I had done yesterday didn’t qualify as big or important.
We’d barely touched. And whatever grazes or brushes or intense looks of fiery longing had passed between us before Petula came barreling in all meant nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.
Great. Now I was thinking about it again, and Naomi was looking at me expectantly as if she was waiting for an answer.
“Hey, do you know if Jamal disinfected the kids’ section last night?” I asked.
“A subject change. Not at all suspicious,” she teased. “You’re still coming to dinner tonight, right? Nash and Lina will be there.”
My social life consisted of me being the fifth wheel tagging along with two couples with smoldering hot sex lives.
Ugh. I really needed to make some changes in my life. I wanted to be the one making my friends uncomfortable with over-the-top PDA. I wanted to be making plans for the future with my hot life partner with a large penis.
A salacious memory of Lucian’s trouser-covered erection immediately appeared in my mind. No! Bad, brain! Bad. Lucian was not life partner material.