“This is really nice,” he said.
I spun on him, this anomaly in a custom suit. Was he making fun of me? He was a god, expanding all over the simplicity of this simple room. Nothing had ever been so incongruous as his presence in my library.
The way he looked at me, those lips tightening just a little, his hands crossed in front of him—he meant it. Or he meant to be polite. I couldn’t tell past the glow of perfection. My every intuition misfired. His looks and stardom were short-circuiting my senses.
“Thank you.” I indicated the metal folding chair across my desk. “I have only one other grown-up-sized chair.”
He nodded and sat in it. I didn’t think the little library had ever contained a man like Dash Wallace. He was tall, of course, but he also cut the space he moved in like a scalpel, and when he crossed his legs, the angle of his legs against each other was the opposite of awkward.
“So…” Opening my apple bag gave my hands something to do. “If you’re not here to fund my palatial library, what brings you?”
“Well…” He cleared his throat. “First, I wasn’t trying to insult you on Friday.”
“What were you trying to do?”
“Make conversation.”
I dumped the apples into a big yellow bowl on my desk. “I’m sure I was oversensitive.” I shook out the last apple. It tumbled to the top of the pile, bounced, and went to the floor.
With a speed that defied the laws of physics, Dash shot his arm out and caught it. The rest of his body barely moved. His fingers tensed around the fruit just enough to hold it, as if he was about to throw it to second base. Those fingers. The way they curved. The flesh on bone. How would they feel against the curve of my hip? The inside of my thigh?
“You catch it, you keep it,” I said, looking away.
He put it on top of the pile. “Leave it for the kids.”
“Breakfast doesn’t always happen for the kids who get here at seven thirty.” I sat behind my desk, comforted by the furniture between us. “And they don’t all get a good lunch. The ones who fall between the free hot lunch program and lunchmeat on bread. There aren’t enough fruits and vegetables. And everyone loves an apple.”
He nodded, looking at my face as if reading a book. Was I babbling? Was he reading my attraction to him like a story he only needed to skim? He was sucking the breath out of me.
“You’re right,” he said, taking his apple back. “Everyone does.”
“I have a class coming in five minutes.” I didn’t mean for my voice to be husky and low. I cleared my throat. I’d done enough talking. I just met his gaze. Let him read my story. He was a beautiful man, and he knew it.
“I have a problem,” he said.
“Oh, looking for a place to make an endowment?”
“Let’s not start on my endowments.”
My throat did something that made a sound, and my jaw clamped shut to prevent me from responding. He was smiling. I was dying thinking about his endowments.
“Sorry,” he said, and I remembered that blown kiss on the TV.
He thought I was sexy, and he didn’t know that I knew. Why was I letting a little joke between adults make me feel small? I should have felt terrific. He may or may not have wanted me, but he certainly found me physically appealing. I could choose to feel good about that.
I cleared my throat and decided on a new start. “Don’t be. I brought it up. This problem. It’s something I can help you with, I assume?”
He fingered the apple as if it were a baseball, thumb looking for stitches, turning, feeling, turning. A body in motion tends to stay in motion, and Dash Wallace was a man in motion. “I had something before your students came to my table on Friday. When they left, it was gone.”
My body went from warm and aroused to cold and tense. I had to work to not get defensive right away. “Really?”
“A glove. It was in my things under the table. I need it back.”
My kids. He was accusing my kids of stealing his glove. That was a problem. No matter how poor they were, they weren’t supposed to steal things. I felt personally responsible. I wanted to apologize profusely, beg forgiveness, sell something to pay for it.
But couldn’t he buy another glove? For Chrissakes, he had only one glove in the world? He’d signed a seventeen-million dollar two-year contract. Who did that then came to East Hollywood looking for a missing piece of equipment? How much was the most expensive baseball glove? Five hundred dollars? A thousand?
As if reading my mind, he said, “It’s not just any glove. It’s important to me.”
“I understand.” I didn’t. Not at all. I sat in my creaky chair.
He leaned forward, elbows on the desk. My desk. I couldn’t move. If I leaned forward, I could have kissed him.