Naked. Megan Hart

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      “Thanks, Patrick,” Alex said, and set about making the coffee.

      He figured out his way around Patrick’s kitchen, faltering only once, when he opened the wrong cupboard to pull out the coffee pods, and found the spice jars, instead. I turned in my chair to watch him. He was no casual houseguest. He knew how to make himself at home.

      Patrick and I could hold entire conversations without words, but this morning he was deliberately not giving me the right signals. Or he was misreading mine. He could be selective that way. Before I could get him to tell me what the hell was going on, Alex turned from the coffeemaker.

      “Anyone hungry for pancakes?”

      “I couldn’t,” I exclaimed.

      Just as Patrick said, “Alex, you’re a darling.”

      Patrick looked at Alex. Alex looked at me. I looked at Patrick.

      “Actually,” I said, “I should get going. I’ve got some work to do—”

      “On Sunday?” Patrick asked incredulously. “What’s the point of working for yourself if you can’t take the weekend off?”

      I stood and stretched. “The point of working for myself is that I can work whenever I want.”

      “Yeah, and work whenever you have to.” Alex leaned against the counter, one long leg crossed over the other at the ankles.

      I nodded. He understood. Patrick, who worked eighty-hour weeks but also took a month’s vacation every year, understood the importance of hard work, but would probably never comprehend why I’d quit a stable salary to go out on my own.

      I hugged my former boyfriend and kissed his cheek. Patrick softened, finally, his embrace unwilling but inevitable. He held my face still and looked into my eyes.

      “Don’t work too much, Livvy. It’s the holidays.”

      I put my hands over his on my cheeks and carefully peeled away his fingers to release his grip. “You want me to take back all the presents I bought you?”

      He laughed the first real Patrick laugh I’d heard in a few days, and squeezed me close. He whispered in my ear, “Remember what I said.”

      Most of the time when Patrick hugged me I could take it for what it was—a physical expression of the affection and love between two friends. Platonic friends. And then there were the times when I breathed in the scent of him, the cologne I bought for him so many years ago and which he’d never switched from, even though he could afford something trendier and more expensive. When I felt the press of his body along mine and I had to close my eyes and remind myself to let him go, and when I found it almost impossible to do so.

      Still locked in Patrick’s arms, I forced myself to open my eyes. Alex’s gaze found mine over Patrick’s shoulder. With that scrutiny as motivation, I patted Patrick’s back quickly and stepped away, hoping my nipples weren’t hard through my T-shirt or that my cheeks weren’t as flushed as they felt.

      Patrick caught my wrist before I could get entirely away. “Stay for a while. It’s Sunday.”

      “Patrick…”

      He didn’t let go. “Alex, tell Liv she should stay.”

      “Olivia. You should stay.” Alex, still leaning, smiled.

      I smiled, too, even as I turned and gave Patrick a good, hard poke. “I have a life, Patrick.”

      He scoffed. “What are you going to do today? Hang around that cold apartment and fiddle with your pictures? She’s a photographer,” he added for Alex’s benefit, and jabbed at my ribs.

      “Cool. What do you take pictures of?”

      “Everything!” I said over my shoulder as I tried to dance out of the way of Patrick’s poking fingers.

      I looked at him, hard. Last night he’d warned me off Alex as though my mortal soul depended on it, and now he was begging me to hang around for the day. Of course, he often persuaded me to stay longer than I’d intended, and often I let him. But I did have work to do in my studio, which wouldn’t paint or clean itself, and which had been sadly neglected since I’d bought it six months before.

      “Patrick…”

      Knowing he was manipulating me didn’t make it any easier to resist him. When he flashed me the familiar pout, the one that had always swayed me, I sighed. I glanced at Alex, who was watching us both with an expression I could only describe as intrigued.

      “Alex is making pancakes,” Patrick said.

      I looked at Patrick. Patrick looked at Alex. And Alex…Alex looked at me.

      “I am,” he said. “And I’m really good at it.”

      I knew enough to admit defeat.

      “Fine, but I’m taking the first shower, and I don’t care if you run out of hot water,” I told Patrick, who smirked how he always did when he got his way.

      Upstairs I bumped into Teddy coming out of his bedroom.

      “You’re staying?”

      Another man might have hated the fact I was still so much a part of Patrick’s life, but not Teddy. But then I’d never seen him hate anything. Teddy fully believed in that crap about lemons and life.

      “Yeah. Just for a little while. I do have to get home tonight.”

      He laughed. “You should move back up here, Liv. It wouldn’t be such a long drive then.”

      I rolled my eyes. “You’re as bad as he is. Annville’s only half an hour away, for crying out loud.”

      Teddy had spent his entire life in Central Pennsylvania, a place where crossing the Susquehanna River could be considered entering a whole new world. He grinned. “But it’s Annville.”

      “Pfft.” I waved a hand. “I’m taking a shower. I hear there are pancakes in the making.”

      Teddy rubbed his stomach. “Yum. Our guest, I assume, not our beloved Patrick.”

      Patrick never cooked. “Yeah. Hey, Teddy…” I paused and leaned against the doorjamb to my room. “What’s the story with him, anyway?”

      “Alex?”

      “Yeah.”

      Teddy shrugged and his smile became a tiny bit strained. “He’s a friend of Patrick’s. He needed a place to crash. He’s only going to be here for a few more days. Nice guy.”

      That answer floated between us, a bit of fluff on a current of not-going-to-bring-up-certain-topics. The topic in question being why Patrick felt he had any right or interest in my love life, or lack thereof. I shrugged, finally, because sometimes you simply have to put aside things that have no answer.

      “Taking a shower,” I said, and Teddy left me so I could.

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