The Inmate (60)

“All right!” Tim does a fist pump. “That’s great.”

“I’m glad one of us is good at teaching math to ten-year-olds.”

“Don’t feel bad. You’re cute, at least.”

I laugh and smack Tim in the shoulder. “You know what you’ve done, don’t you? You’re going to have to do this from now on every time Josh has an exam. You are now the designated teacher.”

He smiles at me. “I don’t mind that.”

As I head to the living room, I smell something tantalizing coming from the kitchen. It’s not as good as Margie’s kitchen aromas, but it smells pretty damn good. I inhale deeply as I settle down onto his sofa. “What are you cooking for me?”

Tim sits beside me on the sofa. “Guess.”

I take another sniff. “I smell tomato sauce.”

“Ding ding ding.”

I remember the one other night I came over, Tim cooked spaghetti and meatballs. “Spaghetti and meatballs?”

He makes a face at me. “Should I be offended that the fact that you smell tomato sauce makes you assume I must have made spaghetti and meatballs? I am capable of making other things, you know.”

“Well, what is it then?”

“It’s spaghetti and meatballs,” he says, a touch defensively. “But it could’ve been something else. It could’ve been lasagna. Chicken parmigiana. Just saying…”

I lean in to kiss him. “I love spaghetti and meatballs.”

He kisses me back, pulling my body close to his. Is this the way he kissed Kelli Underwood? She certainly seemed to think he was a good kisser.

No, stop it. Why am I thinking about that?

“I love you, Brooke,” he murmurs in my ear.

Since the first night he said it to me, we have opened up the floodgates. He loves telling me he loves me. And I can’t say I don’t love being loved. “I love you too.”

He pulls away and glances back at the kitchen. “Do you smell something burning?”

“No…”

He frowns. “I better go check on the food. I’ll be right back.”

As Tim dashes into the kitchen to tend to the spaghetti and meatballs, I lean back against the sofa cushion. I notice something bunched up against my thigh, causing an uncomfortable pressure, and I reach back to see what it is. Between the sofa cushions, my fingers locate a balled-up cloth.

I tug on the cloth until it comes free. That’s when I realize it wasn’t a cloth at all. It’s a green silk scarf, which had blended into the fabric of his green sofa.

Whose silk scarf is this? It sure as hell doesn’t belong to Tim. I bring the fabric close to my nose, inhaling the scent of a woman’s perfume. The smell is vaguely familiar.

“The sauce is fine,” Tim declares as he returns to the living room. “I’d say the food should be ready in about ten minutes. I hope you’re hungry, because I made way, way too much.”

I can’t even manage to force a smile. My fingers are wrapped around the silk scarf in my hand. “Tim, whose scarf is this?”

He barely glances at it. “I don’t know. Yours?”

“It’s not mine.”

He looks more carefully at the green fabric in my hand, his eyes narrowing. “It doesn’t look familiar to me. Maybe it’s my mother’s?”

Of course, that makes sense. This is, after all, Tim’s parents’ house. It shouldn’t be suspicious to find a piece of women’s clothing stuck in the furniture. Maybe the perfume I was smelling seemed familiar because it was the same one that Mrs. Reese used to wear all those years ago.

Yes, that must be what it is. After all, it’s not like Tim is bringing other women here. He wouldn’t cheat on me.

Tim tugs the scarf out of my hand and tosses it onto the coffee table. Then he slides onto the couch next to me, so close that his thigh is pressed against mine. “Listen,” he says, “there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah.” He reaches out and squeezes my hand. “I just… I’m crazy about you, Brooke. I always have been. And I know we haven’t been together that long, but I hate being away from you for even one night. So I was thinking… maybe…”

Is he asking me if we should move in together? If that’s the question, I don’t know what to say. I’m crazy about him too. But I have Josh to think about. I can’t uproot his life by having another person move in with us, just to have it all fall apart. I can’t give my son a father and then take it away from him.

And there’s another reason why I’m not sure I’m ready to take things to the next level with Tim. I can’t shake the feeling that he’s hiding something from me. Why has he been so evasive every time I have tried to ask him about Kelli? He already told me he went out with her. Why won’t he admit it?

And who does this scarf really belong to?

Tim must notice the look on my face, because he releases my hand and backs away on the sofa. “You know what? Let’s talk about this later.”

My shoulders relax. “Good idea.”

“Hey.” He squeezes my knee. “Why don’t you grab a bottle from the wine cellar? I think we could use a drink.”

It’s sort of adorable that Tim calls their basement a wine cellar—but he’s already run off to the kitchen to take care of whatever is burning, so I don’t have a chance to tease him about it. It’s not a wine cellar—at all. It’s a basement with like a dozen bottles of wine and a wood rack that his dad built. But I suppose if he wants to call it a wine cellar, I won’t begrudge him that.