Cream of the Crop (Hudson Valley, #2)(19)
Where was the hustle? Where was the bustle? Where were the sirens and the horns honking and the people, for Christ’s sake, that you could always count on for background noise at all hours of the day and night?
Silence pressed in on me from every direction, convincing me that Roxie had faded away and it was just me left alone to battle the shadows from a thousand nearly empty trees outside, silhouetted by an angry pumpkin moon gazing down on this land that time forgot.
When it’s quiet in the country, it’s all too easy to imagine a man in a plaid shirt striding out of the woods. Peering at your farmhouse from across the field, wondering if there was a buxom city girl curled up in a squeaky bed upstairs, too pretty to be killed off at the beginning of a horror movie, but kept alive for something truly terrible somewhere near the end of the third act.
Yeah, sleeping in the country isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
“How’d you sleep?” Roxie asked brightly as I staggered downstairs the next morning, following the smell of coffee that beckoned like an olfactory pied piper.
“I hate you,” I muttered, pushing my hair back from my bleary face. She rolled her eyes and handed me a cup of coffee, which I grasped like a talisman. “I love you.”
“You’re so dramatic.”
“I agree.” I sighed, sinking into a chair at her table. “How long did it take you to get used to sleeping with all that racket?”
“What racket? I didn’t hear a peep.”
“Yeah, that’s the other thing. It’s either as loud as Mardi Gras out there, or the sound of silence. What’s up with that?”
“I grew up with it so I barely notice it anymore. Of course, I don’t sleep much anyway.”
Roxie had had insomnia since she was a kid. “That getting any better?”
A content look crossed her face. “It’s funny, but ever since Leo and I, you know . . .”
“Started f*cking?”
“Started seeing each other is what I was going to say,” she said, her cheeks pinking. “I’ve been sleeping better. I mean, I’m never going to get eight hours, but I’m definitely getting more sleep than I ever used to.”
I sipped at my coffee, nodding. “It’s all that f*cking.”
“It’s more than the f*cking,” she insisted, hooking a chair over with her foot and sinking down next to me. “It’s the before and the after, you know?”
“Ah yes, the sweet nothings and the afterglow.” I picked a stray yarn on my sweater. “I’m usually wondering when the f*cking will be starting back up again.”
“Oh, the f*cking starts back up again,” she said, her blush deepening. “But there’s just something about sleeping next to him. It’s . . .” She paused, searching for a word.
“Amazing? Incredible? Out of this world?”
“Nice.”
“Nice?” I asked, shaking my head. “That’s all you got, is nice?”
“It is nice. It’s so nice,” she replied with the most perfect sense of peace and contentment I’d ever seen. “I don’t get to sleep with Leo every night; some weeks there’s only one or two nights we can have an actual overnight due to Polly’s schedule. So when we’re together, of course it’s full of slap and tickle, but then, when that’s through, and it’s just him and me and the quiet—that’s the nice.” Her eyes looked right through me; she was in her own world now. “He always drifts off first, of course, so I get this time with him to just . . . be with him. Watch him sleep, listen to him breathe, listen to him snore, for God’s sake, and just feel this big, warm man next to me, his body wrapped around me, those big callused hands on my hip or on my belly, and it’s honestly the best feeling ever. It’s just . . .” She trailed off, dreamy and faraway.
“Nice,” I breathed, understanding.
“Yeah,” she replied.
I’d had nice. Once. But then it was so very not nice.
We both mooned for a moment, lost in our own thoughts, and then I broke the spell by telling her I was off to meet her high school crush.
“Tell him I’m still waiting for direction on Logan’s birthday cake. I don’t know what I’m making, but if he doesn’t tell me soon it’ll involve Walmart fruit cocktail,” she called out to me as I headed down the stairs and off to the Jeep.
“I’ll do my best, but I’m sure with all the flirting going on, it’ll be hard to remember,” I teased, knowing how she felt about her high school crush.
“I loved that man since puberty; you better watch your ass, city girl,” floated out to me through the open kitchen window. As I turned back I could see the curtains fluttering, and I pantomimed my finger doing something inappropriate to the hole my other hand was making.
I couldn’t wait to meet this guy . . .
“How adorable are you?”
“Excuse me?”
“Excuse me, but you’re the second beautiful man I’ve seen in this town since arriving last night. What is in the water upstate?”
“You must be Natalie,” replied the beautiful man who was exactly as Roxie had described The Chad Bowman to be. Tall, handsome, confident but not cocky, the guy was worthy of many a high school crush.