Page 18 of ClickBack

“You sent him home?”

“He’s got a life.”

“He should enjoy it. You seem like work.”

“He’d give you a reference.”

We reach my car. I unlock it but don’t open the door. Jarrett stands beside me, close enough that I can see the place his chain disappears beneath his shirt. Neither of us looks toward the road.

“My place is in the city,” he says.

“I gathered you had one.”

“Come over. We could put on a movie.”

“Have you picked one?”

“No.”

He looks entirely untroubled by that omission. I laugh, which makes it easier to say what I want next.

“I’d like you to kiss me before I follow you anywhere else.”

He comes closer. His hand settles above my shoulder on the car, giving me space to turn away that I have no intention of using. I lift my face. The first kiss is careful enough that I can feel him waiting to learn what I want. I take hold of his shirt and show him.

He kisses me again, harder. The small scrape of his goatee catches beneath my lower lip. His free hand finds my hip, and I move into him before I remember we are in a parking lot behind a restaurant where the owner knows his name.

He has been polite all evening. I’ve been polite most of my life. Neither of us is interested in continuing.

When he draws back, I keep my fist closed in his shirt.

“Address,” I say.

He smiles against my cheek. “Excellent word.”

I laugh, and he kisses the laugh out of my mouth before letting me go. This time I open the car door. He sends the address while I put my bag down, then waits for me to find it on the screen.

“I’m taking my car.”

“All right.”

I leave the lot ahead of him. At the second light, I check my mirror and find his headlights behind me. I turn up the radio and head into the city.

Chapter 4

Jarrett

Most people who come up here go straight to the windows. The view does what I pay it to do, Center City spread out under the glass, the river holding pieces of light, the Ben Franklin strung up blue against the dark. Giselle gives it about as long as she’d give a stranger’s vacation pictures. Then she walks my living room like she’s deciding whether to believe it.

She passes the sectional and the art a designer picked after I gave her almost nothing to go on, and stops at the shelf by the windows. There’s a photograph of my mother there. Mom is laughing with her head turned half away from the camera, because Von said something right as I took it and she didn’t have time to get herself together.

“This feels like yours,” Giselle says.

“It is.”

“Thought so.”

I paid somebody to make this place look like I live here. That picture was the first thing I added myself, and she found it before she found the framed jersey.