Page 34 of I Choose You (Wilder #2)

I threw on a pair of joggers and a T-shirt and found her in the living room. She was lounging on my couch, a blanket draped over her legs. She looked like she belonged there.

“Okay.” I got her attention. “I can make us pasta, or pasta, or um, pasta. What’ll it be?”

Her gaze raked down my body, and she chuckled. “Well, I was feeling pasta, so I guess option two.”

“Solid choice. I’ll get it started.”

“I can help,” she said, moving the blankets off her lap.

“No. I offered to make us dinner on this non-date, Friday night in. You just relax.”

I rummaged through my cabinets for the ingredients.

I did have pasta, but only a bit left of a few different varieties.

I threw the elbows, spaghetti, and penne together in a saucepan and set it to boil.

Apparently, I didn’t have any jars of pasta sauce, but I had milk and butter.

I could make a sauce with that, right? I got to work, keeping an eye on the pasta while I got to work on the sauce.

“Dinner’s ready,” I called to Claire fifteen minutes later.

We each made a plate, and I grabbed us both a water as we settled in at the small dining table I had.

Claire’s lips were pursed together, trying not to laugh at my mismatched noodles. The spaghetti looked a little odd and clumpy, but whatever. We both dug in at the same time. I nearly spit it back out, only barely managing to get it down.

“What the hell is wrong with this?”

“It’s… good,” Claire lied. She committed to it even further, going for another bite. I could see the look of terror on her face as she picked around the spaghetti, going for the elbows and penne instead.

“Don’t you dare put that in your mouth,” I hissed.

What the hell did I do wrong? It was pasta. How could I screw up boiling noodles?

Claire went in for another bite despite my protests. She had to cover her mouth while she ate, probably trying to make sure it didn’t come back out.

“It’s not terrible. It just needs…” She trailed off.

“Flavor?” I asked. The butter sauce was watery and bland. The spaghetti was clumpy, the elbows were chewy, and the penne was crunchy. It was a fucking disaster.

She laughed, lightly at first, before it turned hysterical. Before I knew it, she was hyperventilating in a silent laughing fit.

“This is so bad,” she huffed between her sharp breaths.

I wanted to be mad and disappointed, but watching Claire swipe her tears of laughter away was making that impossible. I chuckled, shaking my head. “You are not eating any more of this. I think it went to your head,” I told her, cleaning up both of our plates and dumping them in the trash.

Claire collected herself, laughed again for a minute, and recollected herself.

“Are you still hungry? You can order us something with delivery. Use my card.” I pulled my credit card out of my wallet.

“I’m good. Maybe something for dessert though.”

“I was hoping you were going to be dessert.” I turned to her, taking in her lightly dotted freckles across her soft pale skin, her perfect long legs, and my oversized sweatshirt covering up her stunning figure.

“Reid,” she warned. I could see her breathing quicken. She tried to hide a grin, and the playful glint in her eyes told me she didn’t hate me flirting with her.

“What? A guy can hope,” I winked.

I threw out the rest of the dinner and started doing the dishes. Claire worked beside me, drying the dishes and rummaging through my cabinets to figure out where they went.

“So, your boss is a dick.”

She groaned. “I want to defend him, but it’s hard.”

“Because he’s a dick.”

“Yeah, I think he might be,” she sighed.

We made our way back to the living room and settled on the couch.

Claire leaned against the arm, her feet folded under her as she faced me.

“He wasn’t this bad before. He must have a lot on his plate right now, and this project seems super important.

I mean, it is super important,” she hurried to say.

“But he’s acting like it has the ability to destroy him if it doesn’t go perfectly. ”

“That must have been why he assigned it to you.”

“Well, that’s the thing. This is my first solo project as the project manager. It was supposed to go to Derrick originally, but he switched us out because he said this would be a good project to get my feet wet.”

“It’s a huge restoration job. He had to know that there would be a crazy amount of details and decisions that would need to be made. Hell, we’re going to need to pick out light switch covers at some point. You were writing those updates daily for weeks.”

“I still am,” she added.

“And has he at least started reading them?”

“No.”

“But he shows up here, criticizes every single thing, and threatens your job if I fuck up on my job. He’s fucking nuts.”

“I don’t know. That’s usually how it goes, right?” She shrugged.

“No,” I growled. “What makes you think that?”

Claire let out a strong breath, her shoulders sagging. I reached out to her and pulled her feet to me, tugging her closer until she was basically lying down.

“Talk to me.”

She adjusted the pillow behind her head, taking a moment. She was so beautiful I had to tear my eyes away from her before I got myself into a situation.

“It’s weird. Before I came down here, I knew that my relationships weren’t normal—well, that’s probably not the right word—not healthy. But being in Calla Bay, being around you, it’s put it into perspective.

“For me, growing up, I was often an afterthought. My parents would make these important plans that I would need to attend, but they never thought to tell me. So, the day would arrive, and I wouldn’t have a dress prepared, or I was knee-deep in homework, and my mom would freak out that I would ruin everything if I didn’t fix it immediately.

Find a dress, wash and do my hair, full face of makeup, in like ten minutes before we had to leave. It happened all the time like that.

“And Will was no different. If we went to a dinner party that he deemed better than ours, I would hear about it for days. Why didn’t I throw parties like Heather, or when would I get my act together and start acting like a wife, even though he hadn’t asked me to marry him.

“It was always my fault if something went wrong, no matter where I was or who I was with. For a really long time, I believed it. College helped me see some of the toxic behaviors, but that was before Will and I even got together, so clearly, it didn’t help that much.”

“You were surrounded by losers and douche fuckers, but that isn’t your fault. You know that, right?” I asked her. My hands had been stroking her legs without me realizing it. I gripped her foot and used my thumbs to apply pressure to the balls of her soles.

Her moan was so lewd I instantly got hard.

“Tell me you know that you are perfect and everyone around you are dickweasels.”

She laughed through her moaning. “I’m far from perfect.”

“No. You are perfect.”

The doorbell rang. Slowly, Claire pulled her foot from my grip. “That must be the food delivery. I’ll get it,” she said, her face flushed.

She thought I was kidding, but I wasn’t. To me, she was perfect. She was the only one who couldn’t see it.