Page 41 of Tangled Like Us

“Merde,” she curses.

We both move into action.

Jane searches drawers for amapeen, and I set my radio on a counter. Holding the knot of my towel—because I’m not about to flash my client—I crouch and pick up the gallon with my other hand.

She glances quickly towards the spill, then away. “Do you…have, um…?” She shakes her head again and looks back at me.

I catch her gaze.

And we’re caging breath like the air is toxic. Laced with pheromones that try to lure her and me together. To never come up for oxygen again.

With flexed muscles, I point at the cupboard below the sink. “A mapeen is in there.”

She clears her throat. “Right.” Fixing cat-eye sunglasses on her wavy hair, she squats to the cupboard with curiosity twinkling her gaze. “What exactly is a mapeen?”

Now I’m shaking the fucking cobwebs out of my head. “A…” What’s a mapeen in English called? It’s not hitting me fast. I take another beat. “…dish…towel, dish rag.”

Her lips lift. “It’s Italian?” She seems genuinely excited to learn this.

I screw on the cap to the half-gallon. “The only kind I know.” I watch Jane open the cupboard.

Tell her more.

I stand up and add, “You can’t learn it in college. Can’t really write it, can’t read it. It’s just how we’re raised to talk.” I explain how I didn’t even knowmapeenwasn’t English until the eighth grade.

“Is it more like a dialect?” She pushes past dish soap to find a blue mapeen.

I place the half-gallon on the counter. “Like a broken dialect, mixed with incomplete Italian, and then passed on from Italian immigrants to their children and then their children. It’s a clusterfuck of a language, but it’s our clusterfuck.”

Jane returns to the spill. Smiling bright. “That’s beautiful.” Sincerity floods her voice and those words. Speaking with so much heart—there’s never any question how much she means what she says.

I rake my hand through my damp hair, and then I reach out to take the mapeen from Jane.

“I have this covered. It’s my mess to clean.” She rolls up the purple frilly sleeves of her 50s-style blouse. “We’re out of milk next door. But I already gathered all my cats for a treat and I felt like I played a horrible trick on them with empty bowls. So I thought I’d borrow a cup here.”

“You can take the rest. There’s still some left.”

Jane squats down in a mint-green tutu, leopard-print leggings underneath, and she mops up the spill. “That’s really sweet of you, but I meant to only take a little and now I’ve left SFO with none—” Her cat-eye sunglasses suddenly fall off her head. Splashing in milk.

I crouch down and pick up her sunglasses.

Our eyes meet for a hot beat before I stand and move to the sink. Washing them off for her under the faucet.

She stares at me, entranced. Like my silent authority is a slow-burning fuck.

My blood heats, muscles on fucking fire.

Cut the tension, Thatcher.

Don’t cut a thing.

My brain is splitting in two directions, and it’s killing me. I hate indecision.

“Take it.” I nod to the half-gallon. “I can get more later.” It’s either going to her six cats or a cereal bowl, and her cats are more important than one of the guys eating Frosted Flakes.

She smiles softly up at me. “Merci.” While I dry her sunglasses on the bath towel I’m wearing, she rises to her feet.

I hold the glasses out to Jane.