I walked over to the window and watched him again, his body taut and his brow furrowed. The sun was going down and he didn’t stop working. I felt like a sick voyeur, consumed with the lines of his body and the way his muscles moved with both anger and ease. I opened the door and walked toward him without really thinking. When he looked up, he looked fierce, like he might give me a piece of his mind and tell me how shitty my friends were. I was the last person he needed to tell and I’d be the first to agree with him. My steps faltered at the look of anger lingering in his dark eyes. It was so intense that I felt scared to proceed, but also too dumb to turn around and go back inside without saying something. I wasn't sure if I was doing the right thing, if he found me bothersome and intolerable, or even worse, patronizing for trying to talk with him.
"Everything alright?" he asked, wiping the sweat off his forehead with the bottom of his white shirt. The temperature had let up a tiny bit, but there was still heat lightening zigzagging across the darkening sky. I couldn't help but peek at the tanned skin and the dip of the V at his hip again while his shirt was up. Wyatt was, without a doubt, the sexiest guy I’d ever seen in real life. My mouth both watered, and my throat went dry simultaneously. My reaction to him had me feeling kind of crazy, like he had strong pheromones that made my brain confused. I had the strongest urge to touch him and run from him in fear at the same time. It was like the idea that he could be dangerous heightened all of my senses.
"Yes," I said. I was trying to act cool and nonchalant, while clearing my head of the fog his presence seemed to have created. "I was wondering if you'd eaten. I mean, you've been working all day, and I haven't seen you stop."
He cocked his head to the side as a slow smile formed on his perfect lips. "So you've been watching me all day, huh?"
"Guilty as charged. It’s boring in that big old house alone and I’m sharing a giant pizza with no one.”
The sky rumbled like rain might make an appearance, but it was probably just more of this damn heatwave that had its hold on Wexler and was predicted to last through the weekend.
“Would you like some dinner? I could warm up some pizza or make you something else."
I said it quickly, my eyes looking anywhere but him. I felt like I'd stolen a piece of candy and was caught red-handed. I hope he didn’t judge me by my friends, but how could he not when it was all he knew of me.
"I'm not really the guy," he said. His voice came slowly, enunciating every word as if making sure I heard him, crystal clear.
"The kind of guy to eat…pizza," I asked.
"The guy you use to piss off your Daddy." He spat his words heavy with venom.
"Well, since my dad isn't here, I can't really piss him off, can I? He’s all the way across the Atlantic. Excuse me for thinking you might be hungry."
He looked at me like I was a child. Wiped his hands slowly on a grease rag and threw it down in the pile of tools and miscellaneous lubricants and parts he had on the driveway. He was dirty again, after the dip in the pool. Sweat and grease stained his body and he needed a shower. I was taken by his musky scent, so male, so hard earned, so different from what the males in my social circle were scented with.
“You always this insistent?” he asked.
“Only when I want something,” I told him.
“And you want me to eat pizza?”
“Eat pizza with me and maybe drink a cold beer?”
“Now you’re talking.”
I turned and walked back to the house and he wasn’t following me. I guess he really hated us all and wanted no business with any of us East Pointers outside of work. A man like my father, he loved cars and chose their cold company over mine. It was fine, I could deal, I was used it.
“Harley, hold up. Let me wash my hands in the garage and I’ll come have a slice.”
I was already up the steps, about to shut the door and block him out of my life. He looked so rugged standing there in the glow of dusk, his body chiseled and cut from years of hard, honest work. There was something about Wyatt that drew me to him. Maybe he was lonely too, or like me, felt like a fraud living in his own skin.