Jeremy appeared farther down the road, jogging as he normally did.
“Hello, neighbor,” I said cheerfully, though he couldn’t hear me. “You get your workout on.”
I barely even noticed that he was wearing tiny black shorts and nothing else. Why, it was the furthest thing from my mind. He was doing it on purpose, but he obviously didn’t know who he was fucking with. A child playing a man’s game. How cute.
But instead of jogging right by, he stopped across the street on the sidewalk, chest heaving, hands on his bare hips, the shorts riding low.
And without looking at me, he started stretching.
Obscenely.
“Whaaaaat is happening,” I breathed.
At first it was just his back, pushing his hips out and rolling his neck. And then he must have thought his thighs needed work, because he lifted one leg behind him, and he reached back to grab his shoe with his hands. He pulled his foot up high, arching his back as he did so. The muscles in his chest and stomach flexed. His junk pressed against the front of his shorts. He dropped the leg and reached for the other, doing the same stretch.
And then he turned toward the house opposite ours and bent the fuck over, pressing his hands flat against the ground without bending his knees.
I dropped my coffee mug into the sink. It went everywhere.
“What’s going on?”
I screamed as I whirled around.
Sandy was standing in his robe, eyes barely open.
“Nothing! Nothing. My coffee spilled. That’s it! I wasn’t doing anything weird!”
“Whatever,” he mumbled as he went toward the Keurig.
I glanced back out the window.
Jeremy was gone.
So that’s how it was going to be, was it?
Fine.
He wanted to mess with the bull?
He was going to get the fucking sledgehammer.
“OKAY,” JEREMY said later that week, looking at his laptop and squinting his eyes. “It looks like we got a response from Desert Realty & Trust. They seem to be more than happy to make a donation to Phoenix House.”
We were sitting in his office. Next to me was Marina, and on the other side of her was the accountant/financial advisor, a sweet older man named Bernie who offered his services to Phoenix House pro bono. He was mostly retired but still handled the books for Marina and a couple of other nonprofits. I’d liked him immediately when I met him, given that I’d been in a skirt and he’d bowed low, taking my hand in his and squeezing it gently. He was a gentleman.
I didn’t expect to be called into the meeting, but Marina had insisted. Jeremy had apparently told her I’d done all the heavy lifting at the dinner (while leaving out the specifics), and she thought I needed to be involved in case they wanted to hear from me. I highly doubted Brad ever wanted to see my face again, but since he was a fucking shit weasel, I had no problem with that.
My problem was that I wanted to climb Jeremy like he was a tree and I was a squirrel so I could put my nuts on him.
(Yes, my brain was mostly scrambled. Whatever.)
But since we had an audience, I was on my best behavior.
Mostly.
Marina was looking down at her tablet, and Bernie had his own laptop set up on the other side of Jeremy’s desk. If I just so happened to be gnawing on the end of my pen seductively (kind of), then so be it.
Jeremy kept glancing at me, the skin around his eyes tightening.