Chapter Five
I unlocked the door and waited, and true to his word, he walked in with two large coffees and a jar of peanut butter.
I was smiling at him. “What are you doing?”
“If you work, then I work,” he said, handing me a coffee. “Jennifer’s rules.”
“I work every day.”
“I don’t mind,” he said simply. “If I want to be the best, I need to do what the best does.”
“Is that flattery?”
He lifted up the jar of peanut butter. “No, this is flattery,” he said with a heart-stopping grin. “I can’t believe you don’t have any.”
I smiled at him, and he stared at me. Neither of us spoke, and the air was electric. Fuck. “So, how was last night?” I asked, changing the subject and putting some distance between us.
“Oh, I never went,” he said, sipping his coffee. “Wasn’t up for it.”
I was oddly relieved he hadn’t gone out, hadn’t picked up anyone, or that he hadn’t taken anyone home. Fuck, this was getting ridiculous.
Then he asked, “How was your night?”
“Uh, okay,” I lied. “I was home pretty early.”
“No hot date?” he asked lightly, but there was a seriousness in his eyes.
I shook my head. “No.”
Cooper exhaled through puffed cheeks, seemingly relieved. “So, what’s on the agenda for today?”
He was wearing jeans today, not suit pants. He had a button-down shirt, with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, so I wasn’t sure if he was here to work or not. It was definitely more relaxed.
“I, um, I’d like to get started on the Cariati file,” I told him. I didn’t exactly have anything for him to do, but didn’t want him to leave either.
This kid was doing my head in.
“Okay,” he said, excited “You’re doing the façades for that job, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Can I watch?” he asked.
I stared at him disbelievingly. “You want to watch me draw?”
He nodded, but his cheeks tinted with embarrassment. “It’s like watching a masterpiece from the beginning,” he admitted quietly.
I couldn’t help but smile. “Flattery will get you everywhere.”
His eyebrows flickered. “Really?”
He stared at me until I had to look away. I put my coffee down on the counter, pretending to be distracted. Jesus. I wasn’t imagining things. This kid was seriously flirting with me. Fuck.
I should have stopped it. I should have said no. I should have told him from the very beginning that this was a bad, bad idea.
But I couldn’t. While the logical, sensible side of my brain was telling me to put an end right now to this nonsense, the selfish, infatuated, stupid part of my brain wanted it.
My body wanted it.
I glanced back at him, at his smug little smile, then snatched the jar of peanut butter from his hand. I looked at the jar and turned it over in my hands. “Flattery in a jar, huh?”
He smiled as he sipped his coffee then assessed to the dining table. “So, are we working today?”
Work. Right. “Yes, we are,” I said, getting my brain back on track. “You can keep going with the specs on the Lewington job while I get started. It takes a while to grid it all out.”
“I can’t believe you really start each job by drawing it out,” he said, walking over to the table. “You know it’s the twenty-first century, right? We have computers now.”
“I like to see it develop in front of me,” I tried to explain. “If I draw it out, it seems to give me a better feel for the overall tone. I’ve spoken to the Cariatis many times. I know what they want. I can see it in my head, and it comes out better by my hand than with a computer.”
I looked up then, to find Cooper staring at me. He was smiling, as if some errant thought made him happy. “That’s amazing,” he said. Then he added quietly, “You’re amazing.”
I was taken aback by his blatant compliment, pleased, but a little embarrassed. I looked at the table instead of him. “Oh. I’m not sure about that.”
“I am,” he said confidently. “And there wasn’t even any peanut butter involved.”
It made me laugh and as I sat down, I opened my grid pad and pulled my draughting leads from my satchel. Cooper looked at the specialized pencils. “Do they still make those?”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s not a quill and inkwell, you know.”
He laughed. “No, in the museum they have the quills and draughting leads in separate displays.”
I chuckled, despite his constant jibes at my age. “Comments like that counteract the peanut butter.”
He grinned, and instead of looking even slightly remorseful, he looked at me like I’d just proposed a challenge.
I tapped the table with my index finger. “Enough with the smartass comments. Work.”
Like I hadn’t spoken at all, he said, “How about we have a little bet?”
“Pardon?” I asked. “As in a wager?”
“More of a professional, social experiment,” he mused. “How about, for the next four hours, you do your drawing of the façade, and I enter in the exterior details into the CAD program. At the end of the four hours we’ll see, one, who was more productive, and two, who was more accurate.” He opened his laptop and looked at me expectantly.
“And what exactly is the wager?”
“The loser buys lunch.”
I smiled at him, at the gleam in his eyes and at the daring of his smile. “Deal.”
I slid the spec sheet across the table to Cooper. “You’ll need that,” I told him, and started with my grid paper and went by memory alone. It was a remodelling job on an old building, strictly confined by city building codes.
I knew those codes like the back of my hand, I knew what the owners wanted and I knew how to make it happen. So, picking up one of my draughting leads, I got started and not even the annoying tap-tap-tap of Cooper on his laptop keyboard could distract me.
It was my favorite part of my job. Of course all jobs went through the specifically designed CAD program, but for me, this was where each job started.
It was about two hours later that Cooper stood up and stretched. He walked off toward the kitchen and came back with the jar of peanut butter and a spoon. “What?” he asked, when I looked at him. “It was my jar of flattery.”
He then proceeded to eat it by the spoonful, and one time I looked up at him, he was concentrating hard at the computer screen with the spoon still in his mouth. It was…cute.
Soon after that, my stomach let me know when it was lunchtime, and sure enough when I checked the time, it’d almost been four hours. I stood up and walked into the kitchen, grabbed two bottled waters and a spoon and went back to the table. I put the two waters down, leaned my ass against the edge of the table near Cooper and picked up the jar of peanut butter.
“How are you going with your wager?” I asked, as I scooped out a spoonful from the jar.
He sighed. “Well, I’m done, but I know it won’t be as good as yours.”
I stuck the spoon in my mouth and as soon as I tasted the peanut paste, I couldn’t help but groan. “This is good.”
Cooper looked up at me, seemingly transfixed by the spoon in my mouth. “Told you,” he said a little gruffly. He shook his head, and looked quickly back to his laptop, turning it around to face me. “Not that we really even need to check, because I’m sure yours will put mine to shame.”
I looked at the screen. “You’ve done a really good job,” I told him. “The façade looks good, the elevations are clean. It looks good.”
“Mmm,” he said, not convinced.
“You’ve got the coding correct,” I reassured him. “And considering it’s a new program to you, don’t dismiss that. You’ve done a great job.”
“Righto,” he mumbled. “Let’s have a look at yours.” He stood up, walked around to my side of the table, and he picked up my grid pad. He was quiet for a long moment, so I walked around and stood beside him. “Jesus,” he whispered. “It’s…this is amazing.”
I smiled at him, and he shook his head.
“The shading, the perspective, the lines…” He seemed lost for words. “Wow. It’s um, it’s…”
“It’s lunchtime and you’re paying,” I told him, taking the pad and throwing it onto the table. Cooper grinned at me for a beat too long, walked to my front door and held it open for me.
“No jokes about the elderly?” I asked as we got to the elevator. “Yesterday you were full of cheek about my age.”
“Can you remember yesterday?” he asked, wide-eyed. “Your Alzheimer’s medication must really work.”
I pressed the button for the lobby. “You’re such a little shit.”
I thought I might offend him by calling him that. But by the way he grinned proudly, I doubt I could offend him if I tried.
The streets of New York on a Sunday were still busy, only people had dressed a little more casually than they did during the week. We started to walk and ended up near the park at a vendor. Cooper stared at me. “I might be a lowly intern, but I can afford more than a pretzel for lunch.”
I laughed at him. “I happen to like these.” So two pretzels later, we found a bench seat and started to eat our lunch.
Cooper was thoughtful as he ate, looking around. “I love this city,” he said.
“Me too,” I said, and smiled when I looked at him. “It has a hum, an energy, doesn’t it?”
He nodded. “Yeah, it does. But”—then he shrugged—“you’ll probably think I’m crazy, but you wanna know what I love about New York?” He shook his head like he couldn’t believe he was about to admit something. “I love the skyscrapers. I love the glass and steel, I love the purpose this city has. I love how the new buildings integrate with the old ones. I love the history and the modern, I mean some of these buildings are works of art…”
I stared at him, and he stopped talking and blushed, ducking his head. “See? Told you you’d think I was crazy.”
I shook my head slowly. “I love that too,” I said quietly. “Everything you said, that’s what I love about it too.” I shook my head, a little perplexed that this man, this man half my age, understood me.
Cooper smiled and looked down at the half-eaten pretzel in his hand. “I’ve never told anyone that.”
I laughed nervously. “I’ve told people, but they’ve never really understood me.”
He looked at me then and neither one of us spoke. I just stared at him—wondering what on earth it was about him that intrigued me so much—and right there, in a city of millions with the noise of people and cars and buzzing past us, we sat in silence and had ourselves a moment.
He looked back down at his hands, with tinted cheeks, and exhaled as though looking at me had rendered him unable to breathe.
I liked that more than I should. “Come on,” I said, standing up. “I want to show you something.”
He stood up, threw the rest of his lunch in the bin and looked at me with keen eyes. “What is it?”
“This way,” I said, walking in a different direction than the way we’d come. Two blocks over, I pointed up. “See that?” It was a nondescript commercial building, dwarfed by the taller buildings beside it. Usually overlooked by passers-by, it wasn’t the biggest or the grandest, but it was a classic building that any decent architect would appreciate for its subtlety.
“The Crawson building?”
I nodded. “I did that.”
Cooper’s eyes widened. “Really? I mean, I’m not doubting you…it’s just…wow.”
I laughed. “Yes, really. Complete retrofit. Exterior façade to replicate the existing, even enhance the history of the building, but its interior is something else. You should see it. It’s classic art-deco design but completely sustainable.” I showed him the cubic forms, the strong sense of lines, the sleek curving forms and illusion of pillars.
When I finally stopped talking, I looked at Cooper to find he wasn’t even looking at the building. He was staring at me. “Can you show me?”
“Inside the building?”
He shook his head. “No, show me how you draw. I want to be able to do that.”
“Oh.”
“Will you show me? I want to learn, I want to see things how you see them.”
I looked at him again, and he stared straight back at me. His eyes never faltered, never strayed from mine. All I could do was nod. “Yes.”
He smiled magnificently. “No time like the present.”
We started to walk back to my apartment. “Are you sure you don’t have anywhere else you’d rather be?” I asked. “Working with me on a Sunday is hardly anyone’s idea of fun.”
“Well, I’m not anyone,” he said brightly. “I happen to enjoy it.”
“I’m glad you do,” I replied.
The rest of the walk back to my place was quiet, but as soon as we were inside, he pulled his chair next to mine at the table. “So where do we start?”
He had the basic, graphic art and technical drawing skills all architecture kids had. He admitted to that—he could draw a building easily enough. But he couldn’t draw it to life, he said. Not like me.
So for the next few hours, we sat side by side at my table with my grid pad and pencils. Sometimes our knees bumped, sometimes our thighs were completely touching, sometimes he’d rest his arm on the back of my chair, sometimes our hands would be so close they’d almost be touching.
And we talked, and we laughed, and we told stories and he smelled so good. But he listened, and he studied, and he copied and it was pretty obvious this kid had talent.
It was also pretty obvious there was something between us. I wasn’t imagining it. I’d catch him staring at me, or sometimes his breath would catch, and every now and then when our hands touched, it’d make my heart rate take off and my mouth would go dry.
Sometimes I’d catch myself staring at him. I was lost in his brown hair and hazel eyes and kissable, pink lips. When he was concentrating, or lost in thought at the drawing in front him, I’d have to make myself look away.
When he turned to ask me about something, our faces were so close, within leaning distance. His question was long forgotten, and his eyes darkened as he stared at me. He licked his lips and leaned in just a fraction.
He was going to kiss me. And I wanted to. I wanted to feel his lips, I wanted to taste him, touch him, and it was that want that made me panic.
I shot out of my seat and went into the kitchen, shaking my head of the Cooper-daze it was apparently in, and tried to calm my hammering heart.
I turned to find Cooper stand up slowly. “I should probably go,” he said quietly.
“Okay,” I said, out of breath.
His brow furrowed and he collected his laptop and stuffed it into his satchel. He exhaled through puffed-out cheeks and mumbled something about seeing himself out. Unable to do much else, I nodded, compliantly.
He walked out of my apartment and not three seconds later there was a knock on the door. Knowing who it would be, I looked through the peephole anyway and nervously ran my hands through my hair before opening the door.
Cooper looked rattled, confused even, so I asked, “Everything okay?”
He stared at me for a long second then blurted out, “I think we should kiss.”