All the way home, I kept glancing at Max and Cupcake in my rearview mirror. At one stoplight, he fussed with her harness. During a two-minute delay when a construction guy with a spinning stop sign made us wait for oncoming traffic, I watched him adjust her window twice and the air conditioning once. At another stoplight, he took a toy and made it dance across the dashboard and into her bed, while he smiled so wide that it made my cheeks hurt. Until I saw Max with Cupcake, I’d never in my life known what it meant when women commented on sexy photos of men with, My ovaries just exploded!

But now I did. I suuurrrrrre did.

Except I was going to have to put that all behind me. I had to. For our friendship, for our living situation, for my sanity. I shifted my thighs together. It wasn’t going to be easy. It was like he’d unleashed something inside me, like he’d popped the cork right off the champagne bottle that I never knew I was.

In the rearview, he was talking to her and petting her head, his massive bicep flexing, his beautiful smile glinting.

Groan.

Somehow, I managed not to drive off the road, though, and I pulled into the driveway and hopped out, giving him a wait one second finger. I unlocked the front door and was met by Julia, leering at me from under the bench where Gram used to put on her shoes.

“Hello!” I said, trying as hard as I could not to let her, you know, smell my fear.

We were making progress, though, amazingly, and she came out from under the bench without even a clawed sideswipe at my shins. I placed my hand at her level, and she passed underneath it, arching her spine as she moved under my palm. Her fur was soft and a little staticky. “So listen,” I told her. “We’re going to have some company.”

Tentatively, I moved to scoop her up—a maneuver I’d never actually successfully executed without coming out of it like I’d rolled around in the rose bushes. But either Julia was becoming dangerously deprived of sodium and her reflexes were slow, or we were making actual human-cat progress. Either way, I soon had all twenty pounds of her in my arms. I moved the drape back from the small sidelight. “That’s her.”

From the side, her clear eyes looked like marbles. As she realized what she was looking at, her whole body stiffened, and she let out an almost puma-like growl that made her rib cage vibrate against my body. It was like holding a boom box that only played bass. Then the growl turned into a hiss, and she bared her teeth at the window. Her arms and legs shot out at right angles from her body, and her claws extended like razor blades.

Oh, great.

It would never work. If that was her reaction to a glimpse of Cupcake from twenty feet away, I couldn’t even fathom what it would be like claw-to… Cupcake didn’t really have claws. Toes. Claw-to-toe. Whatever it was, it wasn’t going to be pretty.

Julia was four-parts dead weight to one-part fluff, and I lugged her up to my bedroom. Her favorite place in the house was on the window seat that looked out into the yard. I could move her kitty litter into my bathroom for the time being, I figured. If she wanted to use the window as her cat flap, we could make that work. Maybe. It was worth a try. God help those sparrows, but at least Julia would be happy. And not eating SPAM.

I locked her in my room and then ran back downstairs where I gathered up a little stuffed mouse she liked to do unspeakable things to and a feathery ball that was weighted inside so it moved on its own, along with her bed and a little cat-sized afghan that Grandma had knitted for her. In my bedroom, I turned up the AC to full blast, and I put her bed on my bed. She, meanwhile, was busy considering the complete works of Hemingway and nuzzling The Old Man and the Sea.

From my window, I watched Max dislodge Cupcake from her little bed that hung from the passenger’s seat. He slung his duffel over his shoulder and then picked up Cupcake in the crook of his elbow, bouncing her along, and he headed for the front door. Cupcake gripped his broad chest with her funny little feet and rested her head on his shoulder. The whole thing was incredibly infant-like, down to the duffel…as a diaper bag.

And kablewy went my ovaries, all over again.

* * *

While Max fussed with more repairs, all sweaty and sawdusty and deliciously hard to resist, he insisted that I work. I still felt awkward. I felt like we’d put the thing between us on the back burner, but now there was something steaming up the kitchen. But work was a distraction, and I plunged into it, with both feet and holding my breath. I was deep into a sketch of my handsome Max-prince joining forces with his potential princess to fight a fire-breathing dragon named Rufus when I heard a menacing rumble of thunder outside. Cupcake shivered next to me on the couch, and her little googly eyes met mine. “Just thunder,” I told her.

But not to Cupcake it wasn’t. Her whole body trembled with another roll as the skies darkened, plunging my living room into heavy afternoon shade. With tentative, awkward steps, she climbed into my arms and clung to me in a very monkey-like sort of way. She shifted her weight to one back foot and made gentle efforts to climb up onto me even higher. Her bony little elbows pressed into my chest. I supported her little tush with my palm. She put her muzzle to my neck, and I felt her hot breaths, accompanied by another shiver of terror. She tried to nose her way into my thin summer hoodie like a little kangaroo.

I closed my sketchbook and carried Cupcake over to the window. I pulled back the thin, lacy drapes and was met with a perfect view of Max’s crotch.

I pulled a total Julia Caesar and looked away at the nearest stationary object: a dead plant in a macramé plant holder. Cupcake’s tail wagged furiously, and in my periphery, I watched her paw the air, signaling I want that nice man to come inside.

Trying to avert my eyes from his package—goodness gracious, that package—and trying hard just to focus on his thigh or something—so sexy, those thighs—I knocked on the window. I busied myself with pulling off the crispy leaves from the plant. He bent down and smiled. “Hey! How’s the dragon?”

His cheeks were sunburned, his bare chest shiny with sweat. He had a hammer in one hand and two nails between his teeth. In actual comparison, my fairy-tale prince was kind of a weenie compared to the real thing.

Using the arm that wasn’t wrapped around Cupcake, I pulled down the top half of the window. A fresh breeze blew in, smelling like summer rain. “Grumpy. You should come inside.” I pointed up at the storm, and he looked up at it, too. From where I was standing, I got a glorious view of his abs and his pecs and his neck, as well as the rippling columns of muscle on either side of his Adam’s apple. A few raindrops splatted down onto his skin, and he ran his palm over his face.

“I’m good,” he said and wiped the sweat off his forehead with his shirt, which he’d hung on the ladder. I caught a glimpse of his boxer shorts. It was a different pair from the plaid ones that I had pulled off of him last night. With my teeth. This new pair had tiny red lobsters on a navy background. He was like a walking testament to why everybody should move to Maine. Like, right now.

Rosie! “Don’t be a hero. Take it from Ben Franklin and get off that ladder. Come eat a cupcake.”

Max sniffed and nodded. “Fair enough,” he said as his heavy footfalls rattled the ladder. “You want me to run and get something to eat for dinner?” He picked up his shirt and wiped the sweat from his face again. I could almost feel the ripples of his abs under my fingers. He was the stuff of bronze statues in huge atriums, of marble competitors in Olympia. He dropped his shirt and took a long swig of water from a bottle on the windowsill, such manly force that it made the plastic crinkle.

“I’ll figure out something. And I have beer.”

Max smiled hard, looking from me to Cupcake and back again as he drained the bottle and crunched it in his hands. “Perfect.”

* * *

Except it wasn’t. For the first time in all the years I’d known him, things between Max and me were very, very awkward. We couldn’t even make small talk without blurting out things at the same time, and even physically, it felt like we were mismatched magnets. Just a few days ago, we’d been able to move around this tiny, strange little kitchen like we were anticipating each other’s every move, like a perfectly choreographed dance. Now, every single time I moved to get something, we’d collide. I’d reach for the forks, and he’d reach for them at the same time. I’d try to grab some plates, and he’d be trying to cross the kitchen to grab the glasses. Over and over again, we were skin-to-skin. Face-to-face. Body-to-body. Like maybe we weren’t mismatched magnets at all, but drawn together so powerfully that we couldn’t stay apart.

“Sorry,” I said, backing away and wedging myself up against the drawer pulls of the cabinets behind me.

He raised his arms like it was a bank robbery. “It’s me. I’ll get out of your way.”

“You’re not…”

“I didn’t mean…”

I clutched a breadboard to my chest. “Can we just get this out of the way now?”

Max nodded, like he was resigned and even a little bit sad. He looked at the floor and sighed. Then he glanced up at me. “You first.”

I clutched my breadboard to me like my princess, using her pink shield for her dragon slaying. “It was amazing. It was the best sex I’ve ever had. And I hope you know how I love you.”

His mouth actually fell open. He took a few slow breaths, and his eyes flickered as he watched me. “Rosie…” His voice was strangely gruff, like when he’d first woken up that morning. At least an octave lower than normal.

But I stopped him before he could say more. “It’s true. I do love you. I love you like nobody I’ve ever loved in my life.”

His eyes focused in on my face, searching for something else, something more.

“As my friend, I love you.”

He inhaled hard and ran his hand through his hair. Again, he looked at the floor and put a little more distance between us. An inch, two. “Yeah, I know.”

“We can’t be more than that.”

His expression hardened as he studied me, and as he studied me, he bit his lip, and as he bit his lip, I felt my whole body say, Rosie. You know what you want. “Why not?” With one thick finger, he lifted my chin to raise my face to him. His rough thumb moved over my bottom lip. I felt a warm shudder pass right through me as the thunder rumbled again. It was inside me, and outside me too. Echo, echo, echo.

“Because we…” We. We. We.

Again, he searched. Again, he touched my lips. “We what?”

He took yet another step closer, pushing his hips into my stomach.

My breathing became suddenly shallow, and I was so very aware of how my cleavage bulged as I breathed. So did Max, it seemed, because his eyes fell down onto my breasts and stayed there. He groaned like he’d groaned last night. Primal and aggressive.

He wants you, Rosie. He wants you really, really bad.

He brought his face down to mine, brushing my cheek with his. Into my ear, he said, “We what?” once more.

My eyes fluttered shut, and I slumped back against the countertop. As I reached out to support myself, he wrapped his arm around me and compressed my breasts against his body.

I could feel myself getting wet again, actually dampening my panties, that telltale trickle. You know what to do. Just do it.

For one long, last moment I savored it. I felt his body against mine. Warm and hard. I inhaled him. Clean laundry, musk, sawdust. Sweat. Heat. Desire. I memorized him. The navy-blue edges of his eyes, the strong line of his jaw. My heart said yes. But I had to be more than my heart. I just had to be. “You go spend some time with Cupcake. I’ll get dinner ready.”

Max turned his cheek, as if I’d slapped him. He stepped back and crouched down to give Cupcake a pat, his hand as big as her back. Her big eyes slid shut, and she toppled over onto her back in pure doggie bliss.

I could see his temples flexing, his jaw clenched with tension, and when he stood up, he wouldn’t even look at me. “You know what? I’m not that hungry anymore. I’ll go take a shower. You go ahead and eat. I’ll leave you alone.”

“I don’t want you to leave me alone,” I told him. “I want things to go back to the way they were. Yesterday. When everything still made sense.”

He looked me in the eye, hard and serious. He shook his head very slowly and rasped the stubble around his mouth with his palm. “There’s no fucking way that’s going to happen.”

He turned to go and left me alone in the kitchen without looking back. His strong footfalls moved up the stairs, but they lingered for one second on the step where he’d first taken me. Same as I’d lingered there, too.