“Wow,” I said, happy to move off the subject for a while. “Does that mean you are all in on Wendy?”
Deacon grinned and sat back in the chair. “I don’t know how you did it, but Wendy is a diamond in the rough. That girl picked up the job like nobody I’ve ever seen and is a natural in management roles when given to her. She’s also diligent and thorough on paperwork. You got lucky with her. No way you knew she would take to it like she has.”
“Fair,” I said. “Luck had a part to play. But you still admitting you were wrong to doubt her and, by extension, me, is awesome.”
“Don’t let it go to your head,” he said.
The next few days were filled with long hours of work, which meant finding alternate means of keeping Lily occupied. My crew was working in a township almost forty-five minutes north of Ashford, and that meant I couldn’t just get back to let her out on my lunch break and be reliably home at five thirty. So, I brought her with me, testing her by letting her run free on site and hoping she stayed out of everyone’s way.
In short, she was fantastic, playing with the guys when they wanted a break and otherwise staying near me but not on top of me. More often than not, I found her in a patch of sun somewhere, happily and lazily dozing. As dogs should do.
Thoughts about Helen plagued me the entire time though, and I tried to force them out or at least minimize my time thinking about her as much as possible. If I felt myself focusing too much on her, I would try to catch myself and shake it off. There was no good wallowing in the fact that it had been days and she hadn’t contacted me.
I tried to come up with reasons why she wouldn’t contact me or at least give me her number. Maybe she was a private kind of person and didn’t like giving out her number. That could be it. She might just be the kind of person that wouldn’t want a third party giving out information like that. We didn’t address it when I was at her place, so she didn’t think it was needed or something.
Or perhaps she thought I didn’t want something serious. I had to at least account for that. I thought I’d made it pretty obvious that I wanted to continue seeing her, but there was always the possibility she either thought I didn’t want anything more than casual sex or that even she didn’t want anything beyond that. Or she might just think that since we were in a small town with the same friend group, she didn’t need a way to contact me.
There were possibilities, but none of them seemed to fit perfectly. That might have simply been because I was frustrated. I wanted to see where we could go and having a continued connection over the days after our night together would have helped that. She was out of town, but text messages and video calls could be a sexy alternative that could make seeing each other again more fun.
Then again, I didn’t remember seeing her phone at all. Was it possible she was one of those anti-tech people who had an analog phone or just refused to use their smartphone most of the time? Carter was like that for a long time, needing Deacon and me to help him figure out how people communicate now. Maybe she was like that?
But she was a chef. In Chicago. The idea that she would be removed from technology with her job in that city was kind of ridiculous. It left me with the idea that either it was one of the flimsy excuses I came up with before or that she just simply didn’t feel like she wanted to talk to me. That maybe I saw something in us that she didn’t. I would have to deal with that.
While I figured all that out, I decided the best method of not going crazy was to work my ass off and spoil the living hell out of Lily. On top of bringing her on the job, we took walks on my lunch breaks and drove the long way home so she could stick her head out of the window.
She was a huge dog already, and I knew she was only going to get bigger, but it was funny when we pulled alongside someone else, and they saw her head curiously examining them from her place in the passenger seat.
I hadn’t been in the office for a few days, as we were on location, but Friday was going to be a day back in Ashford, and when we got up in the morning, Lily seemed disappointed that our flow of getting into the car and going for a ride was interrupted.