The Neighbors by Ania Ahlborn Page B

known.
    “My goodness, you’re the sweetest thing in all the world, do you know that? The
sweetest
thing.”
    Drew felt his face flush as she leaned in to kiss his cheek. She smelled like sweet vanilla. He pictured her pushing that basket of fruit from his arms and onto the ground, oranges rolling down the front steps and onto the lawn. She’d shove him against the wall next to the door, her mouth against his, her knee coming up on his hip, the entire neighborhood peeking through their blinds at Mrs. Ward and the boy next door.
    Startled, he took a step away from her.
What the hell was that?
His heart thumped against his ribs. His initial thought was that Harlow was seducing him, but that was ridiculous. She hadn’t done anything at all, save for giving him a peck on the cheek. He stood staring at her as she plucked the basket from his hands and stepped around him, her high heels clicking against the porch. Pushing open the front door, she offered him a look over her shoulder.
    “Come in,” she told him.
    The door had been unlocked.
    Andrew hesitated, that flash of fantasy making him uncomfortable in his own skin. There was something wrong with him. Harlow was gorgeous,
hot
, even, but she was old enough to be his mom. Hell, that was one of the things that drew him to her—the fact that a long time ago, before the world fell apart, his mother was a lot like Harlow. And yet, there he was, imagining things that made him feel like a total creep.
    But he couldn’t refuse her invitation to go inside. That would have been rude—a complete contradiction to the gift basket she held in her arms. Taking a steadying breath, he followed her into the house.

    Mickey cracked open the screen door as he watched Harlow click up the sidewalk. He saw Drew offer her a giant basket, a ridiculous pink ribbon fluttering in the breeze. He clenched his jaw as Harlow leaned into him. When Drew followed her inside, he almost called out:
No! Stop! Don’t!
    Something tightened in his chest, like a tourniquet around his heart.
    “So you just randomly decide to grow a conscience now?” he asked himself, disgusted. “You let her bring him here, and now you have morals?”
    He grimaced, let the screen door slam closed behind him, and turned to look at a fresh plate of cookies on the coffee table.
    Harlow’s perfume still lingered in the air.

    Mickey had been in his early twenties when he came out of a Narcotics Anonymous meeting to find a strange woman leaning against a slick black Cadillac, looking like the president’s wife. Her hair shone beneath the streetlight like spun gold. Her lacquered lips looked as though they’d been coated in ruby-colored glass. The porcelain finish of her skin glowed ethereal in the moonlight, and her curves...they invoked images of classy pinup girls posing with fighter jets and power tools. With his hands deep in the pockets of his jeans and the hood of his sweatshirt pulled over his head, he couldn’t help glancing her way, and she smiled widely enough to show off her perfect teeth. She gave off the scent of money like a pheromone. Some poor junkie’s over-protective mother, he thought.
    He hesitated when she flagged him down. She told him she was waiting for a “friend,” that she hadn’t expected to run into a dashing young man such as Mickey when she had set out forthe community center that night. He smelled vanilla when she leaned into him a little too close, her lips brushing his cheek as she invited him to a late dinner.
    He would have been a fool to decline.
    Mickey didn’t know she was married, and even if he had, he wouldn’t have cared. Despite her age—at least forty was his best guess—the woman was hotter than fire: everything from the way she talked to the way she batted her eyelashes, her chin tipped downward just so—it was an instant turn-on. Just having dodged possession charges, he was in the shittiest spot in his life. Banging a woman like this, married or not, was a welcome