Need to Know

Zeke realized with horror that his hand, which was clutching the magazine, was sweating, and he quickly wiped it on his jeans before knocking on the apartment door.

He could hear her footsteps as she got closer, and then the scrape as she pushed the little footstool against the door so that she could reach the peephole. Zeke smiled at her. A moment later, the many locks and deadbolts turned and the door swung open.

Molly was wearing an oversized men's button up shirt splattered with bits of acrylic paint and, best as Zeke could tell, nothing else. There wasn't anything inherently immodest about it. Molly stood five-foot-nothing, and the shirt probably came down lower on her pale freckled thighs than most dresses did, but still all Zeke could think was, "Oh my God she's not wearing pants."

A vision of how good she'd look wearing just his T-shirt floated briefly through his mind.

With a Herculean effort, he tore his gaze away from her legs and met her green eyes instead. Her frizzy red curls were being somewhat ineffectively restrained by a pair of chopsticks, and there was a thin paint brush tucked behind her left ear. The brush had still-wet purple paint on it. There was a more paint dried on her hands and a small smear of it on her face just above her eyebrow; the eyebrow on the right with the little white scar vivisecting it.

If she had noticed him checking her out, she didn't comment on it. She greeted him with a smile and invited him inside. Zeke watched her shove the footstool back to its spot next to the coat rack and then lock all seven locks, deadbolts, and security chains behind them. He noticed another fleck of purple paint on the back of her thigh, like a wild colored freckle.

"There's chardonnay in the kitchen if you want some," Molly offered as she padded barefoot into the living room, retrieving her own glass from where she'd left it on the coffee table.

It wasn't quite noon yet.

But a little liquid courage didn't sound like the worst idea, so long as he remembered not to try to keep up with Molly. He didn't need another repeat of what happened in Vegas. Joe hadn't been over thrilled to hear that when he'd asked Zeke act as a bodyguard for Molly and Sierra's girls weekend, what he'd actually done was get so drunk he passed out on the floor of their hotel suite.

Zeke grabbed a glass from the drying rack by the sink and picked up the bottle of wine sitting on the counter, pouring the remaining measly tablespoon or so into his glass.

"Oops," Molly giggled. "I didn't think I killed that one yet."

She shrugged and swallowed the remainder of her glass in a couple big gulps.

"Don't worry. There's more," she said.

"Uh, no worries. I'm good."

"Well, I'm not," Molly said with another slightly inebriated giggle.

As Zeke watched Molly retrieve a bottle of something pink from the refrigerator, he tried to remember if he had ever seen her entirely sober.

"You know Sierra's not home, right?" Molly asked.

"Yeah, no. She's at Joe's for the weekend," Zeke said.

Molly stopped drilling in the corkscrew, her brow creased with worry.

"Everything's okay, right?" she asked. "Are you here to protect me from another something Joe and Sierra don't want to tell me about?"