"It wasn't much. I don't do much."
"No it was great. I don't get much in the way of home cooked meals. Not home enough to manage to keep food in my fridge."
They lapsed into silence, drinking and looking at her coffee table. Which was uninteresting.
"So ..." they both started at the same time. Nervous laughter. He had to be thinking the same thing she was.
"The kiss?" she offered.
"The kiss." It fell between them, the memory of it, the implications.
Mandy quirked her mouth to the side. "Here it is. What do you want? To be friends. Do you want more? I don't want to fuck around here. Colton really likes you, but it's hard." She sighed.
"I know. He explained about his dad being gone. I didn't ask, I promise. I don't want to screw around with him either. Or you." It was Kip's turn to sigh. "Look, Mandy. I didn't come here planning on kissing you. I thought we'd have supper, catch up and see that we had made the best decisions for ourselves."
"That was my plan. I just, I wasn't sure if I regretted what we did."
"I know. We aren't the same people we left behind. But, it's obvious there are still, we are still compatible. Kissing you was like, nothing had changed. It feels like that with you."
Mandy's body twitched, anticipating a move closer to him. "It was amazing. Let's leave it at that. Do we want to find out where this goes Kip? Can we have a relationship? Your on the road a lot. And I'm up here with my life."
"Any relationship has it's struggles. Let's not set anything in stone tonight. Let's be friends for a few weeks, months. I can wait. We've both been waiting this long."
She nodded. "Yeah."
He opened his arms to her. "Come here, cuddle up with me. Mandy I've spent eleven lonely years apart from you. More than I missed-the physical stuff, I missed my best friend."
Mandy hesitated, but he looked so solid and comforting that she moved easily into him. She laid her head on his chest, letting her body tune into his breathing, listening to the steady beat of his heart. He was rock solid, like he'd always been. "I missed you, too," she said.
They sat in silence for a long time, just being together. "I never told you this. I knew you lied about doing badly in math."