Free Crazy For You by Jennifer Crusie

a ton of people in my life.”
    “I mean a guy.”
    “I don’t need a guy.” Quinn turned away from him to look out the window. “Especially a guy who steals my dog.”
    “Right.”
    Nick pulled into the driveway to Quinn’s apartment. “The dog stays in the truck,” he said, and Quinn hugged the mutt one last time and then helped him lock it in the cab. Its eyes were accusing as they walked away. What about me? it seemed to say. Who’s taking care of me?
    Nick ignored it.
    When they got upstairs, he found that Quinn was right, there wasn’t much there that she wanted, and they loaded everything but her clothes into the truck in half an hour. “That’s it?” Nick asked her. “You’re not taking anything else?”
    “I feel guilty enough about leaving him,” Quinn said. “I mean, he stole my dog, so I can’t stay, but I’m not going to leave him without furniture. This is the stuff that’s important to my family. The rest was just garage sale stuff or stuff he bought new that I hated anyway. I’ll put my clothes in garbage bags, and we’ll be done. Is she warm enough?”
    Nick looked at Katie watching them anxiously through the back window of the truck, her paws pressed against the glass. For a rat, she was kind of cute. Kind of. “She’s fine. Let’s get your clothes.”
    “I really appreciate this, Nick.”
    Nick kept his focus on Katie. “Let’s get your clothes.”
    He followed her upstairs to help, which was a mistake. Watching her fold dresses into garbage bags wasn’t a problem, but then she opened drawers and started tossing fistfuls of silky underwear into a bag, all of it in the weirdest colors like electric blue and hot pink and metallic gold, and in patterns like plaid and polka dots and leopard and zebra, and he couldn’t help but imagine what it must look like on her— all that color next to her pale honey skin, all that silk filled out round and warm the way she’d felt with her arms around him.
    “I’ll carry this down,” he said, grabbing the two nearest bags when she started pulling out nightgowns. “Be right back.” He ran down the steps and threw the bags in the back of the truck, and then stood out in the cold trying to get his mind back so he could figure out what the hell was wrong with him while Katie stared at him reproachfully through the window.
    Quinn was a friend, that’s all.
    Okay, so she was the best friend he had next to Max and he loved her, a friendship kind of love, but that was all. He was not having hot thoughts about Quinn. That would be crazy.
    It isn’t the first time, he told himself, and thought of nineteen years before, of the August he and Zoe had come home because things were going so wrong for them. In the three months since their wedding, they’d found out that all they had in common were bad tempers. But in the same three months, Quinn had changed. When he’d left, she’d been a perplexed sixteen-year-old drink of water in a blue chiffon bridesmaid dress, trying to put his wedding back together when her sister had balked halfway down the aisle. “I can fix this,” she’d told him, and she had, while he’d sat and fumed and wondered if he really wanted to marry Zoe‘ after all. But when he’d come back three months later, Quinn had run out to the car in her cutoffs and tank top to hug her sister—Zoe grabbing onto Quinn with more emotion than she’d ever grabbed onto him—and he’d gaped in surprise and guilty lust as Quinn laughed and rocked Zoe back and forth, confident and round and happy and suddenly sexy. Shit, I got the wrong sister, he’d thought then, with all the depth of a nineteen-year-old.
    And that was when Zoe had looked over and caught him and glared at him so that he’d turned back to the car to get their things before she could say anything out loud. Later that night, she’d backed him up against her mother’s white metal kitchen cabinet with a paring knife under his chin and said, “She’s sixteen, you