Free In Close by Brenda Novak

nothing was open.”
    “You’re telling me Isaac wanted to make you dinner? ”
    It was true; he’d been set on it. But Claire wasn’t sure she’d believe it if she were Leanne. “He says I’m too thin.”
    “Why does he care?”
    Claire didn’t have an answer for that. If she had to guess, she’d say he felt guilty for the way their relationship had ended. But there was no telling what Isaac thought. For one thing, it could change from day to day depending on his mood. “Who knows?”
    “What about after dinner?”
    Grateful for the chance to turn her back, Claire put her purse on the kitchen counter. “I dozed off on the couch while he was cleaning up, so he threw a blanket over me and let me sleep.”
    “That’s so unlike anything I’ve ever heard about him,” Leanne marveled. “He thinks he’s too good for the rest of us. He doesn’t mind using locals to get off— you learned that the hard way—but he’d never take anyone in Pineview seriously. We’re all hicks to the famous photographer. ”
    “Thanks for the reminder, but he loves this place.” He’d just told her so.
    “He likes living in a remote location. That doesn’t mean he likes the people here.”
    Claire had heard others charge Isaac with the same thing. He could seem arrogant. But some of that was simply a product of being so appealing. His good looks, his talent and keen mind intimidated people, made them search for some flaw in order to prove he wasn’t as perfect as he seemed. And he was more than willing to expose every weakness, just to show that he didn’t need their approval. “Let’s…give him the benefit of the doubt, okay?”
    “He does you one kindness after how he treated you before and now you’re sticking up for him?”
    Again she regretted ever letting her sister know how she’d felt about him. “I’m not sticking up for him. I’m trying to look at the whole picture. We were together a long time ago, and people change. He’s…guarded, but don’t forget he was abandoned as a little boy, then raised by Old Man Tippy, who scarcely said a word that wasn’t about his beloved photography. You remember how Tippy was. It’s understandable that Isaac might be unwilling—or unable —to get close to people.”
    Leanne maneuvered her chair past the couch. “Oh, come on. He gets close to people all the time. He was close to you once. And there’ve certainly been others who’ve visited his place after dark and gone home so well-ridden they can hardly walk.”
    The crudeness of that statement made Claire cringe. She didn’t like the image it created, or how foolish it implied she’d been. But Leanne wasn’t feeling the contempt she pretended to feel, at least not exclusively. Claire sensed envy, too—and the last thing she needed was for Leanne to come on to Isaac.
    “He’s made some mistakes, but I don’t think he’s as…bad as he once was.” After she’d stopped sleeping with him, Isaac had gone from one girl to the next. Word of his “sexcapades” had spread all over town. There’d even been rumors that he was having an affair with Claudia Hampton, a rich older woman whose husband, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, stayed in Houston most of the time she’d lived in Pineview and rarely bothered to visit.
    “You’re convinced he isn’t a womanizer anymore? Just because he made you dinner without taking you to bed?”
    Leanne didn’t believe a man like Isaac was likely to change, and she was probably right. But Claire refused to concede the point. “I’m saying we don’t really know, so why judge?”
    “He makes his true self impossible to miss!”
    “Maybe he uses his hard-ass image to hide who he really is.”
    “And why would he do that?”
    “It’s a defense mechanism. If everyone thinks the worst of him he has no expectations to meet and no disappointment to face.”
    “Where did you learn that psychobabble bullshit?” she said with a laugh.
    It was just something she’d been