The feeling would go away, he assured himself. It was probably caused by the gloomy weather lately. Or post-holiday malaise—not that he’d particularly enjoyed the holidays this year, though he’d made an almost superhuman effort to conceal that from his family and friends.
He stopped walking when he saw someone sitting on the carpeted floor beside his door. “Aaron? What are you doing here?”
He didn’t bother asking how his cousin had gotten into the secured building.
Aaron looked pointedly at his watch. “New superhero movie? Seven o’clock? The two of us were going to catch it tonight while Andy was busy with that surveillance job?”
“Oh, damn. I forgot. I’m sorry, I—”
“Forget it. Throw on a sweatshirt and some jeans and we’ll go grab a burger.”
“Yeah. That sounds good. Give me ten minutes.” He unlocked his door and preceded his cousin inside.
“So how did your day go?” Aaron asked casually, glancing around Casey’s immaculately decorated, fashionably neutral living room.
Casey pulled off his tie and shrugged out of his jacket. “It was good. Negotiated a very profitable settlement that could have gotten sticky.”
“Congratulations. That must have felt good.”
“I guess.” He was already unbuttoning his shirt as he headed for the bedroom.
Aaron tagged after him. “You don’t sound exactly elated. Tired?”
“Yeah, I guess so.” Bone tired, he thought, pulling a pair of jeans and a Texas Longhorns sweatshirt out of the closet. Soul tired. Heart tired.
“Dude, you’re killing me.”
Tossing his shirt on the bed, Casey looked questioningly at his cousin, who was leaning in the bedroom doorway. “What are you talking about?”
“I can’t stand to see you this glum. You’ve been this way ever since you got back from Tennessee, though you’ve done a really good job of hiding it.”
Casey tugged the sweatshirt over his head. “I’ll get over it.”
“Get over what?”
“You’re the one who started this. What do you think?”
“I think you didn’t really want to come back from Gatlinburg,” Aaron said bluntly.
Turning his back to the doorway, Casey swapped his suit pants for comfortably faded jeans. “Does anyone ever really want a vacation to end?”
“It’s more than that, Case.”
Turning back to his cousin, Casey released a long sigh. “I miss Natalie,” he admitted, the first time he’d said it out loud since he’d parted from her almost two months earlier. “I even miss the dog.”
“Have you tried calling? Natalie, not the dog.”
“I haven’t spoken to her since she called to let me know she’d gotten her position back with the firm in Nashville.”
“How do you know she isn’t missing you, too?”
“She’s the one who said it wouldn’t work between us. If she’d changed her mind, she knew how to reach me.”
“So you’re just going to spend the rest of your life trudging back and forth to work, pretending to be happy?”
“Give me a break, Aaron. I’m trying, okay?”
Aaron smiled sympathetically. “You’re trying too hard. It shouldn’t be this difficult.”