Part of Your World(11)

“Good. I hope his dick shrivels up and falls off. For real.” She picked up her iced coffee. “What did your dad say about it?” she asked, talking around the straw.

“It’s going to piss you off,” I warned.

“Tell me.”

“He said that Neil is brilliant and that sometimes brilliant people make mundane mistakes.”

She scoffed. “Yeah, well, you’re brilliant too, and I don’t see you humping anesthesiologists.”

“He also said he hopes I come to my senses soon because the summer holidays are coming up.”

“He didn’t.” She gasped.

“Oh, yeah. He did. And Derek left me alone, trapped for three days in Cedar Rapids with this.”

“I want to cage fight your whole family.”

I snorted. “Yeah, me too.”

“Why didn’t you just tell your dad to go to hell?”

My laugh was for a joke much funnier than this one.

“You do not tell Dr. Cecil Montgomery to go to hell.”

No one did.

I was raised to have an almost godlike deference to my legendary father—I didn’t know anyone who didn’t. You did not argue with him, you did not disagree with him, and you certainly did not tell him to go to hell.

I went to the university my father told me to go to. I pursued the career he demanded. In fact, the only time, and I do mean the only time, that I ever dared disregard my dad’s wishes was when I went into emergency medicine instead of surgery. He only let it go because Derek was the family front-runner anyway, so I didn’t really matter.

That backfired.

Bri poked at her ice with her straw. “Your dad terrifies me. When he used to come to the ER, everyone would scatter like cockroaches. And then your mom would come in after him to do a spinal consult, all sweetness and light, mopping up the tears of the nurses. Why’s there always a nice one and a mean one?”

“Because there are two types of people in the world, difficult ones and easy ones, and they marry each other.”

“Ha.”

She paused for a moment and eyed me. “Okay. So tell me about the hickey. Telling everyone you burned yourself with a curling iron—are we in tenth grade?”

I laughed.

“Did you have hate sex with Neil?”

I recoiled in horror. “No! Why would you ask me that?”

“Because you’ve been avoiding talking to me, so I can only assume that’s because you don’t want to tell me the hickey origin story. And the only kind of sex I’m gonna begrudge you is sex with Neil.”

I let out a deep breath. “I did not hook up with Neil.”

She waited. “Well?”

I made eye contact with her for a long moment, and she made a give-it-to-me gesture with her hand.

“I met someone last week.”

She pulled her face back. “You did? When? Where? What app are you using?”

“No app. Remember the guy who towed me from the ditch?”

“The middle-of-nowhere guy?”

“That’s the one. I went home with him.”

She blinked at me. “You didn’t…” she breathed.

“I did. And then I ran out at four-thirty in the morning without waking him up.” I cocked my head at her.

“Why the hell did you do that? Something wrong with him?”

I shook my head. “No. There was absolutely nothing wrong with him. He was nice, and sweet…” I looked over at her. “And twenty-eight.”

She grinned. “Daaaaamn! You get it, girl.”

“Shhhhh,” I said, hushing her, looking around. “I can’t date a twenty-eight-year-old, Bri,” I whispered. “He’s a baby.”

“He’s not your baby.”

“Cam is twenty-two,” I said.

“Yeah, well, Cam is not your kid, and the only reason your ex had a twenty-two-year-old son was because you were dating a man ten years older than you.”

I shook my head. “I didn’t even date twenty-eight-year-olds when I was twenty-eight.”

“Well, you missed out. They’re just old enough to not be annoying and they have all that sexual energy. And you can train them. They’re so eager to learn at that age, like puppies.” She dipped her head to look me in the eye. “Does he have any friends?”

I laughed.

He did have energy…My cheeks went hot thinking about it.

“I’m going to be thirty-eight this year,” I said. “I can’t date a guy that young.”

“Who says? If you were twenty-eight and he was thirty-seven, nobody would bat an eye. Nobody batted an eye when you dated Neil—and they should have, that guy was an asshole.”

I pressed my lips into a line.

“Look,” she said, going on. “You’re new to this whole single-in-your-thirties thing so you don’t know what it looks like out there, and I’m here to tell you, it doesn’t look good. It’s like picking through a garbage heap looking for the least disgusting thing. Last week I had a guy bring me funeral flowers. Like, they were a cross and they had a picture of the dead guy in the middle.”

I barked out a laugh.

“I don’t think he noticed until I pointed it out,” she said. “Oh, remember the Hawaiian-shirt guy with the porn ’stache and all the cats who kept saying I looked like his next ex-wife? Like, seriously? These are the men we’re supposed to get a UTI for? If you found someone you like, date him. Trust me.”