After Hours (InterMix)(94)

“Like there’s anybody you can stand. Plus we’re not a couple, anyhow, so that doesn’t apply to us.” I said it a little too fast, probably giving away the fact that I felt something about the topic. What, I didn’t even know. But even having the concept of coupledom on the table instantly made me feel all overheated and irritable, fuse primed.

Kelly sipped his beer, gaze pointed at my face the entire time.

“What?” I asked. “We’re not a couple. How do I even know you’re not banging like, six other women from Larkhaven?” Or at least a couple from Lola’s. Kelly wasn’t Prince Charming, but he was employed and interesting, with a hell of a body and a nice face, if you liked ’em mean. He could surely get laid more readily than most any other guy in this city.

He smirked. “I know we’re not a couple. I just think it’s cute, how adamant you are about it.”

I narrowed my eyes, faking over-the-top suspicion. “How many other women from Larkhaven are you banging, by the way?”

“You’re the only girl I’m banging from anyplace, right now. I’ll be thirty-nine in a few weeks, and you work the same marathon shifts as me—I’m too f*cking exhausted to juggle more than one woman at a time. Let the twentysomethings deal with that hassle.”

“Twentysomethings like me?”

He made a face like he’d forgotten exactly how young I was. “I suppose.”

“You know I’m banging like, half the orderlies from the Warbler building.”

He mimed a smarmy, silent laugh and took a drink.

It felt acutely as though there was more on the table than just our beers and elbows.

So we were both seeing only each other, and now we both knew it. That put us perhaps one serious conversation away from Kelly becoming my boyfriend, but I didn’t even know how I felt about that anymore.

I’d never had a boyfriend who’d fixed my car, or defended my honor, or f*cked my living daylights out. Did I want one, if it meant admitting I needed those things?

When the waitress approached, Kelly warned, “I’m getting you the chicken.”

“Sure.”

I drank deeply, and watched as he ordered manicotti for himself, adding that, “The lady will have the chicken parm.” I actually felt sort of flattered by the old-school treatment. He didn’t seem like such a threat to my feminism anymore, and his be-my-bed-slave thing struck me as a special-occasion deal, not his baseline sexual MO. I knew things about him, things girlfriends knew—what he liked to have said to him in bed, what brand of beer was his, how his voice sounded right when he woke up.

But no amount of intimate insider information changed the fact that he oozed lone wolf. He’d told me pretty straight; he didn’t think he was cut out for marriage.

Not that I was picking out dresses, by any means.

Fuck, I hated that I was even thinking about any of this shit. It had all my Mom-nerves buzzing.

And I hated that I could already pinpoint the exact flavor of heartbroken I’d feel if I did hear about him seeing some other woman, even though he had every right.

Worst of all, I’d known I’d wind up feeling all this crap before I even agreed to sleep with him, yet here I was, being the sort of woman that annoyed me so much. Like I didn’t know full well that the people who grate on us the worst are always the clearest reflections of our own weaknesses.

What I did know for sure, though, was that if the are-we-a-thing? conversation was going to get broached, Kelly would have to be the one to broach it. I could tell from the chaos in my head just pondering it, I wasn’t ready to lead those negotiations.

Kelly folded his arms atop the table. The blood from where I’d scratched him had dried to two dark smears, fresh battle wounds to add to the tableau.

I eyed his fingers, trying to imagine what it’d be like if Kelly were my boyfriend, and I could just reach out and hold his hand. What if that wedding band, the one that unintentionally told women, back off, he’s taken . . . What if he were taken, and that ring’s inaccurate message was on my side?

Suddenly Kelly reached between us, tapping my wrist with his finger. “Did I freak you out or something?”

“Pardon? When?”

“I dunno. You’re all glazed over.”

“It must be the beer. Or the sex,” I added quietly, eager to steer us back to an arena we knew how to grapple in.

“You got defensive, after I was teasing you about couples shit.”