Page 121 of In Somnis

“Tessa!” I look around instinctively.

“What? I’m team Paul. He smelled your neck. I respect that in a man.”

“He didn’t smell my neck.”

“You said he buried his face in your neck.”

“It was more of a…” I gesture vaguely. “An adjacent situation.”

“Lenny…”

“Fine. He smelled my neck.” I take another pull of my milkshake. “But he also said he’s been celibate for five years. Which, he told me, like thirty minutes after I met him,” I add.

The noise she makes is inhuman. Several nearby shoppers turn to look.

“Sorry,” I say to them. “She’s fine.”

“I am not fine,” Tessa informs me, pressing both hands flat to the bench as if she needs to ground herself. “Lenny. He told you he’s been celibate for five years?”

“And that he has two months left.”

“Two…” She stops, then presses her lips together. “Holy shit, you know what that means, right?”

“That he has very good self-control?”

She makes a sound that is a half-laugh, half-delighted shriek, and covers her mouth with her hand. “That means he’s going to go feral when he finally gets you. Which is great because you need to be folded like laundry by a man with a little bit of gray in his beard.”

“Tessa!”

“What?” She chuckles. “It’s the truth.”

“You don’t even know him.”

“Oh, I do.” The smugness in her expression softens. “I know exactly what kind of man he is. He’s a good one, Lenny.”

I open my mouth to ask her what she means by that and how she could possibly know, but then I think about ice water in a tumbler he washed and refilled. About white sheets tucked at the corners, and Mr. Muffin placed with obvious care. About the way my name sounds different in his mouth than it does in anyone else’s. About his hand at the small of my back in the kitchen doorway, and his lips at the corner of my mouth, and the fact that he spent three hours picking out furniture for someone he hit with his car and calls it nothing.

“You like him, don’t you?” Tessa asks, softer now.

I look down at my milkshake. “Yeah,” I admit quietly, and I know I would only ever admit it to her. “I do.”

She bites her straw, muttering something that sounds almost like “that’s not going to make this easier,” but before I can ask what she means, she says, “Now. Tell me about the tall one with the freckles and the paint on his hands.”

“Nevan,” I say, just as he walks past us in the mall in his unhurried way, hands tucked in his hoodie pocket.

“Oh,” Tessa says beside me, her eyes following him. “He’s handsome.”

“He’s twenty-seven.”

She gives me a look. “And?”

“And that makes him eight years younger than us.”

“Paul is five years older than us.”

“That’s not the same.”

“That comment made you a hypocrite. You know, John Lennon was younger than Yoko Ono.”