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“What are you doing?” he asks.
“I have to go,” I tell him. “But thanks.”
He laughs but the sound is muted and unhappy. “I can’t believe you just thanked me,” he says, running a hand over his face. “Get back in bed.”
But I’m already pulling up my shorts as I walk away. “I’ve really got to go,” I tell him, practically running from the room.
23
He’s gone Sunday morning when I reach the buffet.
“What a great guy,” says Nicole. “He flew all that way for one hour at a party.”
I think of him watching my face as he fucked me, his eyes hazy, his jaw clenching as he got close.
“Well, it’s not like he was saving orphans from a burning building,” I reply.
I skip the post-brunch activities, claiming I have work, but the thought of the empty office is just too unappealing, so I go home instead—which isn’t much better.
“Are you busy?” I ask Keeley when I return her call.
“Yes,” she says. “I’m trying to decide if I want Oreos or barbeque potato chips from the vending machine.”
“Are you certain you’re a doctor?” I open my refrigerator, which is just as empty as I anticipated. I should have actually eaten at this morning’s brunch. “Like, was it a real medical school, or was it a strip mall with a handwritten sign out front that just said medical school?”
“Fine, Miss Judgmental. I’ll get the Sun Chips. I’m pretty sure they’re health food because I don’t enjoy them. Anyway, how was sex with Ben?”
I blink. “What makes you think I had sex with Ben?”
“Are we really doing this dance right now? You obviously did. You sound intensely invested, which always means it’s about Ben, but you sound a little horrified, which means you either slept with him or murdered him. I can’t help you with removing the evidence if you murdered him, by the way, because I’m stuck at the hospital until tomorrow.”
I shut the refrigerator door. Clearly, no food is going to materialize through continued staring. “Like I’d ask you to help me remove evidence. You’d leave a trail of Hot Tamales leading right to the burial site.”
“If you think I’d drop Hot Tamales and not eat them straight off the ground, you don’t know me very well,” she says. “Anyway. The sex?”
“It wasn’t a big deal.”
She laughs. “Shut up.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Fine. I don’t believe you but I’ll play your game. So what happens now?”
“Nothing, obviously. It’s not like I’d date him.”
“I’m no one to throw stones, but it seems to me your bar for who you sleep with should be set higher than your bar for who you’d date.”
As loathe as I am to accept advice on this matter from a woman who once seduced a monk during a silent meditation retreat, she has a point. “It’s not that he isn’t good enough,” I admit aloud for the first time ever. “It’s that he’s not what I want.”
“Ah, yes,” she says, with a quiet laugh. “You still want flannel boy—the wise, widowed but strangely youthful farmer. I mean, what would you even wear on a farm? Do you own a pair of boots?”
“Yes,” I begin. “I have the Burberry—”
“Boots that aren’t designer, or suede or high-heeled.”
“Oh,” I say with a sigh. “Shut up.”
She laughs. “Just think about it, honey. Because repeatedly hooking up with a man you’ve talked about obsessively for two years straight…doesn’t sound like hate to me.”
