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She didn’t look at him.
“He’s not a nice man.”
She wanted to cry then, and the tears wicked up from that knot deep inside fast and sharp, but she swallowed hard and blinked harder.
When she finally looked at him, his silence patient, he had finally leaned back in the chair. He smiled at her, right away, and his smile was surprisingly easy for someone whose mouth spoke in such a precise way.
“Obviously,” she said, “there’s something to this mailman thing.” She let herself look at him for a long time, this man her lips had almost touched. “I thought, after I left him, that I would do all kinds of crazy stuff. Pick up someone at a bar. Move. Go to the south of France and pick someone up at a bar. The only thing I did was buy a wholesale club pack of Coke and put it in the fridge where anyone could see it.”
Winston obligingly raised his eyebrows in question.
“You know. All the sugar. Caffeine. Or maybe it was the high-fructose corn syrup.”
“Not reasonable?”
“Not even a little. Sometimes I drink them right before bed, just like a giant ‘fuck you,’ and then I read a book with the TV on and fall asleep without brushing my teeth.”
“My God.”
“That’s right.” She cocked a finger gun at him. “Living on a prayer, baby.”
He grinned, and it was so thoroughly disarming that she let her hands fall into her lap, smiling back. The knot in her stomach had warmed and loosened further, and it felt like when she inhaled there was more room than there had been in her body for a long time.
“You’re here, though,” he said. “Here in New York, I mean. And here in this apartment. So you’re certainly capable of doing mad things.”
“You calling me crazy, mailman?”
“I’m merely pointing out that here you are, and here I am, a man who was very thoroughly picked up at a bar. What comes after the picking up at the bar bit?”
“Ruthless therapeutic confessions about our failed relationships. Cold chamomile tea.”
“Had I known, I might have been more wary of your charms.”
“I haven’t explained the part that happens after the cold tea.”
He did this thing then, this absolutely flawless Englishman thing with one eyebrow, that she’d glimpsed in the bar but had assumed was an illusion because no real person could surely convey so much inappropriate interest merely by lifting an eyebrow by a fraction of a millimeter.
“Yeah, so,” Allie croaked. “Since there is obviously so, so much that could happen after cold tea, maybe we should make a list.”
“That sounds perfectly reasonable.” He didn’t linger on his joke, and it made it even funnier as he leaned over and pulled open a drawer to extract a perfect pad of white, heavy paper. Naturally, he had a fountain pen in the inner pocket of his coat hanging over the back of his barstool.
“You understand,” Allie said, her neck scalding hot, “what kind of list this is.”
“Yes.” Winston uncapped his pen with a snick. “This is the list equivalent of an entire gross of Coca-Cola.”
“Absolutely. This is a Coke-before-bed-closet-light-it’s-been…” She gave him a questioning glance.
“Five years.”
Allie coughed. “It’s-been-five-fucking-years list.” She pointed to the paper. “Write that at the top.”
“Write ‘Coke-before-bed-it’s-been—’?”
“Just write ‘Allie and Winston’s list,’?” she amended. “We don’t have all night.”
He wrote in all capital letters, his penmanship as perfect as a draftsman’s, in thick blue ink. “Right.”
Allie suddenly understood that she was—wet. Like, not a little warmed up, either. She was pretty sure she should just freeze in one position so she wouldn’t get any more signals from her body that would mess up her swag with Winston.
