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After she shut the door, Heidi gave Carine’s chin a chuck. “You find all your own pain, and you don’t need me to help you.”
Carine slowly dragged a pair of French fries through the ketchup pond and said softly, “What about the pleasure?”
Fine. If you wish. I’ll lock Kevin out for the weekend and teach you what my touch feels like.
“I don’t think you need me for that, either,” was what actually came out of Heidi’s mouth. “I doubt I could keep up with you, anyway. You’ve got good knees and hips. My wrists click now when I flick Tim off.”
“You make it sound like I have one foot in the cradle, and you have one in the grave.”
“What my fillers disguise, my birth certificate illuminates.”
Holding the rest of the flounder sandwich up to her lips, Carine laughed. But when the mirth tapered off, she said, “I…think I mean it.”
“You mean what?”
Carine shrugged bashfully—a disconcerting morsel of body language coming from an extrovert who sold enormous things for a living. “You’re probably thinking, ‘Shit, if this is how she comes on to people, maybe she should stay single.’ I assure you that I’m usually a little more dynamic.”
“Is that what you’re doing? Coming on to me?” That didn’t seem to be the case to Heidi. She was gleaning curiosity and loneliness off of Carine, which were inarguably compelling things, but Heidi had been playing with Carine for too long already. Carine was meant for someone else. Carine was looking forright-now, and Heidi was convenient. That was all.
“Maybe not coming on to you,” Carine amended. “Maybe just asking outright if you’d do to me what you’ve been rumored to have done to others. I don’t care if it doesn’t mean anything. I just want you to look me in the eyes every now and then so I can feel like the person touching me actually recognizes me and cares a little.”
Heidi generally wasn’t prone to dispensing emotional feedback, but listening to Carine say things like that and then for Heidi to not express at least a little empathy was difficult. One thing she knew about Carine, though, was that while Carine may have courted attention, her preferred flavor wasn’t pity.
Heidi dragged her tongue across her teeth and took a deep breath through her nose. “You have other options.”
“I wish you’d tell me who they are.”
Heidi couldn’t. She’d made an assumption and had no list she could immediately stammer out. Perhaps when she got home, she could flip through the notebook she kept wedged beneath the private things in her safe and come up with a few names, but they wouldn’t have been people who recognized Carine. They could learn to care about her quickly enough, but they didn’t know her like Heidi.
“Say I agree to such a preposterous thing,” Heidi said. “Say I make a plan for it to happen and for the fallout to be contained. Then what? Will you be able to bump into me at Janet’s next week and say hello without blushing?”
“God, Heidi, I don’t know. I guess in my head, it doesn’t seem to be any different than you doing those favors you did for Tim.”
“The difference between you and Tim is that Tim is actively attracted to women. He didn’t have to talk himself into arousal.”
“Oh, come on,” Carine said with an eyeroll. “Don’t give me that. Straight women kiss other women in college, and sometimes they even do it when sober. I can’t believe you of all people would be so rigid about that.”
Rigid?
Heidi steeled her spine.
Did she just call me a prude?
Heidi wasn’t sure, but shesuspectedthat Carine had called her—the most chaotic lesbian in six counties—a prude.
“If I were any more of a Scorpio, I’d deem that an insult meriting revenge,” Heidi said quietly.
“Fine.” Undeterred, Carine shrugged and wadded up her lunch trash. “Where’s the revenge, and what time is it taking place? I gotta get back to the office. Lipton is probably calling my desk phone and logging how often I don’t answer.”
She’s serious. She’s seriously asking for it.
Heidi gave the tidying-up woman a long stare.
Everyone who spent a significant amount of time at Clay’s knew that Carine had a penchant for impulsivity, but most of the time, she came to her senses before following through on anything that might bite her in the ass later.
Heidi had certainly bitten her fair share of asses. She’d been trying desperately to not become any more familiar with Carine’s than she already was. She didn’t know what else to do but offer Carine an out. She’d give Carine what Carinethoughtshe wanted and then allow her suitable time and space to change her mind.
She’d view Heidi as a one-time experience, and Heidi would be delighted with that. She didn’t want to get messy with Carine. Messiness was for shameless strangers who wouldn’t give a damn what the locals thought about them.
“Saturday,” Heidi said levelly. “Ten o’clock. My place. I normally go to bed at nine. If you don’t show up, I will make it my life’s mission to tell you all about my deepest darkest things and perhaps even include you in them.”
Carine blinked a couple of times, making her thickly-mascara’d lashes swat her upper cheeks. Then she shrugged and grabbed her drink out of the holder. “Okay. I better go write that down. I’d never remember anything otherwise.”
She left.
Now we’ll see how long it’ll take for her to change her mind.
