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“Thank you.” She smiles. “River is sweet, huh?”
“Very.”
She looks at me carefully.
“He isn’t like you,” I say.
“Like me how?”
“He’s romantic,” I say.
“Dee, everyone is romantic compared to me.”
“But he likes you,” I say. “He really likes you. In a serious kind of way. Not a one-night-in-the-back-seat kind of way.”
“I’ll make sure we’re on the same page,” she says.
I doubt that. It’s more likely she’ll break his heart. Or, somehow, he’ll spread the word of love and convince her relationships are great. If he’s desperate to convince me, he’s probably desperate to convince her, too. “What did you say to Jake anyway?” I ask. “Did you tell him you put things on pause because you wanted more physical action?”
The confidence drains from her face. “How?”
“What do you mean how?”
“How do you say that to a guy?”
Lexi doesn’t know how to broach a topic? Wait. “Isn’t this your expertise?”
“Relationship conversations?”
“Seduction?”
She looks to the floor. “What am I supposed to do? Put on my Horizontal Lambada playlist, pull out a bottle of wine, and tell him I want to slip into something more comfortable?”
“Is that what you normally do?”
“It’s different,” she says.
“How?”
“I like him.”
“Then why did you break up with him?”
“Because I can’t be with someone I like, who I haven’t fucked,” she says. “You know that.”
And all at once, reality clicks into place. She’s afraid of intimacy, and she uses sex to hide it.
She’s afraid of getting too close to Jake. She’s basically admitting it.
I feel a surge of validation. Iamdoing the right thing for her. So what if it’s a little manipulative and happens to be the right thing for the app, too?
“Because I need a man who satisfies and, well, I can’t risk finding out he doesn’t right before we get fake engaged,can I?”
“No one is asking you to get fake engaged.”
“Doesn’t mean they won’t,” Lexi counters.
True. And her point about Jake is actually pretty logical. “Wait a few weeks and then broach the topic.”
