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“Sorry about that.” She reaches out and squeezes my arm. “We just came up with that! Programmer hands are athing.”
Her eyes drift off to the doorway, and I can tell she’s reliving something about Janus right now, and I shake my head at her. I don’t want to picture what he might do to her with his hands, and I really don’t want to think about what Fabian could do to me with his. I don’t need to start imagining …
“What other profession might have hands that …?” Jo starts, and oh, this is why she’s one of my best friends. I want to bounce over the table and hug her.
“Rock climbing?”
“Oh, you’re so bad!” She tips forward, hugging her arms around her tiny body, before rocking back. “Climbers need all this strength in their fingers. I think I’ve read somewhere that they do specific exercises so they can pull themselves up. And they’re roughened, too, from all the rock abrasion …”
“Imagine what sex would be like with a guy like that.”
“I think it would blow my head off,” she says, and we’re both quiet for a minute. How many rock climbers have I met? What talents might they have that I have never appreciated? Aside from insane muscles and the ability to scale impossible cliffs.
“Not a lot of climbers based in Manhattan,” I mutter just as she says:
“You need some profession where they have to use their tongue.” She’s grinning like an idiot now, and I snort into my drink, narrowly avoiding a repeat of the earlier mishap. She has no filter.
“You’re filthy.” But I’m nodding, too. “I can’t think of any sport that requires a man to use his tongue that much.”
“There should be,” she says. “How amazing would that be?”
“The people who run these sporting events are sadly lacking in imagination. What about those people that do eating challenges, like burgers on strings or something?”
Jo laughs. “Holy shit, yes. Strong lips, tongue and jaw, I guess, for a challenge like that.” She shakes her head at me. “Burgers on strings? Where did that come from?”
“No idea.”
“Do you think we could devise some exercises for guys to do … I’m going to suggest it to Janus.”
I freeze. “Oh God! No way, Jo. Don’t you dare tell him what I said about Fabian. I’ll never hear the end of it.”
She shakes her head, standing up to head over to the counter. “I know: He’s like a dog with a bone when he gets hold of something. I won’t say anything to him. I promise.”
I eye up the people at the next table. How much have they heard?
“Seriously, though, what are you going to do about Fabian?” she says when she returns, placing a flapjack in the middle of the table. She slides into her seat and cuts it up, and I absently pick up a piece, pop it in my mouth and chew.
“Oh God, Jo, nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
“But why? He’d be perfect for you.”
I stare at her again. “You’re kidding me, right? Youdoremember David?”
I met David at college, and he was my biggest champion, and maybe that’s why he was so addictive. He was one of those people who paid attention from the first moment you talked to him. I thought it was because of me: It took me a while to realize he was that way with everyone.
“Fabian is so not David. David was a slimeball.”
“Well, thanks for telling me now,” I grumble, though I know I’m not being fair. Jowasdubious about David. She saw how he was trying to be good for me, and worried that the effort would fall apart. But why wouldn’t the same thing happen with Fabian? “They are so alike, that whole car-crash, bad-boy thing. I can’t do that again, Jo. I’ve just got myself back together.”
At the end, when I found out what David had done, I realized how often he would say he had told me something and that I must have forgotten.Lies by omission.Even now I wonder whether I got certain things wrong, the self-doubt pressing in around my heart. I was too honest, too open, and he exploited that. It felt so real, so right what we shared. The pain hits me sharp beneath my ribs.
Jo shakes her head. “I don’t think that Fabian’s like David. Janus has known him a long time. I think he’s a gray wolf.”
“Awhat?”
“A gray wolf—they mate for life.”
“Where do you come up with all this stuff?”
