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“Guy troubles? Is that guy from the market giving you a hard time?” She grimaced.
“No, no guy troubles. Not really. The guy from the market, he’s really sweet. Older. Like so much older.” I rolled my eyes.
“Still on that, eh? So what?”
“When he graduated, I was in diapers.”
She laughed. “Well, that is quite an age gap, but whatever. Who cares.”
I shrugged. She hadn’t truly picked up on the huge age difference, and for whatever reason, I still couldn’t announce that there were fifteen years between us. A whole other person, hell, two and a half Veras. It was a big deal.
“Not quite the picture you had in mind?”
“Not at all. He’s quite connected to his family, and he seems clingy, but clingy isn’t the right word.” With that, I dropped my butt on the stool.
“How clingy? Like cry after sex clingy?” Her face contorted into a sour expression.
“Guys do that?”
It had never happened in my personal experience, except for me once, for reasons that weren’t worth going over. The dude came equipped with a tiny tool and really lacked the experience to use it to his full potential. It was depressing, and the wait for him to finish was ridiculous.
She lifted a shoulder but looked unimpressed. “Once.”
“Was it David?” My eyes bugged out.
“I’m not saying.”
“Ohmygod, it was.” Now it was going to be hard to see him without picturing the six-foot-plus tall guy sobbing like a little girl, curled up in the fetal position, on his bed.
“Stop it. It doesn’t matter who it was. Get back to the topic at hand. What kind of clingy?”
“Well…” Dragging my toe through the sawdust, I made little circles on the floor. “We had a little fight after we…”
Her eyes widened. “Wow. You dawg.”
“Yeah.” I rolled my lip between my teeth, knowing full well she and I were opposites that way. I had no issues jumping into the sack with a guy where she truly hesitated. David was a patient man to wait. “The point is, I accused him of being a serious flirt and tongue in cheek may have casually asked if he did that with everyone. He got upset and left.”
“And you were probably okay with him leaving.” Damn, she knew me too well.
However, sometime after he left, I wasn’t okay with it. But I wasn’t ready to say anything yet, so I carried on with what happened. “Then he showed up at work with a bouquet of apology flowers.”
“Holy shit, that’s like next-level different. Sends up a few flags.” She wandered over to the desk and grabbed her water bottle.
Shit. That’s what I was worried about. “Red flags?”
“Is that what you’re thinking?”
My shoulders fell, like I had the weight of the world on them. “I don’t know what I’m thinking. I don’t do relationships, and I don’t do older men. It’s so overwhelming.”
“Well, that’s not the entire truth.”
I knew what she was alluding to, as she’d been privy to a few details, just enough to get the paragraph read but not the whole encyclopedia. I pushed my shoulders back. There was nothing wrong with being sex-obsessed, it’s what I grew up with, and it’s what I knew.
“Right? I’m the girl who only wants the fun. Relationships, Jesus, are way too much work and never end well. Too much intimacy, and always with the talking about feelings and futures. Blah, blah, blah. Plus, relationships are sticky and messy and when things go wrong, they get very, very nasty.”
“Oh, Libby.” Her voice fell. “That’s not always the way it goes.”
A soft snort fell out of me. “Really? Look at your friends. Summer, who has not one but two abusive relationships in her past.”
