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It would be useful if he could step down the aggression. “Do you call me asshole in yours?”
“Sometimes I think of you as Dinkus. I used to imagine you wore very ugly underwear.”
That was a new one. He’d been called all the crude, insulting, anatomically violent, unprintable names there were, but as far as he knew, no one imagined his underwear, which was ordinary, and most of it was in the basket he’d shoved in the corner.
She went on. “Because you were intimidating and being afraid of you wasn’t going to get me my story.”
“Are you afraid of me now?” He’d wanted to get out of doing the love experiment, and he’d own up to intimidating her, but he didn’t like what that said about him. He was often awkward with people socially, with women particularly, and he’d been especially wrong-footed with Honeywell because she came with the pressure of having to show he could be more than his headlines.
She picked up her wineglass and looked at him over the top of it. “About as much as you’re afraid of me.”
He should be examining his conscience. He’d made a colleague feel vulnerable, deliberately. Intimidation was a tactic he used to get information he needed. He used it in the fighting pit as well. Intimidate your opponent and they’d be on edge, more likely to make a mistake, let slip the words you needed to bring them undone, lower their guard. Intimidate a woman, outside of some bedroom game she was in on—that wasn’t the kind of man he wanted to be. But then Honeywell was a colleague and she didn’t ask to be treated differently from anyone else.
This was fucked up. What he had on his conscience was a vision of Honeywell’s dress on his floor, and that intimidated the shit out of him.
“The next two questions are about friendship,” she said. “What does friendship mean to you?”
Talking about friendship was at least five grades smarter than thinking about sex with Honeywell, than wondering if she was thinking about it with him. “It was easier to have friends when I didn’t have a dinkus.”
“But you have friends
?”
He almost laughed at the worried edge she put on that. He had old friends, married with kids, with busy lives. He could say he didn’t have time for friends or he needed to make time to reconnect, or people sought him out for friendship of one kind or another but always with an aim to what benefits would accrue to themselves. Both answers made him look pathetic.
“I need to work on the friendship thing.” Still a pitiful answer, but it was honest.
“Me too,” she said. “At least I don’t have to worry that people want to be my friend for what I can do for them.”
If he lurched across the table and grabbed her, backed her up against the wall and kissed her till her knees knocked, that would be aggressive. It wouldn’t make them friends, and that was the best outcome for this experiment.
“What do you value most in a friendship?”
He needed to move, so he picked up their empty plates and took them to the sink. “That feeling where you don’t need to explain yourself but at the same time a good friend holds you accountable to your own truths.”
“Oh, that’s good. My hometown friends tried to talk me out of coming here. Said I’d hate it, said I’d come slithering back. It hurt. It’s like they expect me to fail and they’ll be happy when I do. I realized it was because they thought I was judging them, but I’m not. I just wanted something different than living in the same town my whole life.”
“Friendship, it’s overrated.”
“Maybe for you. I miss having close friends. I have colleagues and acquaintances, and I’m on nodding terms with the dealer who hangs on my street corner; he’s stopped trying to sell me crack. There’s a man I like at yoga and Spinoza likes me.”
“Stay away from Spinoza.” He came back to the table. He didn’t like the idea of her living close to a dealer or having the attention of the man at yoga.
She laughed. “What’s your most treasured memory?”
Kissing you against the glass wall of Elaine’s. “Time with my Pops. He made everything an adventure, and I was the hero of all of them.”
“I had this one weekend.” The way she said it made him pay more attention. Please don’t let this be a memory about losing her virginity. “I guess you’d call it a one-night stand, except it went on for three nights.”
Oh fuck me. Friends should be able to talk about this kind of thing, but he didn’t want to be that kind of a friend. He was scum. He wanted to be the kind of friend who saw her naked and desperate.
Often.
“And that’s when I knew I had to get out of Orderly.”
He made a sound of relief and covered it with a cough. He couldn’t have stood there and listened to her talk about having sex without damage to his intestinal fortitude, and damn the cliché.
“What’s your most terrible memory?”
