That last thought felt like it could have had some hard edges, but it didn’t. She was thirty-four. She no longer expected to be anyone’s first anything. People her age came to the table with a lot more history. She’d gone out with people who had kids and dogs and divorces. She was nothing but lucky to get this expert pressure along all the tense spots on her head, places she hadn’t even known about.
“Don’t ever stop doing that,” Rose mumbled even as her eyelids got heavy.
“Okay,” Tom readily agreed. “Every night, if you want.”
“I want,” Rose said. “But your boyfriend will probably demand some kind of schedule.”
It was a throwaway line—she wanted to go to sleep, not have a complicated discussion about their limits, because Rosewas a normie, a square, and she needed to check out Tumblr or wherever people learned how to navigate the boundaries set by their head-scratcher’s main boyfriend before she got into it.I could be cool about this, she supposed she was saying.
“My what?” Tom said.
“Your boyfriend.” Maybe that wasn’t the right word. She didn’t know the open relationship terminology. She didn’t think Boyd was his partner, because she didn’t think she believed in long-term commitments that opened not just for sex but for regular head-scratching arrangements with ex-wives. Though what did she know, really?
Oh look, she was awake again. “Boyd,” she specified and rolled over. Tom, still sprawled across most of the pillows, looked honestly confused.
“Boyd’s not my boyfriend. He’s not my anything.”
Rose frowned at him. “Okay.”
Tom propped himself on his elbows, blinking rapidly.
“You don’t believe me,” he said.
She wasn’t sure she did.
“There are photos of the two of you kissing in a national newspaper. Sloane said there are fifty bazillion pictures of you on the Internet—”
“Because we’re in a production together, and his fans are weird.”
Rose searched Tom’s face for signs of deception, finding none. But he was a good actor. “Really?” she said doubtfully. Tom and Adrian were very good friends, roommates over multiple years, and yet Tom had never shown up wearing Adrian’s clothes. “Seriously? You two never…?”
Jesus, whynot?
Tom looked down at the pillows, rearranging them with atypical delicacy. He didn’t meet her eyes.
“Okay, well, you see how that’s a different question, right?”
That was actually a hilarious response to a straightforward inquiry.
“No! I mean, I could tell you, but do you actually want me to?” he asked. “I guess wanting to know if I’ve got something going on with him is fair—and Idon’t—but do you really want to know what I was doing before you showed up on my doorstep? I don’t mind telling you everything, but do you want to hear it?”
Rose typically skipped that conversation, but a small, bitter part of her pushed her to continue.
“Yes,” she said. “Sure, go on. Anyone more famous than Boyd Kellagher? Anyone else I’ve heard of?”
“If I—if I tell you, are you going to do the same?” Tom asked, a tense little line appearing on his forehead. She couldn’t tell if he actually wanted to know or just thought this was a trump card to avoid admitting to what was surely a good decade-long fun run.
“Me?” Rose said, pressing a palm against her chest and looking at him with wide, concerned eyes. Two people he’d never met, one he had, none of them any of his business.
Annoyed, she screwed up her mouth and then looked away with a deliberate expression of frustration. As though deeply unwilling to admit it, she dropped her shoulders. She wasn’t an actress, but she’d gone to alotof rehearsals.
“So I actually haven’t—yeah. Since you. I just didn’t—itdidn’t feel right. I couldn’t.” She sighed with what she hoped was convincingly tragic, celibate resignation. “I took vows, you know.” She held the position for thirty seconds before she peeked at him.
His jaw had dropped. He was staring at her with four different emotions warring for top position on his face: Panic. Guilt. Disbelief. Awe?
Then she rolled her eyes at him.
He grabbed a pillow and held it out as though he was going to smother her with it. Rose snorted, falling back on the bed.
