“‘Coolest cats’?” I say with a laugh. “You really have been hanging out with octogenarians too much.”
But Dane’s voice cuts through the moment. “Nora, stop flirting and come eat something before you pass out!”
I can feel my face heat up. Goddamn it, Dane. Why does she have to make any interaction as awkward as humanly possible for me.And was I flirting? Shit. Does he think I’m ... flirting?
He puts a hand on my shoulder and shakes his head with a small smile on his lips, a wordless commiseration that acknowledges my friend is razzing me. I appreciate him letting my embarrassment go unsaid.
“I’ll see you soon, Nora,” he says with a squeeze. “Thanks for the lovely if unintentional evening.”
And with that, he turns around and opens the door to the stairwell. Leaving me to round on a smirking Dane and give her the hell she’s expecting.
Chapter 15
“That wasextremelyawkward,” I say, trying to fix her with my most stern stare even as she ignores me and sets an omelet on the table.
“Being up on your roof all night with a dude you can’t decide if you want to murder or bone? Yeah, that must’ve been hard.”
She grabs a fork, pours a glass of water, and then sticks them both next to my plate, eyeing me and then the chair. She sits down and watches me until I give in and sit across from her.
If she is trying to use melted cheese as a distraction tactic, it’s working. At some point the hunger had started to feel normal, but shoving that first bite of hot pillowy eggs and velvety molten bliss into my mouth makes me even more ravenous. Dane watches as I inhale the entire omelet without saying a word and then wash it down with the full water glass.
“Hungry?” she jokes.
“I didn’t quite realize how hungry,” I admit in between bites. “I didn’t have dinner before I got locked upstairs last night.”
Dane leans in to look at me closer, like she’s inspecting me for something. “So you didn’t bone him?”
“Stop saying ‘bone,’” I retort, the seriousness a little diminished by my mouth being full of toast.
“Yeah, I guess the roof, with no cushioning or like ... wipes ... would be a subpar experience,” she snorts.
I fix her with another look, and she just chuckles.
“This wasn’t like a choice I had,” I emphasize. “It was a shitty situation, and we made the best of it.”
“Well, notthe best,” Dane counters, still laughing under her breath.
I rub my hand down my face, not sure if I can take her mockery. It would be funnier if I wasn’t feeling the remnants of being so inconveniently attracted to him. But perhaps it’s a little bit like Stockholm syndrome, and none of that will seem real in the light of a normal day.
“Look, maybe he’s not as bad as I originally thought,” I admit, and I hate how smug Dane now looks. “But no, I am not interested in him. He’s still not the kind of person I would hang out with on purpose. And he’s sort of a former patient, so even the thought is on the border of ethical. Please just drop it,” I sigh.
Dane holds up both hands in surrender. It’s one thing I love about her—she calls things like she sees them but never belabors a point, especially when it’s clearly bothering me. She gets up and sticks two more pieces of bread in the toaster and starts busying herself with making a cup of tea. She’s mothering me, but I sort of like it after the night I’ve had.
I hear my phone chirp and remember it’s been sitting there abandoned all night. I stand up to go retrieve it. There are a lot of messages on it—Dane’s increasingly bewildered reaction to my nonresponse; my mother reminding me I’m supposed to take her to the farmers’ market before work today because “I’m not sure how to pick the right tomato. How do you know if it’s good or if it’s mealy?”; a previous Tinder date who I’m probably going to ghost. And there, the newest message, is from J.
J: Are you a gym person?
I have no idea where this is going, but I’m mostly glad he didn’t text me last night when I couldn’t respond.??Sorry to say I’m not,??I write back.
I stare at the screen, watching the little dots that indicate he’s writing something back, anticipating with a slight giddiness I can’t pinpoint.
J: Oh don’t be sorry. I just wanted to make sure, because I’m definitivelyNota gym person but I didn’t want to do that awkward thing where I berate gym people and then you tell me you run a 10k every morning or bench press before breakfast.
Nora: I’m not only not running a 10k before breakfast, but I don’t even have a concept for how far that is.
J: To be fair, it was the bench pressing that was before breakfast.
Nora: Ah, okay. Well in that case, definitely that person. Does it count if I’m only bench pressing a small irritated dog?
