“Trust me,” Peter said, as he cut open the tape that sealed another box. “Lisa wasn’t doing ittome—she wasn’t thinking about me. At all.”
“Still.” Shay kept it to herself, but she was pretty damn certain that Lisa had hoped Peter was listening at the door.
“That change is fine with me,” he said, so she made the deletion and hitsend.
“Okay, Maddie,” she murmured as she also sent Maddie a text:Just sent another email.“Send me something back.”
She and Peter were in his garage, where yesterday afternoon the SEAL candidates nicknamed Seagull and Timebomb had neatly stacked all of the boxes of Lisa and Maddie’s belongings that had previously been in the Palm Springs storage unit.
They’d made the decision to multi-task and have Shay type Peter’s Chapter Three while he opened and searched through boxes. Neither of them knew what he was hoping to find, but they both agreed that doing something was better than nothing.
Whoever had done the actual packing of those boxes hadn’t taken the time to label any of them. They’d also packed weirdly random things together, like piles of junk mail in with the coffee mugs. A small garbage pail filled with dryer lint had actually been packed in with a mound of unfolded laundry.
Maddie’s computer was indeed deceased—a casualty of the quake. So after Shay had changed into garage-rummaging clothes—an old pair of shorts and a tank top that clearly dated from 2008—she’d brought over her own laptop. She sat with it now, in a folding lawn chair, in the shade at the open door of the garage.
“What happened to make Lisa change her mind? Seventeen months after graduation,” she asked. Somethingmusthave happened.
“Her mom died,” Peter told her.
“Oh, no.”
“Yeah, it was rough. Not completely out of the blue, because she’d been ill, but…I went back to San Diego with Lisa. There were so many of her relatives in town, we ended up staying atmymother’s house. She assumed we were together, so she put us in my old room. It wasn’t a big deal, we were sharing a much smaller space in LA and I was fine with sleeping on the floor. But Lisa was really upset, and…” He cleared his throat. “We ended up sharing more than a bed—whoa! Hey! Look at this.”
He held up a book, and whoa indeed, it wasHarry’s War. The familiar red, white, and blue cover was from the first hardcover edition that had come out four, no,fiveyears ago.
But Shay was too freaked out by what Peter had just told her to really comprehend. Lisa had been upset—the way Shay had been upset after the earthquake. And sex had happened in both instances, because he was too kind and well-mannered to say no.
It was stupid of her to be freaked out—it was exactly what she already knew. She’d been in need of his comfort and pity, and she was clearly female enough so that he’d run his bar hookup pattern and—
Wait. Which was it? Pity fuck or bar hookup? Or maybe, in her case, a weird mashup of both?
“Lisa was a Shayla Whitman fan,” Peter said, pulling more of her books out of the box. His ex had what looked like ten of them, most in paperback. “I’m reading this one—” he held upOutside of the Lines “—right now.”
“What…?” Shay said.
He stacked the books in a neat pile. “Yeah, didn’t I tell you?”
“Noooo.”
“I’m pretty sure I did. I downloaded it the night we met.”
“You definitely didn’t tell me that.” Oh, my God.
“I really like it,” he said.
Oh, shit. “You don’t have to say that.”
“Well, yeah, I know,” he said. “But I mean it. It’s well written, the characters are great—I could swear that I know them, that I’ve worked with them. You got that FBI team dynamic really right. But I think what I like the best is that it’s fun. It’s wildly entertaining—every time I pick it up, I can’t put it down. It’s like reading a really good action movie, with porn thrown in.”
Whoa! Wait! “Romance isnotporn,” she told him. “Porn is sex without an emotional connection. Romance is all about the emotions. I mean, yeah, insert tab A into slot B, but the end result isn’t just a balloon-drop with confetti. There are massive feelings happening, too.”
Peter nodded. “Fair enough. But it’s also true that the feelings ping-pong everywhere. They aren’t quiteYou complete me.”
“Well,yeah,” Shay said. “Because that’s bullshit. People—particularly women—don’t need someone else to be whole. They need someone else to stand beside them and help them be the best person that they can be. To support—and enhance who they are. Not to fill in some mythical missing piece.” She made a raspberry sound, muttering,“You complete me.”
He was laughing at her. “I suspect I hit a hot button. I apologize.”
“Believe me, I’m very familiar with the disrespect this genre gets.”
