“I thought you wanted to meet someone?” Iris said, her smile dropping away as she leaned across the table, her fiery red hair falling into her face. Iris did everything at one thousand percent, while Claire simmered at around ten.
“I did. I do. It’s just...” Claire sighed. She wasn’t great at this. Dating. Romance. Sex. She’d never had a one-night stand, never had a fuck buddy. She’d had a kid at nineteen; she didn’t have time for fuck buddies. But lately, she’d been thinking about trying to date again.Thinking.She hadn’t acted on anything. She hadn’t had the time. Between running the bookstore and parenting a preteen, she collapsed into bed every night around ten, as soon as Ruby was asleep.
“How long has it been?” Iris asked.
Claire’s mouth opened, then snapped shut quickly. It had been a while. No, longer than a while.
“Uh-huh,” Iris said. “A long-ass time. Who was it?”
“What?”
“The last person you slept with. Hell, the last person you went on adatewith.”
Claire took another swig of wine, knowing the answer would scandalize Iris’s romantic heart. “Nathan.”
Iris nearly choked on her liquor. “Nathan? My assistant Nathan? The Nathan I set you up with because you’re both ridiculously detailoriented and thought maybe you could bond over your filing system or something like that, whom you took to dinner at a lobster roll food truck in Astoria and never called again, making it incredibly awkward for me at the shop the next week? That Nathan?”
Claire sat back in her chair, slipping off her dark purple–framed glasses and polishing them on her shirt while she said nothing.
“That was six months ago, Claire.Six.I had no idea it was this bad.”
The timing had been off with Nathan, that was all. He was a perfectly nice man—gorgeous, that’s for sure, and Claire had definitely been attracted to him—but Ruby had just had her first major blowup with her best friend that week, catapulting Claire into uselessly trying to figure out how to help her daughter navigate the particular kind of hell that was fifth-grade friendships. And she’d been finishing up a small remodel in the bookstore, which had been her biggest project since taking over the business from her mom. It was important, a lot at stake.
“And I know you didn’t sleep with him,” Iris said.
Claire lifted a brow. “Is he a kiss-and-tell kind of guy?”
“No. He’s classy as shit. However, I distinctly remember you being wound just as tight as you always are the next day.”
Claire presented her middle finger to her friend.
Iris took a sip of her cocktail and then leaned forward. “Just please—please—tell me that the last time you had sex was not with the father of your adorable, precious, star-of-my-heart daughter. Tell me that wasn’t the last time.”
Claire froze, a confession on the tip of her tongue. But then she realized it wasn’t even true. She waved a casual hand. “Oh, come on, Iris, you know it wasn’t.”
“I know no such thing.”
“I tell you everything.” Or almost everything. She and Josh splitup nine years ago. Her heart pinched, just thinking of it. All the yelling, the crying. Ruby and her tiny two-year-old eyes so wide and scared while her too-young mom and dad ripped each other apart.
“Well, I must be having a memory block,” Iris said, glancing around the crowded bar. “Where the hell is Astrid? She usually writes these things down.”
“What, my sex life?”
“All of our sex lives, including her own.” Iris lifted her hand, pretending to write in the air and putting on a posh accent that sounded nothing like Astrid. “Monday, May 3, 9:23 p.m. I let Spencer penetrate me tonight, which was quite thrilling. Next time, I might go a little wild and venture into reverse cowgirl. He keeps asking for anal, but I—”
“Oh my god, stop,” Claire said, laughing. “She doesnotwrite that in her planner.”
“She writessomethingpostcoital. I guarantee it.”
“She likes order. You’re the one who personalized her planner.”
“Yes, and I put a little box at the bottom of every day that saysIntercourse:yes,no, ormaybe, just for her.”
Claire cracked up. “You did not.”
Iris winked and took a sip of her drink. They’d all been best friends since fifth grade, when both Claire and Iris moved to Bright Falls the same summer. The only time they’d been apart were the four years Astrid and Iris went off to college while Claire dealt with a little surprise in the form of her daughter. Her friends came back to Bright Falls after graduation, cementing their trio back together, and Claire had never been so relieved. Astrid and Iris tried their best to be there for her during Ruby’s first couple of years, but she refused to let them put their lives on hold. Plus, she’d had Josh.
Until she didn’t.
