“What?”
“No one is walking around calculating who to date.” He pretended to scrawl numbers on the palm of his hand.
“Maybe notliterally,but I bet you there’s an underlying logic to it.” I opted not to mention the obvious example of him and Terry, his equal in beauty.
“It’s not that complicated.” He tapped my arm. “How did you and your girl gang hook up?”
“Oh. It’s kind of a long story.” Which I had no intention of sharing. Especially the part involving him.
“Okay, but at some point you realized you like hanging out with each other. The conversation flows. You make each other laugh. There’s good energy.” He looked expectantly at me.
“Yes, but there has to be some difference, or else everyone would go around kissing their friends.”
“That would be rude. Unless they were into it.” He wagged his eyebrows like a mustache-twirling villain in a black cape. “Seriously, though. It starts with that same kind of connection.”
A light bulb went off in my head. “Like inHowards End!”
“I don’t do porn, Mary.”
I sent him a quelling look. “It’s abook. There’s this really famous line—‘Only connect.’” I waited for him to make some expression of amazement.
“That’s it?”
I gave a sheepish nod. The truth was that I’d always found it a bit opaque myself. Was it supposed to be a person-to-person thing, or something vast and philosophical? I glanced hopefully at Alex. “What do you think it means?”
“In your book or ... ??” He circled a palm between us, presumably indicating the world at large.
“With real people. Like you were saying. When it’s more than platonic.”
He rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “It can be a lot of things. You might like the way a person laughs, or how they think, their smell—anything that makes you want to cross a room to talk to them.”
“And then?”
He shifted on the bench, bringing his hip and thigh into contact with mine. “You get to know them.”
Moving away would have been awkward, so I held perfectly still. “And?”
“And then you feel something, or you don’t.”
My voice dropped to a whisper. “Like what?”
He didn’t answer right away, as though there might be some other layer to my question he needed to decipher first.
“Like your day is better when you see them,” he said, looking steadily at me. “And you think about them when they’re not around. Or make excuses to get close, because you wonder if their skin is as soft as it looks. That kind of thing.”
I swallowed. “Oh.”
“Why do you ask, Mary?” He stretched his arm along the back of the bench. “Are you having feelings?”
“It’s for my friends,” I said hastily.
“You have feelings for your friends?”
“No! Not kissy feelings, anyway.” I blew out a breath before starting over. “I mean they’re counting on me to help them find dates for Winter Formal. Except Arden, of course. She’s all set.”
“What about you?”
“I’m not worried about that.”
