I roll my eyes. “Arguably Agatha Christie’s best novel, and you guessed it by chapter three? Bullarky.”
Thad glances over at me from where he’s making the roux, looking deeply offended. “I’m a bounty hunter. I can read people. I know when someone’s lying.”
He’s smiling as he says it, but the words send a jolt of panic through me. For the first time it strikes me that that’s what I’m doing, in going along with this whole friendship thing. I’m lying. To him, to myself. I’m pretending that my heart isn’t broken, that I’m not hoping something will change, that I’m not waiting for him tochange his mind and tell me he loves me, he wants to be with me, he can’t live without me.
Matilda was right. This is a terrible idea.
“Hey.” Thad’s low, gentle voice pulls me out of my panic. He’s standing close to me, frowning with concern. “You okay? Where’d you go just now?”
He steps in closer, raising his hands to tuck my hair behind my ears. His fingers gently trace over my cheekbones, the shell of my ear.
The air in the room instantly changes from friendly to intensely charged, at least on my end. At his nearness, his light touch, a jolt of want shoots through me. I’ve been making my brain repeat the mantra thatwe’re just platonic friends now, that there’s nothing romantic or sexual between us, but my body has not gotten the memo. It remembers those same fingers tracing other parts of me, his skin on mine, and it responds so quickly and urgently I’m afraid he’ll notice.
I step back, just a little, but it’s enough. The spell is broken. Thad’s hands fall back to his side. “I was just remembering something I have to do for work,” I say, lying yet again, because the truth is too mortifying to say out loud. “I’m back now.”
“Okay.” Thad’s hands flex at his sides. “You ready to make the roux?”
His smile and tone are both easy, like none of that affected him in the slightest. Of course it didn’t. Just in case I needed another reminder, I tell myself again—he’s the one who left me. He’s the one who didn’t want me. Even though he’s popped back into my life again, he hasn’t made any gestures that could be read as romantic. I have my answer.
It’s only that, looking into his blue-gray eyes, I realize what I’ve probably known all along: no matter how long we’re friends and what we go through together, a part of me will always yearn for him.
“I’m going on a date,” I blurt out without meaning to.
Thad stills, blinking at me. “What?”
“I just thought I should be honest,” I continue, because the only way out of this mess is through it, I guess. “His name is Barry something. He works with Matilda. She’s setting us up.”
I could tell him how much prodding and cajoling it took on Matilda’s part, how I agreed to everything before Thad showed up again at the library that day…but if I’m being honest, what I really want to know is whathethinks of all this. It’s sneaky and manipulative, I know, but I want to call his friendship bluff. Is this what he really wants? Us dating other people and filling each other in on the details? I think of him telling me about some new woman he’s met and know that no matter how much time has passed and how long we’ve beenfriends, it will be pure agony. And if he doesn’t feel the same…
Then I guess things really are over between us.
Thad’s expression is impossible to read. He just stares at me for a long time, blinking. Is he trying to compose himself, or is it the raw onions I just chopped? After a moment, he grunts. “Does he have a criminal record?”
Despite the immense tension I’m feeling at this conversation, I have to roll my eyes. “I don’t know, bounty hunter. I haven’t checked.”
“You should run a background check if you’re meeting a stranger,SisterHelen.”
“Well, he’s a paralegal and he works with my friend, and we’re meeting in a public place, so I think I’ll be fine.”
“I’ll run a background check on him,” Thad mutters under his breath, quiet enough that he probably thinks I didn’t hear him. “What did you say his last name was?” Glancing over and seeing my expression, he shakes his head. “Never mind, I’ll figure it out on my own.”
“Please don’t.” I shouldn’t have brought this up. With a sinking feeling in my stomach, I realize that I have my answer, and all I’m doing now is picking at old wounds. “It’s not, like, a real date. It’s not going to go anywhere. It’s just…practice.”
“Practice for what?”
“For…” I gesticulate around. “I don’t know. The real thing. So when I meet someone I actually like again, he won’t run away after having sex with me because I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Whoops. Another thing I definitely didn’t mean to say tonight. That glass of wine I’ve been nursing as we’ve been cooking must have gone to my head. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”
“That’s not what happened,” Thad says quietly.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say quickly, because I don’t. I don’t want to rehash what happened. I don’t want to hear some horse-manure excuse about not wanting to hurt me. I also don’t want to scare him off. Despite knowing that being around him will only bring me misery now, it’s still better than the alternative. “It’s fine. Honestly. I’m not trying to make things weird.”
Thad’s voice shifts, and I can tell even without looking that he’s turned to face me. “I need you to understand that isn’t what happened, though. You don’t need practice to be good at dating or sex”—he says the word quickly, like it pains him to even put that suggestion out there—“or anything else. We didn’t work out because of me, not you.”
My heart squeezes in my chest. “Thad, come on.”
“Come on, what?”
