Bethany soldiered on, still faintly pink.
“Soooo... I kind of wanted to get him a present. You know, something small, but not something dorky or jokey. I thought maybe I’d ask you for ideas. Wasn’t sure who else to ask. I’ve only gone out with him twice, but we’re going out again tomorrow, and...” She lifted a shoulder in a shrug, and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “It’ll be our third date, kind of.”
Glory’s stomach suddenly and violently cramped into a pretzel knot.
Everyoneknew that the third date was supposed to be the sex date.
And Bethany didn’t strike Glory as at all prudish. She looked like a girl unopposed to having a good time.
Glory looked up into Bethany’s face and for a moment didn’t see her. Her own had gone bizarrely hot, and the backs of her hands fuzzed over in heat. Somehow knowing that it hadn’t happened yet, and knowing when it would, was worse. The notion of Eli sleeping with Bethany—his hands in her blond hair, his mouth touching hers—made her want to lift open the top of her head and shot-put her brain far, far away from her, somewhere her imagination couldn’t torture her.
It was as excruciating a moment as she’d ever experienced.
But it was a valuable moment. Because the shock of it burrowed like a bullet down through all the various strata of hurt and anger and finally struck an unshakeable bedrock truth that made all the hurt and anger pointless.
She sat with that truth for a silent moment.
And all at once she knew what to say to Bethany.
“Is twenty-five bucks too much to spend on a gift?”
“Of course not.” Bethany sounded surprised. “That’s about what I had in mind.”
Of course not.Glory and her mother could have heated hour-long Kitchen Table Summits over how they could spend twenty-five extra dollars if any should show up.
And in a flash Glory kind of understood why Jonah might had done what he had done. Because that chasm between wanting and having was sometimes unbearable. It took a strong person to patiently build a bridge across it, stick by stick. Jonah wasn’t that person.
It took someone like Eli.
“I know what you should get him,” she told Bethany.
Eli’s entire body was clean scrubbed and he smelled like a crisp Irish spring, which he knew because he’d given his pits a good sniff. He’d trimmed up his privates and inspected his nose hairs and shaved his face until it glowed. His house got the same treatment: it now smelled like bleach, Lemon Pledge, and the Air Wick candle he’d chucked into his basket at the supermarket, and he could see himself in the surface of his coffee table. He’d thrown out all the expired food in the refrigerator, replaced it with a few grown-up things like wine, cheese, and a head of broccoli so that he didn’t look so much a bachelor, and he’d pummeled his sofa and bed pillows into plumpness and changed his sheets to the high-thread-count ones his mom had given him last Christmas and which he hadn’t seen the point in, because weren’t sheetssheets? They were pretty soft, granted.
Eli of course knew what traditionally happened on a third date.
And so he did all this stuff ritualistically, as if in so doing he could summon the desire.
But he’d slept badly last night.
He’d kissed Bethany when he’d dropped her off last night after The Baby Owls show. A brush of his lips against hers. Which probably puzzled the crap out of her. She was the kind of woman men would normally love to paw.
He’d done it to be polite.
And then he’d asked her out to dinner tonight, in both defiance of how he felt and retaliation for last night’s show, and as an apology to Bethany for not wanting to paw her. Bethany didn’t know any of this, of course. She just knew she was going out to dinner at a nice restaurant with a sheriff’s deputy.
Because he’d left the Misty Cat feeling as though Glory had essentially whaled on his soul like a cowbell.
He was still reverberating, feeling bruised, and swinging between the poles of quietly, coldly furious about it and... damn, but it was also just sofunny. It was so... Glory. She’d been spectacular. And awful. And brilliantly, capriciously punishing. He’d been so proud it was nearly painful, watching her take wing like that. And he’d been horny as fuck.
That incredible new song. “Badass Rose.” What did it mean? Had she just used the image for inspiration, or was she trying to tell him something she just couldn’t say out loud?
He just didn’t know what shewanted.
If the game was simply torture: mission accomplished.
But enough was enough.
And the smoothly tan, sweet-smelling, very pretty woman now sitting across from him at Cafe Elegante was sophisticated enough to know what should happen on a third date, too. And judging from all the little touches she’d been sneaking in—a hand laid on his arm to ask if she could change the radio station in the truck, another lingering touch that transformed into a light caress when she was pointing out the billboard of The Baby Owls on the highway, a lingering look and a small smile at the stoplights—she was into it.
