It's Complicated (18 page)

He squared his shoulders and shook his head. “We went on one date. One. Coffee. She has this…thing about me.”

“Coffee?” She punched him lightly on the bicep just as the elevator stopped at the next floor.

The doors opened and people poured in; he dropped his voice to answer, “Not the same
coffee
you and I had, my dear.” The murmur in her ear sent a warm tingle between her shoulder blades as he straightened up, clasping his hands behind his back, pretending he hadn’t just sent her into a topsy-turvy state.

Again.

By the time they left the crowd and reached the street outside the hospital, she was a bit more settled, and they resumed their conversation.

“She doesn’t take the hint. I’ve never seen her behave like that, though.” He frowned, then reached for Josie’s hand, running his index finger down the lines on her palm. “Then again, I’ve never been seen at work with someone I’m…you know.”

“No. I don’t know.” She wasn’t going to give him an easy out. What did he think this was? If she was just an easy fuck to him, he had to say it. She wasn’t going to. “Someone you’re what? What’s ‘you know’?” People rushed by all around them, but took no notice of their conversation. Speaking into cell phones, conversing into the thin air of Bluetooth, as if part of the Borg, heads bent over phones, texting—everyone’s minds were on their little pieces of plastic and glass, not their surroundings. No reason not to press this conversational point right now.

He reached for her hips and pulled them to him, tight arms stronger than she remembered. As she looked up, his face blocked out the sun, the ends of his brown hair curling slightly from the slight humidity, his face relaxed and sly. “Do I have to define ‘you know’?”

“Yes.” The word hung between them like a dare.

A double dog dare.

Which he took. “Someone I’m dating.” The back of his hand against her cheekbone, light and feathery, made the lump in her throat dissolve. Shielding her eyes with one hand, she looked up, feeling taller and bigger than ever.

“We’re dating?”

“We are.”

“Can we have more…
you know
.”

“Now it’s your turn to define ‘you know,’ Josie.” His voice held a laugh. Damn it. He knew exactly what she was asking, her heart beating as fast as he’d been thrusting into her an hour ago.

On tiptoes, she licked his neck and said quietly, “Danger sex.”

“Is that what you call it?” One eyebrow cocked, his nostrils flared, jaw tightened, eyes narrowed. It wasn’t an angry expression. This was the look of a man intrigued to find there was vocabulary for something he’d thought nameless.

“What do you call it?” Turning the tables back on him was a relief. Unbearably revealing, the conversation made her hot and ready as much as it made her want to crawl into a hole.
Hmmm.
Maybe they could have danger sex in a hole in the street. How heavy were manhole covers?

“I don’t have a word for it.”

“Liar.” Crossing her arms, she went down to flat feet. “’Fess up.”

“Air fucking.” Alex barked the phrase out as if it would somehow be better if he said it quickly.

“
Air fucking
? Is that like air guitar?” She pretended to strum an electric one, like Garth and Wayne from
Wayne’s World
, until he grabbed her wrists, a pained expression on his face.

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

Closing his eyes, he sighed, hands still gripping her. “Don’t make fun of something I never imagined a woman would actually want.” A puff of air flew out of his mouth as if the secret, now out, needed to escape from him even faster.

She softened, feeling horrible now, “Oh, no. No, Alex, I wasn’t making fun of you.” She winced, looking down. “I’m mildly embarrassed, and because I have the social skills of a tree sloth on acid, I just make jokes. Bad ones.”

A fierceness came over him and his eyes looked into her soul as if they were reading it. “You understand, though, don’t you? You liked it. You wanted it. It fed something in you. That’s how it is for me. Except I never imagined I’d find someone else who…”

“Yes.” The intensity was almost too much to bear, and Josie felt something crack inside her, a tiny tendril of a new green shoot seeking sunlight.

“Good.”

“Come over to my place for dinner,” she ventured.

“Dinner?”

“Dinner and a movie.”

“What’s the movie?”

“It’s called
My Bed
.”

“I like that movie.”

“You’ve seen it?”

“No. But I caught a great preview of it today.”

“Maybe we could turn it into a drive-in viewing. You know, under the stars?” Something in him had cracked, too—the way he shifted and held his body was more intimate. She stretched up and kissed his lips lightly.

He blinked hard, then jumped a bit. Reaching into his pocket, he checked his phone. “A patient.”

“It’s your day off!” she protested.

“VBAC. She really wants to make this happen, and I promised I’d come in…” He raked his hair with one hand. “Damn it.”

“I get it.” Exhaustion she’d been ignoring asserted itself at the opportunity, reminding her that she really needed some rest, and a shower, and to eat something. And she wanted to spend five hours on the phone with Laura, squeeing about Dr. Perfect. Dr. Air Fucking Perfect, now.

“What are you doing Tuesday?”

“I’m off.”

“Then come…over.”

He was five steps toward the front doors to the hospital when he ran back, grabbed her, and held her, a nice, comfortable kiss planted on her lips.

“I’ll come. And so will you.”

Chapter Eight

In the handful of days since Jillian’s birth, the only place that seemed to give Josie comfort was Jeddy’s. And she resented it. The coffee was terrible, the companionship was awful. But the service was really great and, as much as Madge could be a sourpuss, at least she was Josie’s sourpuss. So now, every morning around 6 a.m., she got a coffee and some kind of reasonable pastry breakfast and settled in a booth, wishing for the life that had unraveled over the past few days as Laura had moved on.

Now, if Josie had said those words to Laura, “You’ve moved on,” she would have heard a torrent of all the reasons why that wasn’t true. Followed, probably, by lots of tears and an extra order of coconut shrimp or a hot fudge sundae. The protests, though, would come from Laura’s understanding, deep down, that Josie was right. Laura had moved on, finding the true love—true loves?—that eluded Josie.

Sex had always been no problem for her, at least. Even before her recent encounters with Alex. Men found her appealing enough to proposition…but not worthy enough to stay. The few relationships she’d had that had lasted longer than one condom had been fraught with jealousy and anger and accusations of condescension on both parts, typically ending in a “fuck you” phone call. And then a regretful booty call a few days later. And then—silence.

When Laura had first met Dylan and Mike and had learned about the threesome life that they embraced, Josie had told, for the first time ever, about her own threesome experience. It hadn’t been intentional by any stretch, and it hadn’t even been
good
. It had, however, triggered a sense of curiosity in her. By pushing her own moral boundaries, she’d discovered that she was still herself the next day, she still interacted with other human beings the same way. She hadn’t grown horns or weeping sores in the palms of her hands; there was no trauma, no self-destructiveness to it.

It had just been an option. She had taken advantage of the opportunity, lived the experience and woken up the next day alive, fine, and normal. Needing to pee, and eat, and shower, and wash her clothes, like any other day. With the minor additional need to decide what it had meant to violate a social norm and sleep with two men at once. Back then, in college, it had been a coup of sorts, some kind of quiet, dark mark as if she had joined an amoral club that no one knew existed and whose members all kept their mouths shut. If they were female.

A rumor had spread about what Josie had done with those two guys, but it had fizzled fast. She was this boyish, petite thing who had a motormouth; most people dismissed her as un-fuckable. So the coup really was hers; her internal scorekeeper knew that un-fuckable Josie had managed to find two guys to sleep with her at the same time. Even the most attractive woman at their small college couldn’t stake that claim. Not out in public, anyway. Being open about it would have brought her ruin. One hell of a Catch-22, right?

Two guys, though, right now…that wasn’t what she wanted. What she wanted was one man, twice over…or to double her over. Alex filled her visual memory: the lines of his pecs, the narrow taper of his waist, the intensity in his eyes in the on-call room. How he had watched her with such steady power, her body on fire just from his look. Picking at the remnants of her croissant, Josie let herself revel in that memory for a few moments before sheepishly admitting a tinge of guilt. Laura had been just a few doors down, as desperate to push something out of her vagina as Josie had been eager to get something in hers.

Thinking of what he’d done to her by the river was also problematic. It was enough to make her come right here, on the nasty vinyl booth seat, willing an orgasm from the memory of his hands on her, his cock hammering her ass into the stone wall, and all that came with coming outdoors.

She snapped back to reality when Madge zipped over, dumped a refill into her coffee mug, and moved on.

She was such a chickenshit, worried every second of every day since she saw him that this wasn’t real, struggling to accept the idea that he would want her. Instead, she’d tried to convince herself that resigning herself to the reality that it would never work would be much less painful than trying to build something, only to have it fall apart. A part of her knew that that was a big load of shit, and if Laura were more available right now, she would be sitting at this table right now, snarfing down a platter of fried green tomatoes, telling her so. “That’s bullshit,” she would say, her finger pointed in Josie’s face, happy to be on the giving end of angsty love life advice.

But Laura wasn’t here. All Josie had right now was her own imagination, her own inner divining rod, and it was saying guys like Alex don’t want girls like her for the long haul—they want them for the quick and dirty. Josie could do quick and dirty. She could do quick and dirty
real
good. But spending enough time with Laura, Mike, and Dylan, and now baby Jill, had changed something deep inside her. It made her see a possibility that turned all the other options into pale imitations of life and love. What if that possibility were out there somewhere for her?

Laura’s voice popped into her mind.
What if
Alex
is that possibility?

Josie took a sip of her coffee. It was hotter than she’d expected and burned a bit, shocking her. She drank some water to cool her mouth and then sat with the pain, knowing that she was sitting with a much more intense pain that no glass of water could alleviate.

Just open up to this
, she thought.
Just do it.

If she didn’t give this a chance, a true
emotional
chance, she’d be left with a big, heaping hole of regret inside of her.

But that’s better than rejection,
another voice said.

She closed her eyes and listened to the cadence of that voice. Whose voice was it? Who was whispering these words that stopped her from acting on hope? It was the same voice that got her out of Peters.

The question was, who exactly was that?

If she were in a selfish frame of mind, which she was drifting into more and more lately, she would indulge in some deep self-pity over the fact that she and Laura had lost their morning coffee ritual. It was not that Josie was a cheapskate, but rather the free coffee from Laura had been more of a bonus, some sort of extra that came along with the companionship. And it wasn’t that she desperately needed the caffeine as much as she had pretended to when she and Laura had gotten together most mornings. The energy boost from the rich, brown liquid was, again, a bonus.

What she’d got out of her ritual was companionship—someone to bounce ideas off of, a good, deep friend to share the boring details of her boring life and her boring job. Laura had a corporate job that was just interesting enough to keep her there and just boring enough to make it a bit dull. Until Laura had met Dylan and Mike, in fact, they’d both been boring. There had been equity between what Josie would tell and what Laura would tell, a mutual bitching session that in the end balanced them out.

Josie, though, had spent years trying to get herself into a stable economic situation, and boring was an accomplishment. Her life had been more interesting than anyone would wish, growing up. In addition to losing her dad, and putting up with her mom, she didn’t have a smooth time of it at school, either.

“Smartmouth” had been the phrase that teachers had used the most with her.
Watch that smart mouth. You’re a smartmouth.
And occasionally, along with fingers clenching her bicep,
cut it out, smartass
, hissed in her ear. That one was the angry English teacher, the furious phys ed teacher—pretty much whichever teacher had a temper and couldn’t stand the fact that Josie did not defer to authority unless authority deferred back.

Socially, she did okay. Being a target for the teachers made her stand out, get notice. Plenty of boys wanted to date her. Though “dating” was a loose term where she grew up. A date meant that maybe the guy paid the car fee at the drive-in and managed to drive you home after he got what he wanted. Or, once you were old enough for bars, on cheap beer night you might get treated to enough drinks to get you drunk—and then, again, a ride home if the guy got what he wanted.

She’d tired quickly of that scene and had hidden in books, her nose in a tome at the local library and later the university branch campus’s meager stacks, hoping to read her way to a better life. It had worked. Nursing school had been her big ticket out of Nowheresville, Ohio. When she’d earned her associate’s degree she’d qualified for a full ride at the small college in Boston, which, for whatever reason and whatever deity knew why, had picked her out of a stack of Josies and made her a queen.