Stitches

“If I said no after four orgasms, someone would need to show up and punch me in the face,” she informs me.

That surprises a shot of laughter out of me. “Four? I counted three.”

“You miscounted,” she says, slyly.

“Damn, we do some good tag team work, don’t we?”

Moira grins. “You sure do.”

The restaurant I picked out for us has valet parking, so we stop out front and give the attendant my keys. I feel a little like a king, placing my hand at the small of Moira’s back and escorting her inside. A couple men turn their heads to watch as she walks by. If she notices, she doesn’t show it. Of course, she’s probably used to it. When she and Seb are out, they get looks from both sexes, ogling the pair of them as if resenting their monopoly on good looks. If people stick around long enough to notice how in love they are, they just have to hate them. No one should look the way they do and be so goddamn happy, to boot.

Tonight it’s me, though.

Tonight I get to be the luckiest bastard in the city.

The waiter brings us cocktails while we look over the menu. I don’t even like half the shit on it, honestly, but I like the atmosphere of this place. It feels private and intimate, even though you’re in a room full of people. I only brought Ashley here twice. The first time was all right, but the second time she ran into someone whose name she could drop later, so she invited them to join us and I had to spend the whole dinner sitting there, listening to them talk about dumb shit I couldn’t give a fuck less about. Ashley regularly talked about shit I couldn’t give a fuck less about and I listened like any good husband, but when it’s three against one and they won’t shut up? I wanted to offer to pay for them to eat and slip out by myself.

After that I was too worried we would run into someone again and I didn’t want to come back. Ashley came without me a few times, with friends—though now I wonder if they were friends at all. I never really worried about her spending time with other men, but I guess I should have.

“Do you have a lot of male friends?”

Moira glances up as she takes a sip of her drink, then shakes her head. “No, not really. I have a few male acquaintances, but no one I really consider a friend.” She gives me a funny little smile. “That’s an odd question to lead with.”

I frown a little, nodding my agreement. “Yeah, it was. Sorry. I was thinking about—” I stop, my frown deepening. Talking about the wife I’m not quite divorced from yet and how she probably cheated on me with all her male friends probably isn’t the right foot to lead with.

She seems to understand exactly what I’m thinking about, though. Her smile sobers and she glances at the table. “You know, before I met Seb I dated this real asshat. I don’t remember if I ever mentioned him—probably not. But we dated off and on for about a year. I was miserable after six months, I just couldn’t figure out how to get out of it. I thought maybe it was just a rough patch, but it was the strangest thing—I’m really not an insecure person, I don’t worry about other women, but I started to feel like I couldn’t trust him. His behavior got really sketchy. He’d keep his phone tilted and turned so I couldn’t see it, he’d cancel or change plans at the last minute, all that kind of stuff. My sister insisted he was cheating on me. I didn’t believe her, but I couldn’t bring myself to shake the insecurity anyway. So one night he pulled his ‘plans changed last minute’ shit when he was supposedly hanging out with a friend. My sister got fed up; she dragged me to her car and went to the place he said he would be hanging out with his friends. He wasn’t there. So my sister—who, I should warn you, is a raging lunatic—loads me back in the car and hauls me around to all his usual haunts, looking for his car. This could have been a profound waste of time, but we got ice cream sundaes while we did all this, and when are ice cream sundaes ever a waste of time?”

I’m baffled that there exists a man idiotic enough to step out on her, but I offer a smile and shake my head. “Never.”

She nods. “So, Gwen finally found his car. We went inside to see who he was with, and he was there with some brunette chick. We didn’t confront him, Gwen just hauled me back out to his car, handed me her sundae, and got out a tube of lipstick. She wrote ‘cheating whore’ on his windshield, ‘tiny dick’ on the driver’s side window, and ‘minute man’ on the passenger side window.”

I want to be pissed off on her behalf over this cheating asshole, but Moira’s laughing at the memory, so it must not hurt too much.

“Anyway,” she

says, shaking her head and smiling as she looks down at the menu. “I digressed a bit, but the moral of the story is, I have been cheated on and I know how shitty it feels. Obviously we weren’t married and it’s far worse that Ashley did this to you after making that kind of commitment, but I understand that it can mess with your ability to trust. That’s what I was getting at. And also, I would never do that to someone.”

“Neither would I,” I assure her.

“I know,” she says, smiling softly. “And if you do, my sister will vandalize your vehicle, so you’ve been warned.”

“I like your sister,” I tell her. “I need to meet this woman. I wanna shake her hand.”

“You met her. Remember at the wedding? Gwen was my maid of honor.”

“That’s right. I didn’t know this story then, though. I wasn’t appropriately impressed.”

Moira smiles. “Long story short, you don’t have to worry about me having male friends. If you did have to worry about that, I wouldn’t be worth holding onto.”

I shake my head, glancing up at her. “You’re far more sensible than I was at your age.”

She shrugs her shoulders, perusing the menu. “I’m glad he cheated now. Imagine how much longer I might’ve stayed with him. I would’ve never met Sebastian. If he had asked me out that day, I wouldn’t have been able to go. It all worked out. Change isn’t always such a bad thing.”

“My relationship with change has been a little rockier. When I was younger, I hated it. I hated the instability of everything. I just wanted something solid and reliable.”

“Then you met Sebastian?” she inquires.

I nod my head. “Mr. Solid and Reliable.”