Dangerous Fling (Dangerous Noise 4)

"Close."

"Jeff?"

"Almost."

"Oh… Malcolm." She hip checks me. "It's kind of a mouthful."

I wink at the hostess as she points to our seats. Her cheeks flame red. She stammers as she hands over our menus and mumbles something about our server being over shortly.

"Oh." Lacey hides behind her menu. "I didn't say it that way on purpose."

I glance at the menu. It's the usual breakfast stuff. It's less interesting than Lacey.

Slowly, she places her menu flat on the table and traces the restaurant's heart logo with her finger. "You think we look like a couple who's going to make it?"

"What does that look like?"

"I don't know. Adam and I… we didn't have any sort of exciting beginning. We didn't have a good story—we met in a class. But everyone thought we looked right together."

"You have a picture?"

"No, but I can find one." She looks up at me. "Do you want to see that?"

"I'm curious."

She pulls out her cell and taps the screen a few times. It takes her a minute to find something. When she does, she places the phone on the table facing me.

They do look right together. He's about her height, average build, with short brown hair and honey eyes. They're on the top of a hill. He's got his arms around her. She's in front of him, smiling at the camera. They look happy. Sweaty, but happy.

"That was a week before I broke up with him." She pulls her cell back. "I was thinking about it the entire hike. We'd been watching TV that morning. Well, I'd been watching and he was ignoring it. He's not really a TV person. Which is fine—"

"It is?"

"Okay, it's a problem, but the worse problem was that he'd agreed to give the show a shot then he was sitting there ignoring it. And I got pissed. I'd tried, hard, to find something we could watch together. And I ended up picking something I didn't even like."

"What show?"

"One of those superhero shows on the CW. Arrow, I think. I don't even remember. I just wanted to get us together on the couch so maybe I could touch him and he'd touch me. But he was sitting on the opposite side of the couch, looking at his phone. He wasn't there with me and he was never going to be there with me. And it hit me at that moment, that realization that it was going to be like this forever. It wasn't

the first time it hit me. It was probably the four hundredth time. But I felt it so palpably that I couldn't even get this one little thing to work." Her eyes go to the table. "The whole drive there, the entire hike… even while we were taking this picture, I was thinking this is fucked. I had to make the picture better. I had to convince myself."

"You look happy."

"I know."

"You're a good actress."

"Maybe." She turns her phone over and traces the logo on the back. "I think of it more as… I was good at lying to myself for a long time."

"Do you believe he loved you?"

"Yes, he still does." She presses her lips together. "Sex just isn't important to him. To him, sex or no sex is the difference between a rich loose leaf English breakfast or a bag of Lipton tea. Sure, he likes the English breakfast, but the Lipton tea has caffeine. It's warm. It's tea."

"Your relationship was shitty tea?"

"Give me a break. I'm not the lyricist." She smiles but there's a sadness to it. "We're supposed to be talking about your parents."

"I like this topic better."