“Crackhead will never get used to me,” Alex sighed.
“Don’t make me choose between the two of you,” she joked. Alex gave her a sour face and disappeared into the kitchen, and from the sounds of it, he was brewing coffee.
A woman could love this man deeply. And she did.
Josie finished toweling off and walked na**d into the bedroom, rummaging through her dresser for clothes. A second dresser, one that didn’t match (and yet belonged there), rested under the window across from hers. Alex’s meager furniture had fit in so well with her eclectic possessions that it was creepy. Creeptastic, in an overly perfect kind of way. As if he were made for her. Even his coffee mug set with the little wooden stand matched the one she had found at a yard sale a few months ago.
Creepy.
“You look like you want to bolt out into the street and run away from me. Like I have tentacles and crawl into your body at night to turn you into a pod person.”
“You have one tentacle that crawls into me at night,” she said suggestively.
“And if I had more, they would join it.” As if his c**k were listening, it rose slowly, cockeyed (no pun intended) at first, then slowly straightened out, long and strong, the sedate politeness of his foreskin turtlenecking down.
“Seriously?” She made a dismissive, but joking, sound as she stared at his rod. “You’re ready again?”
“Always ready.”
“I know that’s not true, because there was that one time—”
Alex grabbed some underwear and quickly put them on, as if his penis were offended by the conversation and needed to have its ears covered. “That one time I’d just come off an unexpected thirty-eight-hour labor, drank five beers, and you rolled over and started humping me! Give a guy a break.” He stretched a simple, moss-green t-shirt over his head, pulling the thin cotton with a furious rush. “And besides, I still managed to make you come a few times!”
“They need to patent that tongue of yours,” she agreed.
“Can we stop talking about the one time I couldn’t perform to your satisfaction?”
“It’s not that you didn’t—” she protested.
“Or shall I bring up the time you fell asleep during sex?”
“Hey! Not fair! I was on painkillers after that dental surgery and—” The look on his face made her shut up. He was right. Not fair. “Fine. Truce.” The quick kiss they shared righted the world. The steamy gurgle from the kitchen made it all even better.
Sitting at her—their—kitchen table, sipping from breast-shaped mugs Darla had given Josie as a gag birthday gift (“Mama won them in an online sweepstakes contest. You should have seen the molded chocolates that came with them!”), she sighed with contentment. And then she ruined the moment.
“I need your help in convincing Mike and Dylan to sit down and talk with Trevor and Joe.”
Alex’s surprised look quickly turned to confusion. “What the hell would those four have in common? Oh…” His voice went low and his eyes registered suspicion. “What are you up to? Is this some stunt for Good Things Come in Threes?”
“No! It’s not a stunt. It’s more that Laura’s so lost lately, and even though she’s happy and life is better now that Jillian’s out of the infant phase, it seems like she needs to talk to someone who’s in the same kind of unique relationship.”
“I’m not connecting the dots.”
“She and Darla are getting together for lunch at Jeddy’s.”
“And you want Mike and Dylan to have lunch with Trevor and Joe? Joe? The kid is an inscrutable blowhard ass**le—”
“You still can’t let go of the fact that you smashed your face into a parking sign because you saw me touching him.”
She expected protest, not: “Damn right I can’t. Fucker.”
“Alex! You’re still jealous? I was touching his heart surgery scar at Darla’s insistence! He was shirtless and we were on the porch and you and I were broken up and—”
His face had gone bright red and his fingers floated up to the tiny scar along his eye. It had been nearly a year and yet…
“It’s not jealousy in the traditional sense. You never dated him, never kissed him, never…but in that moment I was so lost without you, and running past your house—no matter how juvenile—was a way to connect with you. And then to run past and see you touching another man just destroyed my world.”
She gave him a look of sympathy and pain. He took a long drink of his coffee and continued. “Yeah. The guy bugs me. And even if you’d never touched him and I didn’t have that imprinted in my mind on top of my emotional state at the time, he’s a judgmental, condescending prick anyhow. The kind of guy I couldn’t stand in high school and college.’
“He’s twenty-three! Half the guys I knew at that age were like that.”
“Doesn’t mean I like him.”
Josie finished her cup of coffee and just watched Alex. His wet brown hair was close cut right now, his haircut more a function of efficiency than of fashion. Being deep into his residency as an OB-GYN and working extra shifts in the emergency room on rotation meant that any part of his life that could be simplified needed to be.
In recent months he’d taken to this principle of optimization with great zeal, and living with Josie was part of his larger plan. Then again, perhaps it was the other way around: simplifying his life was just a convenient excuse for getting her to agree to share an apartment together.
Deep brown eyes framed with impossibly long lashes turned to meet hers, troubled and smiling at the same time. Alex could do that—inhabit two distinct emotional states at the same time with comfort, okay with the ambiguity. He didn’t see the world in black or white like she did. Being with him taught her, slowly, that there were shades of gray.
And not the Fifty Shades kind.
“Hold on, though—you still haven’t explained why you want all the guys to meet.”
“And for you to be there,” she said with a breathy, breezy tone meant to sound so offhand, so casual that it was nothing, no big deal, just a—
“What?” he roared. “Why do I need to be there? I’m not in a threesome relationship!”
Silence.
“Is this your way of saying you want to add a man to”—his hands waved in the air like giant, muscled butterflies—“this? Us?”