“Nothing more than simple age. She isn’t immortal. None of us is.”
“That old bat will outlive Jillian,” Dylan said, clear as a bell. Darla snickered and Trevor looked a bit confused, picking up a sweetener packet and worrying it with thickly calloused fingers.
Joe looked like a giant slab of polished iron.
“She might,” Alex agreed. “I think my grandfather will have something to say about that, though. The two of them have plans for how they want to die.”
Josie went a bit pale at Alex’s words and buried her face in her coffee cup.
Laura picked up on that, too, her head ping-ponging between him and Josie. “What? Say it.” She bore down on Josie, who looked like she wanted to turn into a million tiny pieces and disappear on the wind. She kicked but missed his ankle.
“Ow!” Mike yelped, reaching down. “Wrong leg.”
“Sorry. You both feel like you’re part of the table underneath.”
“That’s what she said,” Dylan drawled.
Everyone groaned.
Except Joe.
Joe
Five more minutes. Joe would give this farce five more minutes and then he’d march right out of here and go to the Thai place he loved down the street, stuff his face with noodles and chicken, and go back to the apartment to play with his bass and master the newest song in the Random Acts of Crazy set.
Not stare at Dr. Perfect Who Hated His Guts, the Secret Billionaires and their hot blonde, and Darla and Josie, yammering at each other like litter mates.
With big old surfer boy Trevor acting like some dopey teen out of a bad ’80s sitcom they laughed at in reruns on Nickelodeon.
“Well,” Josie said, stretching the word out. Why didn’t she have the same accent as Darla? Joe wondered. “Ed told us that he and Madge plan to jump out of a plane and—I believe his exact words were—”
“Fuck like bunnies,” Alex said, miserable as the table exploded with laughter.
“Without parachutes,” Josie concluded. Joe gave a weak smile. Ha ha. How cute. Whatever. Old people smelled like rose-water and grease, and he avoided them as much as possible. Both sets of his grandparents had died when he was a toddler, so Madge was the equivalent of an alien life form to him.
Though na**d f**king stunt diving sounded pretty rad. Add in a camera and a Twitch.tv streaming channel and it might be cool.
Darla had dragged them all here to talk with Mike and Dylan, and aside from thinking maybe—just maybe—he could salvage his time by being able to name-drop in a law clerk interview, or talk about scandal on a golf course, this afternoon was a complete time-sucking waste of air and thought.
At least he would get a piece of Jeddy’s Boston cream pie. That was his only solace.
Happy f**king weekend break. These people were about as interesting as reading case law on transportation codes. In German.
Every single emotion he was capable of feeling had become unwoven, like a thick tapestry that turned into each individual thread, held in place by the memory of once having been intertwined with the others, but now free and unmoored. He carried inside himself a vague sense of once being able to live, day in and day out, within the chosen borders of this relationship with Darla and Trevor, but now…
He was just a pile of thread. A loose pile that added up to nothing solid.
Not that anyone could know that, though. These f**kers wouldn’t make him talk about his pussified feelings, or—God forbid—get him to talk about how he felt so misunderstood, or make him into some new-agey confessional star like those dumbass television shows his mother adored. No way.
Somewhere in the Century of Selfies, society had gone off the rails, and Darla went right along for the ride, insisting he and Trevor join her in this lunch date, where she expected them to sit across from the human equivalent of a redwood and an Italian boxer dude who was half Rocky, half Joe Manganiello.
Was this how it would go? The three women would sit in one booth and breathlessly talk and joke about the five men in the other booth, segregated by gender like sixth-grade health class?
Not his idea of how he wanted to spend a precious weekend afternoon. In fact, he’d rather listen to his mother drone on about the latest research in medical genomics and how it related to his heart condition. His fingers involuntarily reached up and stroked the barest line of scar that he could feel through one layer of cotton. Most of the time he forgot about it, only three months old when the open-heart surgery took place.
His mom lived with it on the surface, as if she had been ripped open then, too. Except she’d never formed a scar. It was a sucking chest wound that lived outside her body. But that wasn’t Joe’s fault.
Why was he even thinking about this? His eyebrows twitched, and he felt the frown contract his muscles before he could control it. Darla picked up on the tiny change in his expression and tilted her head, trying to read him like tea leaves in the bottom of a cup.
“You okay?” she asked. He let his eyes close halfway, his only public reaction to the rush of oh, shit inside him, because all conversation ground to a halt, seven sets of eyes on him suddenly.
A whoosh of air behind him and there was that old waitress, delivering an impossibly large tray of food that made his salivary glands kick in.
Make that eight.
“You’re the only thing standing between a plate or ten of coconut shrimp and that table, bud,” Madge said. He moved swiftly, hands in his pockets, feeling like an obstacle. An obstruction.
An outsider.
The tray landed on the edge of the booth where Darla, Trevor, Josie, Alex, and Mike sat, and he watched as the old lady unloaded that food with such efficiency she might as well be a robot. Too bad his stomach had become a grinding mass of crushed glass and rusty nails, all churning in the flesh equivalent of a cement mixer.
“I’m fine,” he said pointedly to Darla, answering her earlier question, as the waitress disappeared so fast she might as well have teleported herself across the restaurant. Darla, though, ignored him, her mouth hanging open, one hand waving air into it as she bit into a steaming piece of coconut shrimp that was obviously burning her mouth.
Joe reached for Trevor’s wet glass of ice water and held it out to her. Grateful eyes met his as she gulped it down.
“Danks,” she said. “I dink I burd my tug.”
Dylan’s laughter from the other booth was so loud, so raucous and unfiltered, that it seemed to help Joe’s stomach unclench just enough to feel a moment of amusement, too. “That happens here,” Dylan said, turning to look at Darla, who made a pouty face. “Occupational hazard.”