“Veda was playing footsie with you too?”
I smile into the darkness.
So it was Muffy.
“No. Only you. Just checking to see how you would’ve felt if I was into her.”
“Do not hit on Veda. She got out of a long-term relationship a month ago, and now she’s—never mind.”
They must’ve talked a lot while I was on the phone with Daisy, because I was under the impression Muffy had no idea what Veda’s relationship status was.
“Muffy?”
“What?”
It’s so easy to get a huffy what? out of a woman sometimes. “I’m yanking your chain. I’m not into Veda.”
“Oh.”
“And you’re welcome.”
She takes a big breath, like she’s about to say something profound, then sighs. “We should get to sleep. Funeral plus long drive home equals sucky day tomorrow.”
The bed shakes and the headboard rattles the wall again. My eyes are adjusting to the darkness, and I can make out the curve of her neck, up her shoulder, down her arm, over her hip.
I wonder if she usually sleeps on flat pillows and hard beds, or if she’ll wake up refreshed tomorrow.
“I had a bad experience with a not-dead body when I was little,” I hear myself say.
I don’t mean to, but given how much I’ve asked her to tell me today without giving her anything in return—other than passing out at the funeral home—it only seems fair to confide in her.
And maybe I need to change tactics if I want her to talk to me about whatever it was that happened to her here, and maybe I need to do something nice for her if my dick is ever going to work again.
The sheets rustle as she half-turns toward me. “Not-dead?”
“My grandpa had a zombie moment. The whole family was there at the hospital with him. Kidney failure. He flatlined. Everyone cried. The nurses unhooked all the machines, and everyone left, but I stayed because it was sort of morbidly fascinating. Until he…well, he came back to life. He rolled over, gasped once, looked me straight in the eye, said DIE!, and then he died again. He might’ve said Ty. I don’t know. I just know he died, again, with his eyes and his mouth open, staring straight at me, and it was the fucking scariest thing I’ve seen in my entire life. My mom thought my dad had me, and my dad thought my mom had me, and they left me at the hospital, so I had to sit outside the room with a hospital security guard while they tracked my parents down. When they transported my grandfather’s body out of the room, the whole thing was shaking like the casket did tonight, and I—I don’t like death, okay?”
“Oh my god.”
“I don’t watch zombie movies. Or movies where there are corpses. I can’t even make it past the first sequence in Up.”
“Oh my god,” she whispers again. “So at the funeral home—with the casket moving—you basically—”
“Man down. Yeah.”
“I’m so sorry. I should’ve told you where we were going. I didn’t know.” She strokes my face, then freezes like she’s realized she’s touching me, and she jerks back. “Sorry,” she stammers again.
I’m sorry too, because I wouldn’t mind if she kept touching me, but I’ve been giving her all the right leave me alone signals. “I knew where we were going by the time we got back to the funeral home.”
“But what were you going to do, wait in the car?”
I don’t answer.
I wanted to wait in the car.
But when Muffy ran into that guy and went the same pallor as my dead grandfather, there was no way I could bail on her.
You don’t abandon friends just because you don’t want to come face-to-face with a dead body.
Even when you don’t know what the whole story is with why they don’t want to be there in the first place.
If she’d said I don’t want to go to a funeral, that’s one thing.
Who doesn’t get that?
But there’s more to this story.
“It’s my turn, isn’t it?” she says in the darkness.
“Are we taking turns?” Are we friends? Do I want to be friends with Muffy?
Holy hell. I think I do.
But she’s suddenly still as actual death.
Not kidding. I’m starting to sweat.
After a moment, she takes a deep breath. “I was drowning in student loans and credit card debt and I didn’t get matched for a residency so I didn’t have any idea what I was going to do for a job or money or if I’d ever be able to be a doctor at all, because without a residency, you can’t become a doctor, so I auctioned off my virginity and then couldn’t follow through because—just because—and then I was so mortified that I left town and never came back. I didn’t even get my clothes from my apartment. I just went.”
No small part of me is nodding along, thinking this makes sense because it’s Muffy, but who does that? “Seriously?”
“No more talking. And if you ever repeat that to Kami, or anyone, I’ll—okay, I don’t know what I’ll do except for probably move to another state, without my clothes again, and start over with a new name, which I can do, because I am friends with senior citizen criminals who can help with that sort of thing.”
It’s weird to have a woman in my bed, on the verge of tears, and not have an overwhelming impulse to leap away. “Why did you…” I trail off, because I can’t make myself form the words to ask the question I want to ask.
I couldn’t ask my sisters the same question.
Not that any of them ever would’ve done what she did. I don’t think.
“I got the idea from a book,” she mutters. “And I’d lost a bunch of weight because of stress and I was hot for once, and then my mom found out how much I owed and that I hadn’t found a residency, and she was researching how to sell a kidney, or other things you don’t want to know about, and I think she was serious, especially when she started asking how much kidneys weigh so she’d know how many pounds would come off immediately, so I knew I needed to make some fast cash, and it was what I had, so I decided to see if anyone would bite. Sex is pretty clinical when you get right down to it. Tab A, slot B, right? What’s the big deal if it’s nothing more than going through the motions? Except I couldn’t—I swear, Tyler, if you tell a single soul—”
“It was the guy you bumped into before the viewing, wasn’t it?”
“No.”
“Muffy.”
“I need us both to believe me right now, okay?” she whispers.
I want to hit someone. Or something. Specifically that professor. “Was that his wife with him?”
“Tyler.”
Fuck. Just fuck. “I’m not going to tell anyone.”
“Thank you.”
“You never told Veda?”
“She knows about the auction but she doesn’t know who showed up or what happened after that. No one does except me and that person. No more talking. I only told you because we were doing the friend thing and confessing things that won’t exist in the morning. Plus, some people at the funeral tomorrow might remember that the auction was a thing and say something, even though I tried to be totally anonymous about who I was through the whole thing, which I don’t think I did very well, and I didn’t want to look like the kind of idiot who doesn’t tell her date about the dumb stuff she did in med school, even if nobody knows what happened the night that…the winner…came to collect his debt. And I’m probably moving to Montana as soon as we get back to Copper Valley.”