He had, too, which was why he was making trout melts at three in the morning. They’d been floating for who knew how long in a bubble of grief and sex and zombies.
“Eve and Sawyer and Clara are having a big bash at the Mermaid,” he said.
“Oh. That sounds…” She wrinkled her nose.
“Horrible?”
She laughed. “Yeah. I mean, I love them. I just don’t feel like a party.” She cocked her head. “I feel like the opposite of a party, actually. I’ll hide in my room, though.”
He fired up the stove and plopped some butter into a frying pan. “You could just stay here.”
He wanted to keep floating in the bubble a little longer, was the thing.
“I think I’ve imposed on you long enough.”
Nora had a certain way of talking. She always sounded confident. Decisive. Even, he had learned, when she wasn’t. Here, though, her I think I’ve imposed on you long enough was a little bit less resolute than the way she usually would have said it. You had to know her to hear it.
He knew her.
So he pushed back. Casually.
He hoped, anyway. It occurred to him that if he could tell when there was a chink in her decisiveness armor, maybe she could tell when his casualness wasn’t 100 percent sincere.
“I don’t want to go to that party any more than you do. Stay here. You can go back tomorrow. The clinic opens on the second, right?” He wasn’t sure why he was asking. He knew that. He and Eiko had already conspired to cover the whole day, receptionwise, since Clara was headed back to school.
“Yeah. Back to the grind on the second.”
“So stay. I’ll run out for food tomorrow. I’ll take Mick—he could use a walk. We’ll do New Year’s Eve here. Or not do it, more like. We’ll eat and watch movies and…”
“See if that world’s-longest-orgasm thing was a fluke?”
Yes. He had her. “Exactly.”
She smiled as she nodded at the slices of bread he’d placed in the pan. “What are you making?”
“Trout melts.”
“Trout melts? Cheese on fish?”
“It’s like tuna melts, but with trout. Just you wait.” She flashed him an affectionate smile and, figuring that he’d won her over to both the sandwiches and staying for New Year’s, he said, “Make a list of what you want, and I’ll get it tomorrow.”
“Will you do me a favor?”
“Of course.”
“I’m parked behind your truck, so unless anyone happened by and recognized my car, no one knows I’m back in town. I’d like to keep it that way. I’m just…not ready for people.”
“You got it.” He was secretly pleased that he apparently didn’t count as “people.” He worked in silence for a while, breaking up the fish, scattering it on the bread and grating cheese over the whole mess. He glanced at her, wrapped in his mother’s quilt. “You know what? We never decided what home base was.”
She rolled her eyes. “If you’re about to suggest that home base is multiple orgasms, don’t.”
“No? ’Cause that was pretty damn impressive.”
“No. A base has to be a thing you know about in advance and you consciously decide to hit.”
Yeah, he could see that logic—assuming logic even applied to their absurd bases thing. But he could still tease her. “You didn’t consciously decide to do that?”
“No, I did not. That was a total surprise.”
He plated the open-faced sandwiches and slid them across the island. “So it’s not a superpower you were holding out on me.”
“Nope.”
“No idea how it happened?” he asked as he turned back to grab forks and napkins. He wasn’t trying to push the issue. He was just really, really interested in having it happen again.
“If you’re trying to suggest that it was you and your magical dick…” He whirled, and she winked to show she was kidding.
He made a face at her. “Not at all. My magical dick and I were just wondering if it was replicable.”
They’d been teasing each other, but she turned thoughtful. “I honestly don’t know what was happening there, but my best guess is that it was a function of being really comfortable and really primed. Like, we’ve pretty much been having sex nonstop, so it’s kind of like there’s already a perpetual level of desire humming along, you know?”
He knew.
“And you know, I think this friends-with-benefits thing we have going”—she waved her hand back and forth between them—“really works in the sense that I’m never on edge. I don’t have all the usual crap going on in the back of my mind, like am I well enough groomed, is he going to think I’m too needy or too pushy or too slutty or too whatever.” She picked up her fork and took a bite of the sandwich. “Oh my God. This is so good. I am officially sold on trout melts.”
He wanted to ask her more about “the usual crap,” and specifically what kinds of assholes inspired those kinds of fears, but she had moved on.
“How’d you get that scar on your lip? I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
“Fishhook.” She made a horrified noise, and he nodded his agreement. It had been pretty horrible. “I was ten. I was fishing with my dad and my brother—for fun, not on the boat. We were at the little beach. I’d run into town to get treats from the bakery, and my brother didn’t hear me coming up behind him. He cast just as I was running back up the pier, and his hook caught my lip.”
She winced. “That’s like the worst pain I can imagine.”
“Nah.” It had been horrifically painful. He still remembered the shock tearing through him along with the hook, the ghastly feeling of his flesh splitting. But she was wrong. “It hurt like hell, sure, but only until it didn’t. There are worse kinds of pain.”
“Like what?”
“The kind you’re feeling right now. The pain of absence. That kind of pain sticks around so long, it becomes part of you.”
But enough. He was getting maudlin. He rolled his eyes at himself and smiled at her, hoping to lighten the mood.
She smiled back. “You are too much, Jake. Extended orgasms and midnight snacks aren’t enough? You have to be the Yoda of grieving, too?” She put her fork down. “I’m about to say something, but I don’t want you to freak out.”
Uh-oh. Whatever she was going to say, he had a bad feeling about it. Maybe he’d gone too far with the caretaking. He didn’t want anything to change. He had meant what he’d said to her all those months ago: he was not in this for romance or forever or any of that stuff. He couldn’t face it if she—
“You’re my best friend, Jake.”
Oh. Okay.
That was not what he’d expected her to say.
He was her best friend. That was a relief.
Right?
“I think that was what was happening with the world’s longest orgasm there. You’re my best friend—don’t let that freak you out. I know Sawyer and Law are your best friends. And I don’t mean it in the BFF, let’s-do-each-other’s-hair way—though I do love your hair. And it doesn’t have to be a mutual thing. Just because you’re my best friend doesn’t mean I have to be yours.”