Hello Stranger(70)

“What?” Joe took a swig of water. “Didn’t we talk about this?”

“You said you weren’t dating. But I figured you must be hooking up.”

Joe coughed. “What?”

“You’re always … coming out of her apartment,” I said. And a bunch of others.

“Yeah? So?”

“So aren’t you guys … together?”

“Wait—you thought we were—what?”

My fingers were still tingling from touching him. I shrugged.

Joe started laughing then, but I didn’t think it was funny. He leaned his head back and let out a big sigh. “I’m not dating Dr. Michaux. I am pet-sitting her snakes.”

Now it was my turn to be befuddled. “You’re what-sitting her whats?”

“Her snakes,” Joe confirmed. “Remember? Herpetologist? She has a whole den of snakes in there. Even an Indonesian flying snake. It’s pretty complicated, keeping them healthy.”

Okay. I could freak out about a penthouse full of flying snakes later.

First things first.

I needed to get this straight: “You’re … a snake sitter?”

“Pet sitter,” Joe corrected. “Why do you think I was feeding Parker’s cat?”

“That’s what you do for a living?”

I could feel Joe frowning, like that question was really odd. “It’s one of the things I do for a living,” he said.

“All that time … you were going in there to feed snakes?”

Joe nodded. “

“And so the brown bags were full of…?”

“Live mice,” Joe confirmed.

“Oh my god.”

Joe shrugged. “Food chain.”

“But,” I said as I tried to snap the pieces into place, “what about that time I saw you stumbling drunkenly into Dr. Michaux’s apartment?”

“Do you mean the time she had a stomach virus? And I was helping her down the hall from the elevator?”

“You weren’t hooking up?”

Joe shook his head.

“You were just helping her? Just being a Boy Scout? Kinda like when Parker pretended to faint?”

“I’m not a Boy Scout,” Joe said. “But, yes, I was helping.”

I was still working to take it in. “That’s what you’ve been doing? All this time?”

“Yep,” Joe said. “Mostly cats on this floor. And one bunny. Wait. Did you think that I was sleeping with all those people?”

“I mean, I hoped it was something else. But I couldn’t imagine what that would be.”

“You have a very limited imagination.”

“Well, I definitely wasn’t picturing flying snakes.”

“I don’t know if I should be flattered that you think all those people would want to sleep with me—or offended that you think I’m a man-whore.”

“Sue and I prefer the archaic term mutton muncher.”

Joe just stared.

“What?” I said. “You have to admit it’s suspicious behavior.”

“For the record, I have never slept with anybody in this building. Other than my wife. Back when she used to live here—and used to be my wife.”

But that didn’t track. “Wait—” I said, pointing at him. “What about the lady you fat-shamed in the elevator?”

Joe shook his head like maybe he hadn’t heard me right. “What?”

“I definitely overheard you talking about a one-night stand in the elevator. A woman with a lot of belly fat who shredded your sheets and was a real breather.”

I could definitely feel how Joe was staring at me. Like he could not in any universe imagine what I was talking about.

“She dry-humped you in the parking lot?” I prompted. “And threw up in your entryway?”

But Joe just waited.

“She slept in your bed,” I went on, “and you almost suffocated under a ‘mountain of blubber.’”

That’s when Joe lifted his head. Recognition.

“Now you remember,” I said.

Joe put his face in his hands. “I remember,” he said. “But that wasn’t a lady.”

Really? We were getting into semantics now? “I definitely heard you—”

“That,” Joe went on, dropping his hands to make his point, “was a bulldog.”

I frowned, like he’d just said something impossible. “A bulldog?”

“A rescue bulldog,” Joe confirmed. “Named Buttercup.”

“You had a one-night stand with a bulldog?”

Joe nodded. “I did. A bulldog who was abandoned after she ate a tree branch the length of her entire body and her owners decided she was too much trouble. I fostered her for one night—actually, it turned into three—before taking her to a rescue group.”

“So…” I said, my voice quieting as I let this one piece of information rework all my eavesdropping, “when you called her a bitch, you literally meant … a bitch?”

Now he was offended. “I can’t believe you thought I was talking about a person.”

Suddenly I couldn’t believe it, either.