I laughed.
“Did you have hate sex with Neil?”
I recoiled in horror. “No! Why would you ask me that?”
“Because you’ve been avoiding talking to me, so I can only assume that’s because you don’t want to tell me the hickey origin story. And the only kind of sex I’m gonna begrudge you is sex with Neil.”
I let out a deep breath. “I did not hook up with Neil.”
She waited. “Well?”
I made eye contact with her for a long moment, and she made a give-it-to-me gesture with her hand.
“I met someone last week.”
She pulled her face back. “You did? When? Where? What app are you using?”
“No app. Remember the guy who towed me from the ditch?”
“The middle-of-nowhere guy?”
“That’s the one. I went home with him.”
She blinked at me. “You didn’t…” she breathed.
“I did. And then I ran out at four-thirty in the morning without waking him up.” I cocked my head at her.
“Why the hell did you do that? Something wrong with him?”
I shook my head. “No. There was absolutely nothing wrong with him. He was nice, and sweet…” I looked over at her. “And twenty-eight.”
She grinned. “Daaaaamn! You get it, girl.”
“Shhhhh,” I said, hushing her, looking around. “I can’t date a twenty-eight-year-old, Bri,” I whispered. “He’s a baby.”
“He’s not your baby.”
“Cam is twenty-two,” I said.
“Yeah, well, Cam is not your kid, and the only reason your ex had a twenty-two-year-old son was because you were dating a man ten years older than you.”
I shook my head. “I didn’t even date twenty-eight-year-olds when I was twenty-eight.”
“Well, you missed out. They’re just old enough to not be annoying and they have all that sexual energy. And you can train them. They’re so eager to learn at that age, like puppies.” She dipped her head to look me in the eye. “Does he have any friends?”
I laughed.
He did have energy…My cheeks went hot thinking about it.
“I’m going to be thirty-eight this year,” I said. “I can’t date a guy that young.”
“Who says? If you were twenty-eight and he was thirty-seven, nobody would bat an eye. Nobody batted an eye when you dated Neil—and they should have, that guy was an asshole.”
I pressed my lips into a line.
“Look,” she said, going on. “You’re new to this whole single-in-your-thirties thing so you don’t know what it looks like out there, and I’m here to tell you, it doesn’t look good. It’s like picking through a garbage heap looking for the least disgusting thing. Last week I had a guy bring me funeral flowers. Like, they were a cross and they had a picture of the dead guy in the middle.”
I barked out a laugh.
“I don’t think he noticed until I pointed it out,” she said. “Oh, remember the Hawaiian-shirt guy with the porn ’stache and all the cats who kept saying I looked like his next ex-wife? Like, seriously? These are the men we’re supposed to get a UTI for? If you found someone you like, date him. Trust me.”
I was still laughing about the funeral flowers. “I didn’t even get his number,” I said.
“You get his name?”
“Yeah. His first one.”
She shrugged. “So go find him. You said the town is small. How hard can it be?”
I didn’t answer her.
“Was the sex good?” she asked.
I scoffed. “The sex was incredible. In-credible. He did this thing where he lifted me against a wall,” I whispered. “We went three times. He was back up in under two minutes flat. I got tired before he did, and he was doing all the work.”
“See, that’s some twenty-eight-year-old shit right there. You think your cognac-drinking, receding-hairline, pushing-fifty-year-old Our Time date is gonna give you that acrobatic sex? He’s not. He threw his back out playing golf.”
I laughed so hard a nurse wheeling someone into a room turned to look at me.
I was still snickering. “Okay, but really though. I can’t. I mean, what the hell am I even doing? What does he have in common with my friends? My family?”
She looked me dead in the eye. “You know you can just fuck him, right?”
I gasped.
“I’m serious. You do not need to marry this man. You can just use him for sex. You are aware of this option?”