“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.
Joe kept shaking his head. “You thought I was talking about a one-night stand?” he said. “With a human woman?”
“What other kind is there?”
He shook his head in disbelief.
So I added, “You called it a one-night stand.”
“But I was joking.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
Now all the pieces were clicking into place. “That’s why you posted pictures of her online?”
Joe nodded. “Petfinder dot com.”
“And that’s why you felt so free to liberally mock her appearance like she had no human dignity?”
“She has no human dignity,” Joe said. “She’s a dog.”
“You said some harsh things,” I said. “Even for a dog.”
Joe dropped his shoulders, like Come on.
“I see,” I said.
Joe pulled in a deep breath now as the full understanding hit him. “You thought,” he said, “that I had a one-night stand with a drooly, noisy, sheet-shredding actual human female and then made fun of her body the next day on the phone in a public elevator before posting sleeping photos of her online?”
I made my voice very tiny. “Kind of?”
“No wonder you were so mean to me.”
“Was I?”
“Yeah! And I deserved it!”
“Right?” I said, trying to draw a tentative alliance.
Joe sighed. Then he sighed again. Then he said, “For the record. I have not slept with anyone—at all—since I walked in on my wife hot-tubbing naked with Teague Phillips, the Planet’s Most Boring Wanker.”
But now we had a whole new topic. “Oof,” I said. “That’s a long time.”
“I’m aware.”
“A really long time.”
“Thank you.”
I shook my head. “I thought … you were a total player.”
“You thought I was a total douchebag.”
I hunched up my shoulders. “Sorry?”
“I’m not a player, Sadie. I’m a damned monk.”
I felt a buzzing realization that this, right here, was another of Joe’s problems that I had the power to do something about.