“One café au lait,” she announces as she comes in the door. “So spill. Good date or bad date? Not a great date, I’m guessing, since you’re here instead of at his place.”
“Oh, come on. I don’t usually move that fast.” Jonah doesn’t figure into the equation; he’s an outlier. “Just faster than you.”
“I can’t help it if I’m an old-fashioned girl.”
Carmen smiles as she says it, but it’s only half a joke. She dated the same guy throughout high school, and another guy through most of our undergrad years, so she has almost zero experience with sex outside a committed relationship. Not for lack of chances, though: Carmen gets more male attention than any other woman I’ve ever known. Cute as she is, she’d be the first to admit she’s not any kind of supermodel—but she radiates warmth and fun, which is more attractive than anything else.
“Out with it,” she says as she perches at a drafting table in one corner. “What did you guys do? Were you able to get more than two words out of him?”
“We went to dinner. It took the conversation a while to get rolling, but soon it was fine. Better than fine. Great. Jonah’s not cold or unfriendly. He’s guarded until he gets to know people, that’s all.”
Not really. Something else lies behind Jonah’s silences, his darkness—something that began at Redgrave House in Chicago. But I wouldn’t talk about that part of Jonah’s life even if I understood more about it. His troubled relationship with his family is none of my business, and even less of Carmen’s.
“Who knew? I guess everybody has, I don’t know, hidden depths.” She blows a bit of her cappuccino’s foam out of the way. “When did you get interested in him, anyway?”
I’m torn. Carmen is my best friend; I don’t make a habit of lying to her, beyond the occasional fib like, You look fine, nobody’s going to notice you spilled coffee on your skirt. But how can I possibly explain the whole truth about this? The only two human beings who come anywhere close to understanding are Doreen and Jonah himself—and even those two don’t have the whole picture.
Finally I decide to start at the beginning and see how far I get. “Well, you remember that I met Jonah when he changed a flat for me—”
“Chivalry’s not dead!” Carmen chirps.
I remember Jonah forcing me to my knees, growling, Look at me when you suck my cock. Even that quick flash of memory gets me hot. “Then he was at your party, thanks to Shay, and—” Maybe I can lead into the truth like this. “—after Geordie, uh, embarrassed me out on the deck, I was pretty freaked out. Then Jonah talked with me. Distracted me.”
“Oh, right. Arturo said Geordie started oversharing about your relationship. What did he say?” Carmen’s eyes widen. “Did Geordie talk about your sex life?”
Dammit. I thought every single person at that party knew! That was the reason I hid out at the far end of the yard in the first place. When so many people heard Geordie drunkenly apologize for not fulfilling my rape fantasy—well, I thought that was the kind of gossip that flowed through a party even faster than sangria. Arturo heard it, I know. But apparently nobody told Carmen.
I ought to be grateful. Instead, I’m chagrined. If someone had told her the truth then, I wouldn’t have as much to explain now. I say, “Yeah. Geordie got seriously personal, and I was pretty embarrassed.”
Carmen shrugs. “Come on. You guys went out for more than six months. It’s not like people didn’t know you two were sleeping together.”
“That’s not the point. Geordie, um, gave specifics.”
“Oh, my God. Was he talking about your body? I would die.” She gives me a look. “Do you think that’s why Jonah got interested in you? Because that would weird me out.”
I can’t tell her. I can’t. Carmen’s so far from realizing what I’m talking about, and I don’t want to bridge the gulf between her relative innocence and the kind of kink Jonah and I have indulged. Explaining feels impossible . . . or, at least, uncomfortable. “Not quite like that,” I say, not meeting her eyes. “Jonah didn’t want me to feel embarrassed. So we wound up, uhh, talking when we saw each other at the charity benefit. And guess what? At the silent auction, he actually bought my etching.”
“No way! Really?”
I smile back. “Even better, he decided to bid on it before he knew it was mine.”
Then Carmen and I are talking easily about the fact that Jonah’s interested in my art, and how cool that is, plus it’s pretty hot for a guy to be flying all around the world to study volcanoes, and so on. I ask her whether she’s made a move on her latest crush, but she claims she’s too busy with schoolwork. Has she suddenly turned shy? Maybe this particular guy brings out her bashful side. Our conversation widens as we spiral further away from the dark truth I’d rather not tell.