Never.
Joe must have been cramping up, too, somehow. Because he watched me working on my hands for a minute, then looked up decisively and said, “I think I need a break.”
We’d been at it since five o’clock, and now it was ten.
“Oh,” I said. “Sure. Of course.”
He started walking toward my door, and when I didn’t follow, he turned back to wave me in his direction.
By break, I thought he meant, you know, a turn about the room or something. “Are we … going somewhere?”
“We need to get some air.”
* * *
OUTSIDE, WE STROLLED for a bit.
Then Joe asked, “Who have you been texting all night?”
Was there any way in hell I’d be telling Joe that I had no ability to judge if my own portraits were any good?
No.
“Is it your friend who eloped?”
“I’m just getting her opinions,” I said. “On the portraits.”
“You’re texting her pictures?”
“Yep.”
“Can I see?”
“See what?”
“The portraits.”
I frowned at him, like he was crazy. “Of course not.” We’d already agreed.
Just then, another text came in from Sue. I glanced down to check it—just as Joe leaned over to peek.
“Hey!” I protested, hiding the phone behind my back.
But he tried to reach around me, all playful.
“Nope,” I said, race-walking away. He was not seeing those portraits.
Now he was chasing me a little. “Your friend gets to see them, and she abandoned you for Canada.”
“She didn’t abandon me, she was kidnapped,” I said, moving toward a patch of grass.
What was happening here? It goes without saying that Joe trying to steal my phone was much more fun than Parker trying to steal my phone.
But did he really care about seeing the portraits? Or did he just want to blow off some steam and roughhouse? He hadn’t seemed to care at all earlier—but maybe he was just … looking for a reason to run around outside? Flirting, even?
Joe swiped at my phone again, managing to pull me into a hug-like situation as he did—and this time, he grabbed it.
I wasn’t cleared for running, so I knew I couldn’t chase him.
Instead, I threw my foot out and tripped him.
He hit the grass with an “oof,” and then, before he could scramble off and run away, I sat on him and started tickling him.
It worked. Joe, despite his claims, was highly ticklish. He started laughing so hard, he fully dropped the phone. And it was so fun to see his reaction that even after I’d grabbed it and stuffed it deep into my pocket, I went back to the tickling.
What a strange thing to do. Had I ever tickled anyone in adult life?
Definitely never. But it felt somehow like the only thing to do.
Turns out, it was fun.
“We agreed,” I said, like I had to punish him with tickling now because he’d broken the rules. “You weren’t going to look at the portraits until I was ready. Right?” I tickled some more. “Right?”
“Fine,” Joe finally said, breathless. “Right. I give up! Peace!”
I sat back, out of breath, and then he sat up, also out of breath.
We sat companionably side by side for a minute. That whole thing had been a lot more playful than either of us had expected.
And more suggestive.
Joe was just standing to help me up when we heard a woman’s voice say, “You always were ticklish.”
At the sound of the voice, Joe went tight like a wire. Then he turned to stare at the woman with the intensity of a hunting dog on point.
She was standing a few feet away from us, with a man, holding his hand.
Who were they? Were they people I knew? I scanned for clues. She had a black shirtdress and sandals, and he wore khakis and a graph-check button-down.
They could have been anyone.
But not to Joe.
Joe knew exactly who they were, and his body tensed up so much, it tightened the air around him. That said, he had some grass in his hair. So I reached up to brush it out.
He didn’t even notice.
“What are you doing here, Skylar?” Joe asked, his voice about as friendly as a knife.
Oh god. It was the ex-wife.
The tip-off was Joe’s voice. Specifically: the fumes of loathing rising up from it.
Yeah. Definitely the ex.
Skylar turned toward the man with her, who gave Joe a little wave like they knew each other.
And this must be the man she’d left Joe for. The Hot Tub Guy.
“We were just getting coffee,” Skylar answered Joe, nodding in the direction of Bean Street, and calibrating her voice to “pleasantries.”
“This isn’t your coffee shop anymore,” Joe said.
Skylar gave a little “sorry, not sorry” shrug. “Still the best in town.”
Joe didn’t dignify that with a response.
So Skylar turned toward me. “And who’s this?”
It’s true, I couldn’t make sense of her face. But everything else about her made perfect sense. She was poised. And coiffed. She could walk in heels. She seemed exactly, generically like a woman nice guys might want to marry and spend their nice lives with.
But she was also a cheater.
She had married Joe, and promised to love and cherish and be faithful to him … and then she’d climbed bathing-suit-less into a hotel hot tub with—I glanced over at the Hot Tub Guy beside her—this dude.
Gross. I could see it in my mind almost like I’d been there.
True, my first impression of Joe had been … pretty negative.
If that was all I had to go on, I might even be taking the ex-wife’s side right now.
But every interaction I’d had with him after that first one had been positive. Very positive. I thought about Dr. Nicole saying I couldn’t trust myself, and then I thought about Joe giving me his jacket when I was cold. And feeding me Italian food. And blow-drying Peanut. And offering to be my model.
Maybe the problem was me.
Maybe I should give this poor guy the benefit of the doubt.
In that second, I could just sense every miserable, conflicting, rejected, angry, hurt, abandoned emotion that Joe had to be feeling.
And in that rush of empathy, I just … wanted to help him.
Maybe it was the fact that he’d helped me tonight without any hesitation. Or maybe it was all the time I’d just spent measuring his face. Or the tickling we’d just done in the grass. But I felt a strong urge to help him out overtake me right then.
And I just didn’t overthink it.
Right there, under the curious gazes of Joe’s ex-wife and Hot Tub Guy, “Who’s this?” still hanging in the air, I slid up next to Joe, hooked my arm around his waist, and tried to create the most sexually suggestive side hug in history.
I felt Skylar take it in: the way my hip rubbed against his, the way my arm tightened around his torso, the impact of my temple as it made its landing on the curve of his shoulder.
That was all she needed. “Ah.”
Guess it worked.
It should have been enough. Really, it was plenty. I’d made my point, right?