“Tweak my wardrobe?” Dante asked, stiffening, and then he shook his head. “My wardrobe is fine.”
“Everything you own is black,” Francis said at once with a shudder that showed his opinion of that. “We need to change you up from faux funeral to fashion fabulous.”
Dante scowled at the suggestion. “No. If I let you dress me, I would end up looking like one of the Village People.”
Mary blinked at the comment, surprised at the reference to a band that had been around in the seventies. It reminded her that while he looked too young to know the band, he wasn’t.
“You wound me,” Francis said with irritation. “I have better taste than that.”
“You are wearing pink,” Dante pointed out and Mary had to bite her lip to keep from laughing at the comment. It wasn’t that long ago Dante had been wearing her pink joggers and flowered T-shirt.
“That comment just shows how much of a Neanderthal you are,” Francis assured Dante. “This is salmon and—” Pausing abruptly, he turned to stare at Mary wide-eyed. “Really? Pink joggers and a flowered—Oh, my, those did not fit him well at all, did they?”
Mary’s eyes widened incredulously, and she found herself covering her forehead with her hands as she realized he was plucking the memory and image right out of her mind.
“That will not help,” Francis informed her, and then added apologetically, “But I shall endeavor not to see and hear the things you are projecting.”
Mary lowered her hands slowly, her eyes narrowing. “The things I am projecting?” she asked. “Plural?”
He nodded, his expression almost pitying, and Mary’s eyes widened.
“What kinds of things?” she asked with alarm.
“Oh, you know,” he muttered, suddenly seeming fascinated with the food on his plate. Picking up the end of a piece of bacon, he turned it back and forth on the plate from one side to the other. “Things you have seen . . . and done . . . and stuff.”
When Mary then glanced to Dante, he grimaced and gave a slight, almost apologetic nod.
“You are not the only one. Dante is projecting too,” Francis said reassuringly as if that should make her feel better. “Like we said, it is a new-life-mate and new-turn thing. It will pass eventually.”
Mary stared at him with dismay. If she was running around projecting images of her memories, things she’d seen, and the stuff she’d done . . . Good Lord! She couldn’t even look at Dante without thinking of him naked or all the things he’d done to her and they’d done together. That meant that, basically, her mind must be projecting what amounted to homemade porn.
“Pretty much,” Francis agreed as if she’d spoken her thoughts aloud. “But as I said, it will pass eventually.”
“How long is eventually?” Mary asked at once.
Francis shrugged helplessly. “It varies with each couple. And how it ends does too. For some it stops abruptly, and for others it just slowly fades over time, like a radio being slowly turned down.”
“How long though?” Mary insisted.
Francis glanced to Russell. “How long would you say it was for us?”
Russell shrugged. “A year and a half, maybe closer to two.”
“Years?” Mary breathed with dismay.
“I have heard of couples that were only projecting for one year though,” Francis reassured her. Biting his lip, he then added, “Of course, I have also heard of couples that projected for as much as four years or more too.”
“Years?” she repeated with horror.
Francis nodded, his expression sympathetic. “I suspect that is part of the reason new life mates tend to spend the first year or so mostly at home.”
“That and the fact they cannot drag themselves out of bed long enough to actually do much else,” Russell said with amusement.
“That too,” Francis agreed.
Mary stared at them blankly for a minute, and then stood up abruptly, muttering, “I need to visit the ladies’ room.”
She didn’t wait for anyone to comment, but moved quickly through the tables to get to the hall with the sign reading WASHROOMS. It was a long hall and while she expected the bathrooms to be at the front, they weren’t. She passed a door with a sign that read EMPLOYEES ONLY, and then another that had a small window in it that looked into the restaurant’s large kitchen. Then there was a long stretch of wall before she reached a door with a male symbol on it. The women’s bathroom was the next door, the last one before the hallway ended at an emergency exit.
Sighing, she pushed her way inside the ladies’ room.