“How about we get two desserts and split them?” Dylan suggested, wolfing down the rest of his food.
“Oh, I like that idea! A gradual transition down.” Laura perked up. “What should we get?”
“We have a nice caramel pistachio cheesecake today,” Madge said. “And then there’s the rhubarb maple cheesecake.”
“It’s cheesecake day?”
“No, we just happen to have some of these.”
“Anything else?” Mike asked.
“Well there’s a turmeric-infused candied pecan—”
“Stop there.” Dylan held his hand up. “Is it cheesecake?”
“Yup.”
“I vote for that as one of them. All in favor say ‘aye.’”
Three “ayes” rang out into the air.
“How about two of those?”
Everyone nodded.
“Two slices of that.”
“So, Josie, get back to what you were asking. I like watching you be awkward.”
“Ha ha,” she snapped back. The distraction had rattled her, so she just blurted it out. “How did you know that it was okay to just be together without being together sexually?”
Mike choked on his coffee, Dylan reaching over to whack him in the back hard, repeatedly, as the guy coughed and rumbled.
“That’s awfully direct.”
“And having Alex walk in on your—”
“Okay, okay, I gotcha. I gotcha,” Dylan said, holding his hand up. “I’ll answer.”
“Thanks,” Mike croaked out, trying to recover.
“The problem with answering that question…” Dylan said, leaning back against the torn vinyl booth. “The problem with that answer is that most people don’t have a framework for why I’m about to say what I’m about to say.” His face changed and he became more serious, more introspective than Josie had ever seen in the otherwise cocky, manly man in front of her.
He looked nervously at Mike and then even more nervously at Laura, and said in one long rush of breath, “I realized that what I wanted more than anything.” He stopped. “No, not more than anything, but as much, as much as I wanted Jill…I wanted to share her with Mike.”
Mike blinked and cleared his throat, running a hand through overgrown blonde waves of hair that tickled the top of his collar. “That’s probably what those two guys are going through, Josie—the ones with your niece. That dawning that comes when you realize that there’s this ache inside you that nothing, nothing has stopped so you learn to live with it—it’s just there, like a mole or a scar or an overbite and you try all sorts of things to make it go away. You date different women, some people try dating other men—”
“Not me,” Dylan said.
“It doesn’t matter, Dylan,” Mike said. “Everyone has that ache in them. It’s not just that Dylan and me and Laura or people like us do—everyone does. But for me the moment that Jill and Dylan and I came together, I realized that I was missing something for the first time in my life. Not that I had something.”
Mike’s cool Zen demeanor shifted to a layer of excitement that made Josie lean forward in anticipation, his joie de vivre contagious. “I realized that I was missing that ache for the first time in my life. Do you know what it’s like to go through most of your adolescence and early adulthood in pain and just dealing with it? And then, one day, it’s gone. Just gone. Gone.” Slamming his palm against the tabletop just as Madge delivered the two pieces of cheesecake.
“This cheesecake’s going to be gone in about five seconds. I suggest”—she pointed straight at Laura—“you not put a plate in front of her.”
“Hey!” Laura couldn’t finish her protest because Madge had left already.
“What about you, Dylan?” Josie asked as they each grabbed a fork and dug in.
The cheesecake was perfection, carafes of a turmeric maple sauce on the side and little cruets filled with candied pecans. The first bite of cheesecake and a candied pecan in her mouth at the same time made her want to stop the conversation instantly and do nothing but have a mouth orgasm.
“Ditto,” Dylan said. “Whatever Mike said, that all applies to me.”
“Ditto? You’re talking about the most significant moment in your emotional journey through life and your answer is ‘ditto’?”
“Yup.”
“You have the depth of Justin Bieber.”
“Ouch,” Dylan said, holding his hand over his heart. “That hurt my feeling.”
“You mean it hurt my feelings.”
“No, my feeling. Remember, I’m shallow.”
Everyone at the table groaned.
Josie snatched the piece of cheesecake out of his reach. “For that, you get less.”
“That’s fine. I’ll just share with Laura.”
“No you won’t.” Laura grabbed hers.
Mike looked around with a what about me expression on his face. “What happened to sharing?”
Josie shoveled a piece of mouth-watering goodness into her mouth and answered, “You guys might be into sharing but I’m not.”
“You’ve raised an incompetent ass**le with a God complex. Aren’t you proud?” Alex declared. Sipping jasmine tea, his stomach felt sour. The last time he’d eaten Thai food hadn’t gone well.
Not well at all.
Sitting with his mother in a different restaurant across town didn’t help dull the pain of the memory of his last moment with Josie in his apartment.
“I’ve done no such thing, Alex. I’ve raised a human being.”
“All too human.”
“Then I’ve done well.” She smiled,, the kind of grin that made her dimples appear. His mother’s face was unreadable, kind brown eyes so much like his trying to read him. This was the look she gave him when she was humoring him. He deserved it.
“I just…how could I have screwed everything up like this?” He’d been a complete ass. In retrospect, he could see it clearly. Affected by stress at work, he’d let it spill over into his love life, biting Josie’s head off when all she’d tried to do was to help his family. To be fair, she had made it sound like she might be skirting ethical lines—no one in a double-blind study should know who was in the control group and who wasn’t. Alex wouldn’t know any more details, though, because he hadn’t even tried to reach out. No calls. No texts. Other than going for an occasional run around the park across the street from her apartment, he hadn’t gone near her.