Page 34 of Snake

Also, he refused to stop tracking her phone, and she’d finally conceded that fight. She supposed it was good for someone always to know where she was. Or where her phone was, at least.

Yep, I’m here, and all’s well. No plans to ride any cowboys, for you or for me. Lunch on Wednesday, as usual, absolutely. Love you love you love you, PomPom.

As she typed the second sentence, an image of Cox stepped forward in her mind. There had been a few times last night, and not only while she could blame it on the whiskey, when she’d found him attractive enough to have felt some flutters of real interest. She remembered those random bursts of poetry he’d uttered—and also how he’d saved her life, truly saved her, twice. And how he’d beaten her attacker up. And how he’d climbed into bed beside her to hold her when she’d told him (ugh, her stupid drunken mouth) that she was afraid.

None of that mattered, of course. He was good looking, he was apparently kinder than she’d realized, but that didn’t mean they really liked each other. He’d also called her ‘plastic,’ and a ‘snake,’ after all. He was a decent man, but he was no fan of hers.

Nor was she a fan of his. Not at all.

Anyway, Indianapolis was more than three hundred miles away from Signal Bend, and Autumn didn’t do one-night stands or long-distance relationships.

Which did not matter, because She. Did. Not. Like. Him.

Shoving Daniel Hates-His-Name Cox to the back of her brain, she opened Ida’s text.

That one was a dim, out-of-focus sneak-photo taken at their gym, of a very fit Asian man in basketball shorts and a tank top doing biceps curls with what appeared to be about fifty pounds on the dumbbell. Ida had followed the photo up with Wants coffee tomorrow afternoon. What do we think?

Ida was biracial, with a Black father and a Japanese mother, a racial and cultural combination the whole Greenway family called ‘Blackanese.’ When it came to dating, which Ida did with much more enthusiasm and frequency than Autumn, she mostly dated Asian men. She insisted it wasn’t a specific limiter so much as an aesthetic preference, but they’d been friends since high school, and Autumn knew every man and boy Ida had ever dated. Her ‘aesthetic preference’ for Asian men was strong.

Cute! Autumn wrote back. Right in your wheelhouse. So why the question?

Ellipses popped up almost at once, and Ida replied:

Hey girl! How’re those butts treating you this time?

About like last time. But today is a new day.

Operation Win-Em-Over engaged.

What’s your worry about Bicep Man?

IDK. He’s cute, and so far not creepy.

Gave me his number and didn’t ask for mine.

But it’s so cliché to get picked up at the gym.

Right?

You met Quan at the gym. And Justin.

You’re making my point for me, A

Ida had quite a number of notches in her purse strap, about evenly distributed between dumping and being dumped. Quan and Justin had both dumped her, and they’d both done so for obnoxiously vapid reasons. Quan dumped her after about three months because she’d signed up for a pole-dancing fitness class, and he considered that ‘slutty.’ Justin dumped her because she’d gained ten pounds and decided she liked the extra ba-dunk in her trunk.

Yeah, true. Bad examples. But coffee can’t

hurt, right? Somewhere you can sit

outside. If your jerk-dar pings, get up

and go.

But then we have to change gyms again.

No, better not.

But he’s hot af and has great gym manners.

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