Page 178 of The Moment We Know

Evan blinked. “Wait. What?”

“You didn’t know about that?”

“No.”

“He does, now, though,” David muttered. “Thank you.”

Paige turned to him in disbelief. “You kept that from your best friend, but couldn’t keep it from your mom?”

Evan frowned at David. “You told your mom? Dude, no.”

“Not this again,” David said, taking a deep breath. “I didn’t tell her. She weaseled it out of me—and only the part about us pretending to date, not the fucking around part.”

Evan seemed to think about that for a moment, then asked, “So whose idea was it to fuck around for, uh, sexual healing?”

“His,” Paige answered, at the same time David said, “Mine.”

“It was part of his secret ‘plan’ to get me back,” she added.

Evan’s eyes gleamed. “Subterfuge. I love it.”

“Word-of-the-Day?”

“Actually, it is.” He glanced at the clock on the wall. “With a couple of hours to spare.”

Paige realized she should start getting the shrimp tacos made, otherwise they wouldn’t be eating until midnight, so she got up to start making them, pulling all the ingredients out of the fridge.

At Evan’s urging, David shared the entire plan, while helping Paige chop cabbage, dice tomatoes, slice avocados, mix creamy slaw sauce, cook black beans and pan-fry the shrimp.

When David was finished relaying the story, Evan nodded his head in approval. “Well done.”

“Thanks.”

Paige rolled her eyes and began arranging everything on the counter in a mini-buffet line. “It only succeeded because I fell for it,” she said, only to realize what she’d said when the two men started laughing. “Shit. That came out wrong.”

While Evan watched, David stepped behind Paige and hugged her from behind. “So, anyway, back to your nickname.”

“Yes, please. We keep getting off track.”

“It’s almost like you don’t want to tell her,” Evan teased.

Ignoring his friend, David focused on Paige. “The night you sent me the video of Sputnik, Dick and I were hanging out at his place, and when I laughed at it, he wanted to know what was so funny. So, I told him the woman I’d been casually seeing had sent me a video of her cat, and he was like, ‘You’re dating a cat lady?’”

“And ‘Cat Lady’ was born,” Paige surmised.

“Yeah. And it stuck, which made things easier for me to keep you on the down low, or whatever, because as long as you were just the ‘Cat Lady’, it seemed to deflect Dick’s interest, and at the time, that mattered to me. I didn’t know where we were going, or if we were going anywhere, so the less real interest he came at me with, the better. But later, after you fell for my plan—” he broke off when Paige punched him in the arm, “—I didn’t really get a chance to talk to Dick until that Sunday when I …”

“Deliberately made other plans so you wouldn’t have to see me? That Sunday?”

“Yeah, that Sunday. Which would’ve been the perfect time to come clean and tell him about you, and who you really were, but Jacob’s abuse and my being fucked up made me sit on it. Part of me wanted to wait until I knew we were solid again, because if things didn’t get fixed, I didn’t want him to know that I’d failed with you again.”

“David, you didn’t fail the first time,” she protested.

He shook his head. “Thanks, but I essentially gave up on you—on us—which is a fail in my book. And then I pretty much did it again a couple of weeks ago,” he added.

“Well, now that cry for help makes more sense,” Evan mused, getting up to make another Margarita.

“Cry for help?” Paige asked.

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