Page 26 of The Kiss Principle

He laughed. “I wouldn’t hang around and listen to an hour-long story about the best edible you ever tried if I didn’t want to, Fernando.” A grin sliced across his expression. “Not unless I was on the clock.”

“You cunt-weasel!”

“Uh, technically, because I’m gay—”

“You little ferret fucker! That was a good story! I drew you a diagram—”

I cut off—in horror—because the little shit was laughing, and doing a poor job of covering it by pretending to scratch his cheek. Through the laughter, he managed to say, “The diagram was cute.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be cute. It was supposed to be—no! No, I am not doing this. Next time, don’t bother listening. Next time, you can go shove a Slim Jim up your chute and ride a fucking meat stick.”

What I’d said came back to me, and who I’d said it to, and the inevitable lawsuits. I had a feeling like I’d stepped off a cliff.

But Zé only laughed harder. Not loud—he was, I was starting learn, never loud. But he had tears in his eyes, and he had to sit on the arm of the sofa and wipe his face as he continued to laugh.

“The diagram was cute?” I bellowed.

He slid onto the sofa and covered his face with his hands.

Down the hall, the sound of a door opening came, and Mom said, “What is going on out here?”

“Nothing,” I snapped.

“Ava and I are practicing our song,” she said. “So, we’d appreciate a little quiet.”

“What song? She’s not even two months old.”

“This is why I wanted girls,” Mom said, her voice growing fainter as the door closed. “Or a gay son.”

“A gay son? What the fuck does that mean? You’ve got Augustus, and he’s gayer than Christmas!”

But the door clicked shut.

Zé drew himself up, no longer laughing, although his face was lit up with—what? Happiness? Contentment? Amusement? All three, maybe. I liked how it looked on him. I hadn’t realized, until now, that while Zé was always kind, always in a good mood, always pleasant, I wasn’t sure he was always happy. He met my gaze, and for a moment, I thought he was going to say something. And then, instead of—well, I wasn’t sure what—he said, “You’re going to be late.”

“Shit.” I grabbed my wallet and keys. At the door, I stopped, because it felt like I ought to say something. The best I could come up with was “Thanks for, uh, all this.”

He smiled crookedly. “What are friends for?”

9

The restaurant was called Industria, and it was, according to the blurb I’d read online, a post-industrial deconstruction of traditional Italian cuisine. Which meant, I was pretty sure, it was going to be expensive as fuck and leave me hungry enough to stop at a taco cart on the way home. When I got there, the look of the place confirmed my suspicions. It occupied an enormous, high-ceilinged space, and it leaned into the industrial look with exposed ductwork and polished concrete and lots of rivets or bolts or whatever the hell they were supposed to be. No white linen tablecloths. No stuffy maître d’s. No candles, even—each table had a little origami LED light that changed colors constantly.

Bea arrived about two minutes after I did. I’d seen pictures, of course (and no, you pervert, not that kind of picture). She was petite, blond, and she looked more like a yoga instructor than a biochemist. You could tell she’d had her lips done, but that didn’t exactly make her stand out in a crowd. What made her stand out in a crowd was when she opened her mouth—she was smart, she was funny, and it took me about five seconds to realize my first assessment had been wrong. She wasn’t eight leagues out of reach. Put it closer to fifteen or twenty.

The hostess sat us, and Bea ordered a bottle of wine, and we held our menus and made small talk. She played tennis. She ran. She was heading up a new project at work, but she couldn’t talk about it because it was a Big Secret (she told me “capital letters for both words”).

“But you get bonus points for asking,” she said with a laugh. “Most guys like to pretend they didn’t hear me when I bring up work.”

“Most guys have the emotional maturity of a bag of dicks.”

Her eyes got wide.

“God damn it,” I said. This was Zé’s fault, I decided, because he always acted so goddamned amused, and I’d been letting my filter slip. (Okay, maybe I hadn’t let my filter slip. Maybe my filter was hanging ass in the wind.) “I’m sorry, I—”

But she cut me off with a wave of her hand as she laughed. “No, you’re right. They do. And God, think about how all those dicks would threaten their fragile heterosexuality?”

I grinned. “No homo.”

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