Page 92 of The ABCs of You & Me

“Breakfast?”

I turn back to him and shake my head. “I came to support you, not to have you feed me.”

“I like feeding you,” he confesses, with his head inside the fridge. “It’s way better than feeding only myself.” He pulls out a carton of eggs, a brown paper bag, and the rest of the goat cheese we got last weekend. “I’m going to make you the best omelet you’ve ever had.”

“Big words.” I pull out a stool so I can sit and watch him cook for me, yet again.

“Do me a favor?”

“Anything.”

“Think up a K date for today. Make me forget about Gary.”

Kiss. No, that’s not a date, that’s a thing I want to do. But we could kiss in different places. Maybe try different kinds of kissing in different places. Kiss in the kitchen. French kiss at a crepe café. Butterfly kisses at the botanical garden. The possibilities are endless. A kissing scavenger hunt could be fun. Kissing also seems like a good way to forget about the cat, especially if we do a really good job and get lost in them.

“Okay, but I’ll have to get home and change first.”

“Oh wow,” Foster says in awe. “I didn’t even know these existed here.”

We’re standing outside a twenty-four hour karaoke bar. I can’t sing, and the thought of doing it in front of anyone, let alone Foster, has the partially digested omelet in my stomach doing loop-de-loops.

“In Korea, we’d go into one of these at like ten at night after drinking for a few hours and emerge after seven a.m.” He mimes walking out of the darkness into the sun. “Just a bunch of hungover people staggering out onto the quiet street to drag ourselves home.”

“Sounds… fun?”

“It was actually,” he assures me, leading me through the front door into a sleek reception area with black leather couches and shiny surfaces. This place would be a nightmare to keep clean. They probably go through more Windex in a week than most people go through in an entire lifetime. “Hey, we’d like a room for two, please,” he tells the receptionist.

I hand over my card, and then we’re being led down a narrow hallway with doors on either side. It looks like a place where nefarious deeds would be carried out, not just terrible singing.

“If you want anything from the menu, hit the call button beside the door,” the attendant says. “The catalog is all digital, and the remote is here.” They pull it off the wall and hand it to Foster. “You’ll be given a five-minute warning. If you’d like more time, select the option on the menu. And”—they suddenly look uncomfortable—“no sex.”

Great, now all I’m going to think about is all the things Foster and I could do that are not sex exactly but definitely sex-adjacent.

THIRTY-NINE

FOSTER

“Does that happen often?” I ask.

“You’d be surprised,” they sigh before turning and leaving me and Sophie standing alone in the quiet room.

Sophie takes in the space, glaring at the L-shaped couch that lines two of the walls. “Do you think it’s sanitary?” she wonders aloud.

I lean closer to inspect the surface. “It’s not a porous material, so probably.” I shrug and sit and stand quickly. “Not even sticky.” I grin at her and then watch in delight as she bursts out laughing. The urge to kiss her is getting harder to contain.

“Such a gentleman, checking for bodily fluids for me.”

“I think if we refrain from getting naked, we’ll be fine,” I tease only to immediately regret it. We’d stopped at her place before coming here so she could change, and while sitting in her living room I kept thinkingshe’s probably naked in there right now. I’ve seen her entire back, and I’d be a fool not to want to see every other inch of her.

As much as I try to tell myself that this is all fake, all for show, all a lesson in being with someone who treats her the way she should be treated, it’s more on every single level. Being with Sophie is more than any lie I whisper in the dark before I fall asleep.

“What song do you want to sing first?” Sophie asks, sliding the remote out of my hand and pointing it at the screen.

“You don’t want to go first?” Her head swivels in my direction, and I’m met with wide terrified eyes. “Sophie, why did you pick karaoke if you don’t want to do karaoke?”

She winces. “I panicked?”

“We can go… kickboxing? Knife throwing? Keg? Oh, we could go to The Keg.” I breathe out, mouth watering at the thought of a perfect steak. “Let’s do that, then we can go to a comedy club where we can laugh, for L.”

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