Page 114 of Hello Stranger

Joe coughed. “What?”

“You’re always… coming out of her apartment,” I said.And a bunch of others.

“Yeah? So?”

“So aren’t you guys… together?”

“Wait—you thought we were—what?”

My fingers were still tingling from touching him. I shrugged.

Joe started laughing then, but I didn’t think it was funny. He leaned his head back and let out a big sigh. “I’m not dating Dr. Michaux. I am pet-sitting her snakes.”

Now it was my turn to be befuddled. “You’re what-sitting her whats?”

“Her snakes,” Joe confirmed. “Remember? Herpetologist? She has a whole den of snakes in there. Even an Indonesian flying snake. It’s pretty complicated, keeping them healthy.”

Okay. I could freak out abouta penthouse full of flying snakeslater.

First things first.

I needed to get this straight: “You’re… a snake sitter?”

“Pet sitter,” Joe corrected. “Why do you think I was feeding Parker’s cat?”

“That’s what you do for a living?”

I could feel Joe frowning, like that question was really odd. “It’s one of the things I do for a living,” he said.

“All that time… you were going in there to feed snakes?”

Joe nodded. “

“And so the brown bags were full of…?”

“Live mice,” Joe confirmed.

“Oh my god.”

Joe shrugged. “Food chain.”

“But,” I said as I tried to snap the pieces into place, “what about that time I saw you stumbling drunkenly into Dr. Michaux’s apartment?”

“Do you mean the time she had a stomach virus? And I was helping her down the hall from the elevator?”

“You weren’t hooking up?”

Joe shook his head.

“You were justhelpingher? Just being a Boy Scout? Kinda like when Parker pretended to faint?”

“I’m not a Boy Scout,” Joe said. “But, yes, I was helping.”

I was still working to take it in. “That’s what you’ve been doing? All this time?”

“Yep,” Joe said. “Mostly cats on this floor. And one bunny. Wait. Did you think that I wassleepingwith all those people?”

“I mean, I hoped it was something else. But I couldn’t imagine what that would be.”

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