Page 97 of Hello Stranger

Who were they? Were they people I knew? I scanned for clues. She had a black shirtdress and sandals, and he wore khakis and a graph-check button-down.

They could have been anyone.

But not to Joe.

Joe knew exactly who they were, and his body tensed up so much, it tightened the air around him. That said, he had some grass in his hair. So I reached up to brush it out.

He didn’t even notice.

“What are you doing here, Skylar?” Joe asked, his voice about as friendly as a knife.

Oh god. It was the ex-wife.

The tip-off was Joe’s voice. Specifically: the fumes of loathing rising up from it.

Yeah. Definitely the ex.

Skylar turned toward the man with her, who gave Joe a little wave like they knew each other.

And this must be the man she’d left Joe for. The Hot Tub Guy.

“We were just getting coffee,” Skylar answered Joe, nodding in the direction of Bean Street, and calibrating her voice to “pleasantries.”

“This isn’t your coffee shop anymore,” Joe said.

Skylar gave a little “sorry, not sorry” shrug. “Still the best in town.”

Joe didn’t dignify that with a response.

So Skylar turned toward me. “And who’s this?”

It’s true, I couldn’t make sense of her face. But everything else about her made perfect sense. She was poised. And coiffed. She could walk in heels. She seemed exactly, generically like a woman nice guys might want to marry and spend their nice lives with.

But she was also a cheater.

She had married Joe, and promised to love and cherish and be faithful to him… and then she’d climbed bathing-suit-less into a hotel hot tub with—I glanced over at the Hot Tub Guy beside her—this dude.

Gross. I could see it in my mind almost like I’d been there.

True, my first impression of Joe had been… pretty negative.

If that was all I had to go on, I might even be taking the ex-wife’s side right now.

But every interaction I’d had with him after that first one had been positive. Very positive. I thought about Dr. Nicole saying I couldn’t trust myself, and then I thought about Joe giving me his jacket when I was cold. And feeding me Italian food. And blow-drying Peanut. And offering to be my model.

Maybe the problem was me.

Maybe I should give this poor guy the benefit of the doubt.

In that second, I could just sense every miserable, conflicting, rejected, angry, hurt, abandoned emotion that Joe had to be feeling.

And in that rush of empathy, I just… wanted to help him.

Maybe it was the fact that he’d helped me tonight without any hesitation. Or maybe it was all the time I’d just spent measuring his face. Or the tickling we’d just done in the grass. But I felt a strong urge to help him out overtake me right then.

And I just didn’t overthink it.

Right there, under the curious gazes of Joe’s ex-wife and Hot Tub Guy, “Who’s this?” still hanging in the air, I slid up next to Joe, hooked my arm around his waist, and tried to create the most sexually suggestive side hug in history.

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