Page 35 of Plays Well With Others

“It’s so…thoughtful.” It’s as if she hasn’t spoken the word in ages. Like it’s unfamiliar to her tongue. She bites the corner of her lips then waves a hand in front of her face, her eyes shining.

Oh, shit. Is she going to cry again?

Instead, she takes a steadying breath. “It’s more than I expected tonight.”

Does being nice to her make her cry? No clue. Probably best to make light of the whole situation. “I told you I wasn’t an underachiever.”

She shakes her head vehemently. “I know you’re not, but that’s not what I mean, Carter,” she says, soft and vulnerable.

Her sincerity neutralizes my need to make her laugh. “What do you mean?”

She exhales shakily. “When Edward wanted to impress me, he’d always pick the hot new restaurant that a finance buddy had told him about. He’d usually have missed something I’d planned. A dinner at home. Or a birthday. Or a night out with friends. So he’d make it up to me with these fancy meals. A shabu-shabu place in Silverlake where you had to know someone who knew someone who had the secret handshake to get you in. An Argentinean steakhouse in Santa Monica run by a chef who’d escaped the country, one with a long waitlist Edward could bypass with money. A dessert shop in Los Feliz that was opened by a woman who’d studied under the next Gordon Ramsay, but then defected to do her own thing.”

“Okay,” I say, carefully, waiting for her to go on. I need to make sure she’s not suggesting that I’m doingthat.

“And I’d go with him. Put on pearls. A simple black dress. The sommelier would bring over a bottle of wine and uncork it, and Edward would swirl it, and say it’d be my new favorite. Then he’d tell me about his business trip to London or Singapore or Milan, and the deals he’d struck, and the stories he’d heard. The endless stories from the road. The international banker he’d met who’d just trekked across Nepal in alife-changing journey. The financier who’d climbed Kalymnos in Greece and experienced god,” she says, with a derisive twist in her tone. “It was all just part of the deception.”

Don’t go there. Do not put me in the same breath as that scum. “That’s not what I’m doing,” I say, a warning in my voice.

“No, god no,” she says, flustered, then she sets a hand on my forearm, wrapping her soft fingers around me—skin against skin since my cuffs are rolled up. “I know that’s not what you’re doing. This is so different. This is…” She dips her face, shakes her head. “I feel so selfish saying this.”

“Say it,” I urge.

She lifts her face, holding my gaze. “This is about me. All the things he did were about him,” she says, a little awestruck.

“Good. Thisisfor you.Thisis about you,” I say. It saddens me that Rachel sets the bar so low. That she doesn’t realize that considering your date’s wants and wishes is a minimum standard.

But that’s easy for me to say. I wasn’t the one married to a cheating charlatan who kept another family on the side. Rachel already beats herself up for having been bamboozled by him. The least I can do is show her what respect and decency look like.

And how it feels, too, to sit across from a man who listens to a woman.

And, most of all, that she deserves that.

She squeezes my forearm harder. “I don’t even know what to say except…thank you,” she says.

“You’re welcome,” I say, hazarding a glance at her hand on my arm. Her eyes are a little glazed, as if she’s a million miles away, but she strokes her thumb over the muscle. It’s a dangerous path her fingers are traveling. She’s zapping my body with endorphins, so I put on my game face, maintaining some stoicism even as my body crackles.

She lets go.

I miss her touch.

But it’s probably for the best that she stopped turning me on with her damn thumb. Especially since Elodie has just arrived with a bright smile and two cups of spiked chocolate.

She sets the first one down in front of Rachel. “I call it Some Like it Hot.”

“Nice name,” Rachel says.

Elodie puts the other one in front of me. “This is With A Kick,” she says. “And I’ll be back soon with your special tasting.”

Rachel grins again. “This is the red-carpet treatment.”

“And you deserve it,” I say. This is just baseline shit that a friend should do, let alone a man taking out a woman.

I lift my cup, knock it to hers, and drink up. The chocolate is rich and bittersweet, and the whiskey is good and strong. “Whoa. Elodie should, like, go into business selling chocolate.”

Rachel drinks hers, then nods in agreement. “Let’s tell her to open a shop.”

“She might not have thought of it before, right?”

---