Page 150 of You're so Bad

“Yes, probably. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Either thing, actually.”

Her lips curve upward in a smile that’s so bright it feels like it unhinges something inside of me. I want to reach out and touch it.

I can practically hear my friend Leonard telling me this is what happens when a man lets himself go too long without sex.

“What?” she asks, lifting her fingers to her lips and taking what I wanted for herself. “Did I fuck up my lipstick? I did it without a mirror.”

“No,” I say woodenly, my mind hitched on that image of her painting her lips that bright shade of red without a mirror. “It’s great. Perfect.”

“Ah.” She grins. “We’re back to the monosyllabic words.”

“Perfect has two syllables.”

“And there’s my grump.” Her eyes are dancing with amusement—amusement atme—but for some reason I find myself smiling.

“Maybe I like to keep people guessing.”

“That’s one of us, then,” she says. She gives her lips another tap, then says, “Living with Byron made me realize that he was a shallow, dumb dick on legs.I’mthe one who broke up withhim.”

“Oh,” I say, which is as much intelligence as I’m capable of at the moment.

Then she heads toward the stairs. She goes down ahead of me, and it would take the will of a man who’s had sex more recently than a year and a half ago to avoid looking at her swaying ass as she goes down.

When we get to the bottom, there’s a gigantic box waiting outside the plate glass door of the building—and no deliveryman.

“Are you kidding me?” Mira mutters as she opens the door and glances left and right. “Someone could have stolen my baby.”

“I thought you said this was a record player stand?” I ask. Because it looks big enough to build a dining room table.

She shrugs. “I have a lot of records, and I also took a lot of Byron’s.”

“Let’s get it inside,” I say, grabbing one end.

She picks up the other, and we back it through the door.

“Elevator,” I say, nodding to the elevator at the other end of the lobby, past the mailboxes. It’s an old claptrap kind of thing, with a heavy door you need to pull open yourself, and an accordion style door beyond it that opens when you press the button for your floor.

“Hell to the no.” She shakes her head for emphasis. “That thing wigs me out. Getting stuck on an elevator is my idea of hell.”

Getting stuck on an elevator with me is even less appealing, I’m guessing.

“Why don’t you let me take it up, then?” I say. “I like the elevator.”

“Of course you do. It’s a fossil.”

“I can’t be much older than you,” I comment, hoisting my end of the box a little higher, because dammit if it’s not starting to seem like we’ll be carrying it up a few flights of stairs.

“I may be thirty, but I have the soul of a much younger person. You have the soul of an old guy whose balls are hanging down to his knees.”

Her eyes are glimmering as she says it, and it’s obvious she’s having fun.

“I’ll go at the bottom,” I volunteer, because the weight will settle on whoever’s in that position.

“No, I will,” she insists. “I don’t like walking backward. It wigs me out.”

“So no elevators and no moonwalking. Got it.”

“See!” she says, her voice louder than it has any reason to be. “You’re so old.”

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