Page 81 of The Best Part of Breaking Up

When she’s gone, I click the door closed behind her and sigh.

“Could you have made that any weirder?” I whisper.

“What?”

“She thinks we’re together.”

“I mean, we are here together.”

“You know what I mean,” I grimace.

I begin trying to make sense of the items I threw in my bag this morning, wondering if I’ve got anything in here resembling pajamas. I wasn’t planning to be within a few hundred miles of Quentin – much less sharing a room with him – when I packed.

Across the small space, he takes off his shirt with a groan. The muscles of his back flex, and the sound that escapes him makes me feel suddenly aware of my breasts, my hips, the fact that his half-clothed body is barely an arm’s distance away. He unbuttons his jeans, hooking his fingers into the waistband. Alarm bells go off in my brain.

“What are you doing?” I say.

“Changing for bed…”

“Right here?” I half-whisper. “This isn’t a strip club. You know there’s a bathroom down the hall.”

One of his dimples winks at me as he smirks. “Why? Are you worried you might be unable to resist me?”

I roll my eyes, but my heart skips. Standing here – this close to him – I feel utterly defenseless, which in turn means that I become very, very defensive.

“I can’t say that I find dirty lying cheats particularly irresistible,” I shoot back with a sarcastic smile.

That dimple disappears, and he accepts the jab with a tight nod.

“If you want us to be all incognito, then our best bet is to let her think we’re a couple,” he says. “Which she won’t, if we sneak off to the bathroom every time we need to change clothes.”

A few moments later he unceremoniously slides the denim down his hips, revealing dark blue boxers. I know they don’t actually reveal anything – at least not anything more than I’ve seen of him at the pool – but I can’t help but feel my entire body heat. I try to ignore the shadowy contours of his chest, that trail of dark hair beneath his belly button, the subtle V-shaped set of muscles above his hips, leading down… and down…

“Why are you always trying to convince me to fake date you?” I ask. “Don’t you have enough women in your life?”

With another smooth movement, he hauls himself into the top bunk, dramatically draping an arm across his eyes.

“I don’t have any women in my life,” he says. “Probably because I’m such a dirty lying cheat. But I won’t ogle you, if that’s what you’re worried about. I guess if you don’t believe me you could always whip up a contact real quick.”

“Fuck off,” I mutter.

“Gladly,” he says. “Just turn the lights off, when you’re done trying to defame me?”

I click the switch, enveloping us in darkness.

“I’m not trying to defame you,” I argue, snatching a pair of shorts out of my bag. I shimmy into them before peeling off my dress. “I’m making a judgment based on the information that has been presented to me. Isn’t that what we do? If you wanted me to come to a different conclusion, maybe you should’ve offered up a little more evidence.”

The room goes quiet except for the whir of the window unit AC. Even in the shadows, I turn my back to the beds to slide out of my bra and slip into a tank top before crawling into the detergent-and-sunscreen scented sheets of the bottom bunk. I hear the springs above me shift as Quentin turns over. I wonder if his mattress feels as much like thin, springy cardboard as mine does, but I’m not about to ask. I close my eyes and will my brain to succumb to exhaustion, the way my road-weary muscles already have.

I’m somewhere between running through case notes, cursing Quentin’s very soul, and trying to meditate on the faint sound of ocean waves from outside when I hear him say, “My dad abuses women.”

I open my eyes and blink at the bottom of the mattress above me. For a second, I’m sure I imagined this.

“What?” I ask quietly.

“My dad,” he repeats, “is a controlling asshole who abuses women. He doesn’t do it in the way you can see, but he’s brutal, all the same.”

I’m staring at the bed above me, mouth open, at a loss of what to say.

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