Page 12 of Nothing At All

Stephanie? Woman in Valdosta? Realization sheared through me. She was talking about Dan’s mother . . . which meant she was talking about my Dan.

Having lunch with another woman?

That didn’t track at all. It couldn’t be Lydia, because this gossipy biddy would know her. Maybe it was EmmaLee. Sure, she’d had his dick in her mouth, but that was years ago. They laughed about it, and I’d seen them together. That college-freshman experimentation didn’t mean anything.

Setting my basket of items – she really could have let me go ahead of her – by my feet, I pulled out my phone. Who did you have lunch with since Chuck bailed?

I waited.

And waited.

Bubbles popped up and transformed almost instantly into a reply. Nicole sat down at my table for a few minutes.

Got my food and ate in my car.

I frowned over the texts. Was that defensive overexplaining or just Dan-style overexplaining? It read like Dan . . . but Nicole clearly wanted him and she’d been crying?

I reread Dan’s text.

Nicole sat down at my table for a few minutes.

Well, why did you let her, Dan?

We hadn’t talked about Nicole after Saturday night at the Millhouse. There’d seemed no point since I’d seen for myself she wasn’t on his radar.

His feelings for her weren’t a threat. He didn’t have any. I knew that.

But here was a very public narrative about her feelings for him.

And Dan was . . . naive.

I wasn’t just his first sexually. I was his first real relationship. He’d told me about crushes, some short term dating in college, but I was the first real thing.

Initially, that felt like a red flag. Who got to twenty-four without dating someone longterm? Especially someone as good-looking and down to earth as he was.

But I’d soon realized he was merely shy and focused. He hadn’t really wanted a relationship until me.

I’d picked the admission apart when he’d blurted it at dinner one night, only a few weeks after we’d started going out, before we’d slept together, before we were exclusive. Was that just another line? Could I trust him?

We’d gone slowly, and he turned out to be green flag after green flag and proved unfailingly honest, like one night when we’d been watching a movie on my couch. He’d kept running his palms down his thighs, and finally he’d blurted, “I gotta talk to you about EmmaLee.”

His cheeks had been red as fire when he brought up his sister’s best friend, and I’d known. Sitting next to him, his leg pressed to mine, I decided I wouldn’t be jealous. I mean, I’d hooked up with Ryan Godwin regularly my senior year of college as a form of stress relief with no batteries required, and we were still friends.

Dan had stumbled through an explanation of a gaming night in his dorm room when Lydia and EmmaLee had driven up to Athens so Lydia could meet up with a guy attending UGA. They’d talked about what they had and hadn’t done, who they had and hadn’t done it with, and why it had or hadn’t worked.

The conversation had led to experimentation on his dorm bed and great embarrassment on my couch.

While he talked, he’d stared at the television, where a really handsome guy from the Middle East and a really beautiful Italian woman sought to escape an alien invasion. The visual effects were awesome, and the suspense made reading subtitles worth it.

He was missing all of it, though, his jaw tight and a muscle flicking in his jaw. Red highlighted his cheekbones and flushed his neck.

“I wasn’t good at any of it.” He slumped deeper, shoulders sagging. “She told me her clit wasn’t a game controller.”

I wanted to laugh, not at him, but for EmmaLee – because who hadn’t had that experience? Instead, I laid a hand on his knee and rubbed my thumb over the groove by his kneecap. “Nobody knows what they’re doing at first. It takes practice.”

He cleared his throat, a rough, uncomfortable sound. “I haven’t really tried a lot since.”

Startled, I darted a look at him, finding him still staring straight ahead. The unhappy slant to his mouth hurt my heart, and suddenly so much made sense – how slowly we were moving, how reticent he was to take our kissing further, why his hands never wandered below my waist.