Page 45 of The Lipstick Flip

Tracy mumbled something, but she didn’t resist when I walked her over to the sofa. Okay, perp-walked her—some habits, you don’t lose, even if you haven’t been a cop in a long time.

When I got back to the kitchen, Noah was staring at me.

“Plates?” I said.

He was still hugging himself, but some of the tension in his body eased. A long second stretched out between us. And then he said, “That one.”

I nodded and got out the plates.

Being a cop makes you a cynic. And if the job hadn’t taken the shine off things, being a junkie, being homeless, being in recovery—those would have done it just fine. So, I guess that was why I only set the table for two. Plates patterned with holly boughs. Red cloth napkins. Glasses etched with wreaths and reindeer. It was all very civilized, especially for a white trash son of a bitch like me. I even found pewter chargers, and didn’t that look oh so fucking fancy?

By then, Tracy was snoring. I laid her on her side and covered her with a throw.

Noah was watching me from the kitchen.

Maybe we would have stood like that forever, except the timer went off. He started—a tiny movement, but telegraphed across the room to me.

“Sounds like dinner’s done,” I said.

He nodded; that was all.

I helped Noah bring the food to the table. He’d made prime rib, with all sorts of roasted vegetables to go with it—trust Noah not to settle for mashed potatoes. He gave me a pointed look as he took a salad out of the refrigerator.

“What?” I said with a laugh.

“You know what.”

“Good fucking Christ, Noah, we haven’t even sat down yet.”

“I know. I’m just making sure you know that you’re going to eat some salad.”

“Well, fuck, yeah, I’m going to eat some salad.”

“I’ve seen your refrigerator, Howard.”

I wasn’t sure why, but I almost laughed again, and I couldn’t seem to stop smiling.

“Here,” Noah said, laying the carving knife and fork across my plate. “Because you’re the man.”

“Excuse me?”

His smile was…I guess the best word for it would be sharp, but there did seem to be some genuine amusement there as well. I wasn’t exactly a barbarian, but I wasn’t sure I did justice to the meal Noah had prepared. I got a few good slices, though, and I plated Noah’s first. While he was helping himself to the roasted vegetables, I served myself. I made sure I got a lot of the salad.

“Do you want to say grace?” I asked.

Tracy’s soft snores filled the quiet moment that followed.

“I want to say thank you,” Noah said in a low voice.

There was something about his eyes. About how blue they were. About how he was looking at me, like he was asking me something, and I couldn’t quite hear the words. It was too much, so I looked down and speared some salad and mumbled, “It’s no big deal.”

We ate in silence for a time, and then I realized I was being a horse’s ass, and so I asked about the salad, and Noah told me it was a citrus vinaigrette, and I told him how good it was, and he said we’d had something similar one time when we’d tried that little coffee shop next to the college—and just like that, we were talking. About the food, sure. Because it was all delicious, the way it always was with Noah. But also about…everything.

And suddenly I realized we hadn’t talked like this—talked—in years. In the week since Noah had shown up unexpectedly in my life, we’d talked, sure. But those had been conversations with a goal in mind, with something we had to decide, with offers and counterproposals. I remembered, with a flush, wanting to set limits. Even the phone sex had been…well, not transactional. But we’d definitely had an end point in mind.

This, right now, was just a flow of words. Back and forth. Easy. Like we’d never stopped.

Why had we stopped?