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“Thank you. I needed that more than I realized.” He rubbed his hand over his glistening chin.
“What time is it?” I asked. My phone was charging on the bedside table, but I was too loose-limbed and comfortable to reach for it.
“It was eight-thirty when I got up. Then, I ran six miles on the treadmill, took a shower, and got a fucking incredible blow job from an utter sex goddess, so…eleven?”
I had to take a shower and call Valerie. She’d said she needed to speak with both of us, though about what, I had no clue. It seemed like that meeting, whatever it was about, would go so much better if I didn’t show up with semen in my hair.
I yawned. “I’m going to go get ready. Find us something for breakfast?”
“Don’t you need to be conscious to eat breakfast?” He traced the shell of my ear with one finger.
“Killjoy.” I pushed myself up reluctantly and yawned.
I was halfway to the bathroom when Neil said, “Thank you for the diversion.”
“The condolence blow job,” I reminded him.
He chuckled. “Yes, well. Thank you for that.”
“My pleasure.” I grinned and wiped my chin. For the first time in a while, Neil’s smile in response was spontaneous, not forced, and I was so relieved to see it.
CHAPTER FOUR
I usually dressed for planned Valerie encounters like I was the president and I was about to strong-arm a nuclear treaty with Vladimir Putin. Today, I just didn’t have time to put that effort into it. I needed to let that go, anyway; Neil wasn’t going to compare me in Old Navy to Valerie in Versace and go, “Gosh, Sophie looks so ugly that I have now forgotten all the problems Valerie and I had in our relationship, and I’m going to go back to her.” It hadn’t happened in something like twenty-six years; it wasn’t going to happen today.
Neil seemed to have the same theory. When Valerie arrived, he went downstairs ahead of me in an R.E.M. tour shirt and gray sweatpants, so clearly we didn’t need to make an impression. I put on a green long-sleeved tee and black yoga pants, pulled my shower-wet hair into a sloppy braid and followed him.
I found them in the sitting room. Valerie was dressed smart, but cas
ual, in skinny jeans and a long black sweater. The loose sleeves were pushed up her arms, and her elbows were braced on her knees. She sat back in her chair when I entered and said a quiet, “Hello, Sophie.”
“Hi?” I said as I looked to Neil. He was on the sofa across the coffee table from her. His jaw was tight, his eyes utterly humorless. I glanced between them. “Did I miss something important?”
Valerie’s gaze snapped to Neil, her expression wavering somewhere between uncertainty and shame. What the fuck has she done?
“It’s all right. Sophie knows everything,” Neil told her. The coldness in his voice could have frozen water off the coast of Miami in August.
I sat beside him, my entire body suddenly tense, like I was watching someone trail a thumbtack over the surface of a balloon. Whatever was about to blow up, I wanted to brace myself for it, but covering my ears was also an attractive option.
I couldn’t read Valerie’s reaction. If I had to put a name to it, it would have been a combo of wariness and surprise and unpleasant shock. Warpriseock?
Even my gift for portmanteaus had deserted me.
“Then, you know…” She cleared her throat. “Sophie, your book was very popular, wasn’t it?”
You know it was popular, bitch. It was on The New York Times list. “Yes… Is this something to do with me?”
“In a way.” Valerie glanced at Neil again, like she was asking permission to do something horrible. “You know that my brother, Stephen, was…involved with Neil.”
“Yeah, he told me.” This conversation sure was jumping around. “He said he was with Stephen before he was with you.”
“We were never ‘with’ each other. We had sex on occasion. There was no romantic relationship.” I’d only heard Neil use his current tone on a few occasions, and they’d all been serious as fuck. Like when I’d casually dismissed his worry over his cancer. And when he’d found out that I’d been kind of double-crossing his company.
So, this was really bad.
“Neil. You know that’s not true. You—” She stopped short at the murderous expression he cut her. To me, she said, “Stephen is a television presenter now, and he’s somewhat well-known here. And, as such, he’s an object of some interest to people.”
“I’m following,” I assured her.
