His full name, it turned out, was Nick Mason. Half an hour later we sat in an all-night diner, ordering food from the pasty waitress. Millwood was a trucker’s town, a factory worker’s town—or it had been until the gentrifying started—and all-night places weren’t all that rare here. Even now, a trucker sat at a table nursing a cup of coffee, and another one wolfed down a piece of pie before hitting the road again. Outside, the rain had turned into wet mist that beaded in your hair and on your clothes without really turning into rain again.

The waitress didn’t hand us any menus, so I asked her, “What is the kitchen making right now?”

She shrugged. “Grilled cheese sandwich. Three bucks.”

My stomach growled so loud we all heard it.

“Done,” Nick said, and the waitress walked away.

I stared at the man across the booth from me. In keeping with the surreal nature of tonight, he was good-looking even in the fluorescent light of a diner at two a.m. Gray eyes with short dark lashes, high cheekbones, a sculpted mouth. Life was very fucking unfair. He wasn’t even trying to look that good. His hair was damp and mussed, his stubble an exact shade of hangover, and there was a hole just below the collar of his T-shirt. He looked like a model, if a model had rolled off the back of a truck or woken up in the drunk tank—or both. He stuck the straw in his ice water in the corner of his mouth and watched me back.

“Well, that was a scene,” I commented.

“Sorry,” he said. “I had to do it.”

I traced my finger down the side of my water glass. “How did you find me?” I asked. “I mean, you said how you found Josh. But how did you find me?”

“The internet.” He put down his water. “It wasn’t advanced detective work. I’m not that smart.”

I nodded. I was probably on Josh’s Facebook page, from the times he’d posted when we went out for dinner or with friends. Which we would never do again. “I’m sort of in shock,” I said. “I didn’t, um. I didn’t know. At all.”

“No?” Nick said. “I did. That is, I knew she was fucking someone. I didn’t know who.”

Fucking someone. So much coarser than cheating, but it meant the same thing. “Things were going so well,” I said. It hit me again, that punch in the gut of hurt. “I thought they were. But I guess not.” I closed my eyes as yet another detail occurred to me. “I have to work at the bank with him. Oh my god, I’m so humiliated.”

“You love him?” Nick asked.

I opened my eyes again and looked at him. “What? I don’t—I mean, I hadn’t really… It wasn’t…” Love? Had I even asked myself that? And why was I talking about it with this guy? “Do you always ask personal questions?”

“Just wondering if you’re going to cry, that’s all. If you do, I might bail.” He put down his water glass. “You want to talk about the weather right now, Evie?” he said. “For real?”

Intense. That was what he was. Intense. No one who worked at the bank—and I mean no one—was intense. Even Old Evie, in her wild days, hadn’t met a guy like this. If you were going to spill your guts to someone, it may as well be a gorgeous stranger in the middle of the night. But I didn’t say any more. Instead I said, “How long has it been going on?”

“A week? Two?” Nick picked up his spoon and spun it deftly over his fingers, then put it down again. “I could tell something was up. Jesus Christ, my girlfriend fucked a bank guy.” He rolled his eyes.

“Hey—I dated him,” I said, stung. “And I’m a bank… person. What does Miss Bare-Assed Gina do?”

“She’s a massage therapist.”

I thought of her long, slim legs, given to her by God and genetics. “She’s pretty,” I said self-pityingly.

“Not anymore,” Nick replied.

“She’s better-looking than me,” I said while our waitress put down our sandwiches. “Thinner. Obviously. I mean, Josh is better-looking than me. Everyone always wondered how I got such a good-looking guy. They all wondered what he was doing with me. I should have known.”

Nick took a bite of his sandwich. “You done?” he asked.

I looked down at the gooey cheese on my plate. Fuck, it looked delicious. I shouldn’t eat it. “Done what?”

“Pissing on yourself,” he said. “Whining.”

I looked up and froze, staring at him. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me,” he said. “You want to feel better, you should fuck someone. It’ll do a better job than wasting time running yourself down like that.”

For a second I couldn’t say anything. Then I found my voice. “Did you just say I should fuck someone?”

“You heard me. You should,” he said. “Hard. Get someone to fuck you until you can’t stand up.” His gaze went up and down me again, seeming to see through my clothes. “I’m gonna guess Bank Boy never fucked you like that.”

No. Josh had never fucked me like that. However Nick meant when he looked at me just that way… No. Another shiver happened low in my belly.

I had to be rational here. And I didn’t even know this guy.

“I can’t—” I stuttered. “I can’t believe you just said that. You’re an asshole.”

“That right there.” He pointed at me, at my face. He wore two bracelets on his wrist, a leather one and a woven one that looked old and worn. Something significant. I wondered what it was. “That expression. That’s the one you didn’t have when you saw your boyfriend fucking another woman. I bet Bank Boy never saw that expression at all.”

I had no idea what my expression was, but I had to guess furious. Because that was how I suddenly felt. Fuck him and his stupid insights, anyway. “Fine,” I said, trying to piss him off in return. “I should just fuck someone. Are you volunteering?”

For a second, he actually considered it, his gaze taking me in, up and down. My overalls and sweater, my messy hair. My stomach went into freefall. Why had I said that? Because he was hot, and I’d assumed it wouldn’t happen? Or because I assumed it would? If he said no, or if he said yes—either was equally terrifying.

But Nick shook his head. “You’re not the kind of woman I fuck,” he said.

Now I was both offended and relieved at the same time. “Why not?” I asked.

“You’re nice. I’m too dirty for you.”

No one likes a girl who makes a fuss, my mother said in my head. Gina wasn’t nice. Gina was sexy. Dirty, maybe. Unlike me. Unlike the way I was now.

There were reasons I was like this. Being sexy and dirty, being that girl—it led nowhere. It was pointless. Worse, it led to pain and disappointment. No, even for Nick Mason and his stupid-gorgeous face and his stupid-hot body, I wasn’t going down that road ever again.

But suddenly I was purely, deeply enraged. I wanted to stand up, flip the table through the plate glass window, and scream that I was not nice.

I didn’t do that, of course. I sat with my hands gripping the table edge so hard my knuckles were white. If Nick noticed, he didn’t let on. “Well, you’re not my type either,” I snapped. “I like guys with a little politeness and self-respect. I also like guys who do laundry every once in a while.”

He put a hand over his heart. “You’re hurting me,” he said. “What are you, seventy? You look twenty-five at most. Loosen up, have some orgasms. You’re missing out.”

“You don’t know what I’m missing.”

“Yeah, redhead, I kind of do.”

Fuck. He was so calm. And he had sexy fucking arms. Sexy everything. I kept my voice snappish to keep my distance. “So, Dr. Freud, I should have orgasms, according to you. Is that right? But not with you.”

“Definitely not with me.”

“What is the matter with you?” I said, so loud the half-asleep waitress behind the front counter nearly woke all the way up.

“What’s the matter with me is that I’m an asshole,” Nick said. “We’ve established that. What’s the matter with you?”

“What’s the matter with me is that I wasted four months!” I said. “Four months on that jerk! Being nice! He was supposed to be the one! We were supposed to make plans! And he went off and banged some massage therapist with no pants, and you think I should just—should just—”

“Fuck someone,” Nick supplied.

“Is that what you’re going to do?” Oh, God. Suddenly, I had a vision: Nick Mason, naked, in bed. I looked at his perfect mouth, and the dip between his collarbones, which I could see past the neck of his T-shirt, and it was so easy to picture. All that taut, muscled skin. It was all mixed up with his muscles and his reddened knuckles and the gravel of his voice, and suddenly my girl parts woke up. I mean woke up. I didn’t even like him, and he’d just insulted me. It was exciting and horrifying at the same time.

“I might fuck someone,” he answered me, oblivious. “I’m still considering. I punched Bank Boy, and that felt pretty good. It’s you who has the anger problem.”

That startled me out of my lust. “I do not have an anger problem.”

“You do,” he corrected me patiently. “Your problem is that you don’t have enough of it. You need to get good and mad.”

“I am already good and mad,” I argued back. “At you.”

“Then take it out on me,” Nick said, immune to my insults. “I’m at a boxing gym every day at five.” He told me an address that I recognized in a not-so-nice part of town. “Come meet me if you want to work up a sweat.”

My reply was immediate. A boxing gym? With Nick Mason? “No way.”

He licked cheese from his thumb, pulled some bills from his wallet, and stood up. “Whatever. See you later, redhead.” Then he turned and walked for the door.

I stared after him, stunned. And I couldn’t help it. I watched his ass as he walked.

It was amazing.

I stared for a long time after he was gone, still picturing it.

Then I ate my damned sandwich.