Chapter Four
Who knew it took an hour to bake a peach pie from scratch? No one in Flick’s life had ever cooked any kind of pie. They bought them at Walmart, and they came in a box, and they took twenty minutes to reheat if you bothered with the oven and about five if you were impatient and used the microwave.
Everyone in her family had been impatient. Mostly they ate pie cold and the dessert default was ice cream.
She wouldn’t have asked Tom to make pie if she’d known how long it took. Now she had to eat the pie, which wasn’t the hardship; she wanted the pie, it was the hanging around while he made the pie that was the issue.
Tom clearly didn’t like her, or want her living here, and that was a problem. And hell, she’d known that and yet once she’d learned his address and asking price, she’d jumped in feet first, like always, because the solution in front of you was always a better option than the one that might never materialize.
What an end to a disagreeable week. Resigning had not gone well. Turning down the counteroffer even less well. Her timing was bad. The firm was busy, and clients relied on her. She’d been made to feel she was letting the whole place down by quitting now, and instead of excusing herself and going to her room when she’d encountered Tom and his fried chicken, she’d gone and reignited the cold war between them, right when he’d started to sound more interesting than a ruggedly handsome boulder.
And she hadn’t mentioned the job or the move to her family yet.
Roller coaster was right. Sometimes she made herself feel sick with the twisty machinations of her life.
At least pie-cooking time allowed her to escape the living room and change out of her work clothes. She took her cue from Tom and pulled on yoga pants and a sloppy top that hung to mid-thigh. He was barefoot, so she didn’t worry about shoes. He’d see her chipped toenail polish, but that detail hardly mattered. He’d seen her temper and her childishness.
“He really brings out the best in you, Felicity.” She washed her face, removing what traces of makeup, untouched through the day, had remained. Her hair was a mess, but this wasn’t a date. She didn’t need to look like anything except comfortable, so she pulled it out of its band and left it loose, shoved back behind her shoulders.
She looked pale and tired.
Annoying that Tom looked as good out of his corporate wardrobe as in. He had the chest and shoulders to make a T-shirt look sexy and the square jaw of a cartoon hero. No denying it, her housemate was a looker for a boulder.
Annoying that the man cooked so well. Though anything that wasn’t reheated leftovers was good as far as Flick was concerned. Still, annoying. Bet he took back that invitation to eat together again. For about five minutes, it had sounded damn near neighborly, before he said she’d burn out and implied she was a lousy lay.
She stopped with her hand on the fashionably chromed door handle of her room. “I made a man who doesn’t like me talk about his dead mom and cook pie. Go me.”
She’d be lucky to taste the pie through the guilt of that. She’d eat, make the appropriate nom-nom noises, offer to clean up and quit the scene before she could do any further damage to her tenuous living arrangement in the nicest apartment she’d ever been in.
As soon as she opened the bedroom door she could smell the pie. Not as mouthwatering as fried chicken but wonderful all the same. A heated Sara Lee did not smell this delicious; she could almost taste the sugar, and the smoothness of the peaches.
Tom was settled on the big comfortable modular sectional with the TV on CNN and the remote in his hand. He’d moved her satchel and scarf from the sectional where she dumped them to one of four stools at the kitchen counter. He switched back to the music channel when she came in. Some eighties thing she didn’t recognize. He had a slick sound system but an odd taste in music.
“The Pixies,” he said.
“‘Where is my mind?’” she said on top of the lyric. Where indeed? “You like old stuff.”
“I like playlists other people have made. Saves me the bother.”
How efficient. And soulless. “Look, I’m sorry about earlier. The pie thing.”
“It’s fine. Pie is good. I’m a big boy, I could’ve told you to take your pie request and shove it. And you didn’t bully me into offering you the room. It suits my purposes to have you here, and again, I’m not shy about telling people to fuck off. This is a temporary thing between us, but it doesn’t have to be unpleasant. We should take the time to get to know each other.”
It was a good thing one of them was a rational adult. That was the most he’d said since the hacks-and-flacks mixer when he’d nearly taken her out with his body slam. Except he was looking at her as if she’d done something he didn’t like again.
“Am I dressed wrong?” Shit. The guy had rules on top of rules. She didn’t know how she felt about him moving her stuff.
He placed the remote control in a carved wooden tray on the coffee table that was a solid slab of caramel-streaked marble, and stood. “Of course not. I didn’t realize you were so—” He stopped, jaw clamped tight.
“So what?”
“Young.”
“I’m twenty-eight.”
“You could pass for eighteen without the—” he waved a hand to indicate her body “—uniform—” and her face “—and gunk.”
She parroted his gesture. “Which is precisely why I need the uniform and the gunk. No one wants to take policy and public affairs advice from an eighteen-year-old.”
One of her biggest expenses when she’d landed a consultancy job was her wardrobe. She’d lived in jeans and tees and flirty cheap cotton dresses and had never worn heels. She’d had no idea how to dress to impress and neither did anyone she knew.
She had to hire a corporate wardrobe consultant with her first salary deposit, and spent a bucket load of cash and credit on the right suits and shoes, and elegant dresses for after-hours events. All of which had to be updated regularly, because not being on trend, with the right hair and makeup, was some kind of professional slip-up, a bigger crime than not going to the right school.
Not something men had to deal with, and goddamn, she resented that. Her credibility was at stake if the cut of her skirt was out of fashion, but a man could wear the same suit every day and no one would notice, let alone think it affected his judgment.
“You know there was an Australian male newscaster who wore the same blue suit five days a week on air for a year. No one picked it up. Same suit, five days a week, one whole year, millions of viewers. And not one person was bothered about it. But people called the network and complained if they didn’t like the color of his female colleague’s shirt on a single day.”
“I did not know that,” Tom said. And he said it in a “don’t spook the horses” way, as if he thought this was the beginning of her burnout, the very moment she started to unravel, and it was a good idea not to excite her any further.
“I need pie.” I need you to back off on the judging. You only think I’m a wildcat because you are a stone wall.
He went behind the kitchen counter. It might have been to check on the pie, but since he didn’t go to the oven, it had to be to take shelter from the blast radius. She went to the counter and stood there looking precisely like someone who’d never eaten homemade pie.
“Fifteen minutes,” he said, without reading the back of a pack or anything. Impressive. Annoying.
“I’m not going to burn out.”
“I shouldn’t have said that.”
Fifteen minutes was a long time for two tense people on the verge of an argument to wait for pie and not speak.
Finally, Tom went to the oven and Flick moved across to the kitchen. He took the pie out and set it on the counter. It was golden and puffy, the top of it crosshatched so you could see the yellow of the peaches. They looked almost liquid. Drool gathered in the corners of her mouth.
“This has to cool,” he said.
“I shouldn’t have said the thing about the rails.”
“But you believe it.”
She nodded. Two tense people backing off cautiously. “And you believe I’m a fire hazard. I’ve got lots of energy. Always. I don’t need much sleep. Multitasking is my jam. Make me do one thing for too long and I’m tearing out my hair. But all you can see is that I’m undisciplined and inefficient.”
“You want me to lie with your pie?”
“No, I want it not to be weird between us.”
“Tell me you sleep in pajamas.”
“T-shirt and panties as a concession to being here, in case I sleepwalk.”
His brows went up. “You sleepwalk?”
“I’m not technically asleep when I do it. I might visit the fridge in the middle of the night and I’d forget not to do it naked, so the makeshift PJs are about not wanting to flash my landlord should he also decide he needs a glass of milk at three in the morning. Also, while we’re talking about nakedness—”
“We’re not talking about nakedness.” He looked her right in the eyes as if he was doing some secret military industrial-complex mind-control shit, and he wanted her to forget they were talking about sleeping naked.
“I’m not terrible in bed. There’s a drought, but that doesn’t presume any correlation with my suckiness in the sack.”
“I didn’t say you were terrible in bed.”
“You implied it.”
“You’re a nun. I didn’t imply anything. That would be sacrilegious.”
“You don’t sleep naked, do you?”
“Maybe we could make this not weird some other way.”
“Like trade our Tinder profile info.”
“Like eat pie.” He went to the freezer. “Ice cream?”
It was vanilla bean, some designer brand. “Sure.”
He moved about getting plates and fancy cake forks out of their places while she sat on the stool she’d used earlier.
“My Tinder tagline says ‘older-than-she-looks professional woman seeks hostile man for mutual psychological torture, rough sex, sleeping together naked, potential codependency and certain heartbreak.’”
He didn’t look up. “It does not.”
“It says everything except the rough sex part. That’s for negotiating later.”
“And your picture is you with your tits out.”
She laughed, because he looked up and his face colored. “Now who’s not talking about nakedness?” He had a Tinder profile, she was sure of it. “It’s a selfie taken in a club—it’s too dark. I’m making a peace sign. There’s two people behind me sucking face. It’s terrible. I wasn’t trying. Haven’t gone on there in forever. My bio really says ‘probably don’t bother.’”
“You have a bad photo and a crappy tag. That makes no sense.”
“Had no incentive to get into dating. I knew I wanted to be in New York or Washington. But I like sex, so Tinder seemed perfect, except not, if you know what I mean.”
“I don’t.”
“You called me a ghost. You thought I ghosted you, that’s an online dating reference, and since you like things uncomplicated I figure you have a Tinder profile. No shirtless pic. No image-softening animals. You’re wearing shades. No, I know, it’s an action shot. You’re riding a mechanical bull and your tagline says, ‘I’m Thomas, and I cuddle at the level that should require a subscription.’ No, wait, no, it’s ‘treat you like a Disney princess on the streets and a porn princess between the sheets.’ Or, or, ‘whenever I meet a pretty girl, the first thing I look for is intelligence, because if she doesn’t have that, she’s mine.’”
Not even a snicker. He took a cake server from the drawer and cut into the pie, plated two huge slices then spooned ice cream on them. “It’s ‘pizza is my second favorite thing to eat in bed.’”
She near head-banged the countertop she laughed so hard. She’d given up on thinking he’d react. And he would never eat pizza in bed.
He pushed a plate toward her. “You think you’re the only one who can go for the shock-and-awe lines?”
“Ladies and gentlemen, he cooks, he critiques, he slams down the one-liners.” She made spirit-finger hands and the haaah sound of a crowd cheering.
“Eat your damn pie.”
She ate the pie and it was a kind of bliss in her mouth that made her want to fall in like with Tom. The guy had a special place to put the TV remote, so the chances of that happening were snowball-meet-hell.
Some other guy strumming a guitar was singing about shooting up and not knowing who he was. It was the story of their evening. “Who is that?” she said, hoping to distract Tom while she licked her plate.
“Velvet Underground.”
“Is the song called ‘I’m Trying to Kill Myself’?”
“Close enough. ‘Heroin.’”
“Dude is probably on Tinder.”
“Lou Reed. He’s dead.”
“Too much heroin?”
“He walked on the wild side. Liver disease, so maybe.”
“This is an excellent pie.”
“You licked the plate, you’re a heathen. You can have another piece.”
She sucked on her fork. There was half a pie left, but she’d pop if she ate any more now. “What’s going to happen to it?” Leftover pie, it was unheard of in her life.
“It’ll keep.”
“Are you saying I could have another piece tomorrow?”
“No, I was saying it will keep.”
He was so, so, so deliberately provocative. “Are you really on Tinder?”
“Are you?”
“I’m asking the questions.” He deserved that.
He knew it too. He groaned. “I’m on it. It’s a hiking shot, lots of scenery and a little of me. I go by TC.”
And she deserved that. Finally, something about him that wasn’t polished. “Tom Cat?” Typical.
“Oh God, no. Top Cat. My mom used to call me that.” He passed a hand over his face. “I need to quit the app. I never look at it. Josh set it up so we could compare Tinder and Grindr. He was into all of them for a laugh. Scruff, Growlr, Recon, Daddyhunt, Guyspy.”
Impressive knowledge of dating apps. “I hooked up with it once. It was awful. I mean, it wasn’t dangerous, just made me sad.”
“I failed to hook up with it twice. Got stood up once and did the standing up once.”
“Disaster. We should have a ritual app deletion ceremony.” Yeah, if they were fifteen-year-olds. The pie had gone to her head.
“Let’s do it.”
Oh.
Tom walked past her on his way to his room. She went after him to hers. They were doing it. Back in the living room, phones in hand, she said, “We’re saying goodbye to the meat market of casual, meaningless, demoralizing sex. We’ll have to scratch the itch another way.”
“We’re quitting a service that drives social isolation by replacing sustained intimacy with single-instance, shallow encounters.”
“You’ve thought about this. That’s very good.”
“It’s Hillary Preston, professor of behavioral sciences at UCLA School of Medicine. She calls it cupcake socialization. Cupcakes are ubiquitous but unique, simple and desirable, calorie-laden, habit-forming reward schemes. A diet of them is bad for you.”
“Go, Hillary.” She lowered her chin. “You stood someone up.”
“She was a kid. Way too young.”
“She might’ve been me.”
“I wouldn’t have stood you up.”
Ah.
Awkward.
Maybe he didn’t think she was a lousy lay. She tugged at her top. “You weren’t judging my dress casuals earlier.”
“I reacted to seeing you look so different.”
“Not that I mind. This is your home. I’m just passing through.”
“I’m not judging.”
“I’m not going to explode or backfire, or have a meltdown. You can trust me. I’m happy with where my life is. I wouldn’t change a thing right now. Except I’d already be in Washington.” And the bank of Flick would be closed for everyday business.
“You can have the rest of that pie.”
“You’re a good man, Tom O’Connell.” Stiff and particular, and in need of messing with, but a decent person. “Do you miss Josh?”
“I do. Easiest, closest friend I ever made.”
Look at the two of them. Many talking. Much relationship. Who needed thirty-six questions designed to create intimacy like Jack and Derelie? They had honest distrust, mutual necessity and grudging sexual awareness. “Are you gay, bi? I never thought to ask.”
“No—” he looked at the ceiling “—but I run on tight rails.”
“You can’t dispute it.”
His eyes came back to hers. “They’re my rails and they got me to where I am. Living the way I do works for me. I’m happy with my life. I’m one promotion away from it being perfect.”
She brandished her phone. “Then what are we waiting for? Giving up on cupcake. Pie all the way. Deleting on three.”
“One.”
“Two.”
They deleted on three.
Flick got her pie and she got to tease a cupcake too.