Sure. Why not. Another big bite.
“If there’s a diet you can think of, I’ve been on it. I always hated it. Now I’m just me and I eat whatever I want, whenever I want, because I wasted a lot of time always ordering grilled salmon.”
“You have a pasta deficit.”
“Which at the moment I’m consoling with panini. Close to satisfaction, but still just a centimeter away.”
Like their hands on the table.
She hesitated. “I’ve never told anyone I’ve never been to Italy.”
Martin considered this. “I’ve never told anyone I’ve never been to Borneo.”
“Did people think you should have been to Borneo?”
“I don’t know, it never came up.”
“Italy used to come up. I just... pretended. Usually I avoided directly lying, but not always, and then I always wanted to take a shower afterwards to wash off this... simpering idiot I’d acted like for a whole evening, chiming in with facts she’d gotten off TripAdvisor. Just so people wouldn’t look at me.”
He closed the gap between their hands.
His hand dwarfed hers by so much. But even if she was smaller, she was no longer quite as delicate as she’d been. Now, even if they’d been earned by unheroic typing practice and long hours with her pen, she had her calluses too. She had proof, on her body, of the person she’d chosen to be.
She turned her hand around so her palm was against his. So he could feel the pads of her fingers against his own.
Martin said, “Does it bother you when I look at you?”
“No one’s ever looked at me like you do.” She took a deep breath. “It would bother me if you stopped.”
She couldn’t get her voice to sound light enough, flirtatious enough. She couldn’t tease. She didn’t know why, but for her, this already felt serious.
You rush into things. You always have. You make your biggest mistakes that way.
It wasn’t the rushing that did me in, Tiffani thought. It was the thousand little choices after that. My problem isn’t that I was reckless. It’s that after I was reckless, I panicked and lost all my courage.
She said, “How much time do you think we have before we have to be back at work?”
Martin’s eyes met hers.
“Enough.”
Chapter Four: Martin
The moment he said the word, Martin felt the lie of it.
There would never be enough time. Not for them.
If there had been a clock ticking away inside him counting down to the exact moment when he would have fallen in love with her whether she was his mate or not, it had stopped still before her hand had even touched his.
Tiffani had starved and starved herself to fit an idea that all that deprivation would create something finer and worthier. But nothing could be better than Tiffani as she was. Locked up in her society wife
image, Tiffani hadn’t done the good she was doing now. She would never have been free to stand up to cranky judges or entertain kids with funny, improvised sci-fi fairy tales. She burned so much more brightly now and she kept so many more people warm.
You could learn from her, his pegasus said.
He was certainly learning something. Two hours ago, he’d thought love and excitement were out of his life for good. Now he was walking with her hand-in-hand to a hotel, his heart racing.
Correction: now he was stopping by a drugstore with her to buy condoms. He felt like he had an enormous flashing sign over his head: NEWLY IN LOVE. ABOUT TO HAVE SEX.