Liz turns back and gives one last wave. Both Ben and I wave back, and I can’t help myself. “Enjoy your walk of shame!” I call after her, my voice sweet as sugar.
Liz’s head snaps back as though trying to determine if she heard me correctly, but Ben puts a hand over my face and shoves me back into the house before closing the front door.
He absently rubs a hand over his abs as he looks me up and down.
“You should change. You can’t wear your ratty booty shorts and that ugly T-shirt to IKEA.”
“First of all, you can absolutely wear your rattiest and ugliest T-shirts to IKEA. That’s pretty much the IKEA dress code. And second, we’re not going to IKEA. Really, are you getting so comfortable with your lies that they become fact in your mind?”
“We are going to IKEA,” he says, running both hands through his short brown hair before heading toward the stairs.
“For what?” I ask.
“I
need a new dresser.”
“What’s wrong with your old dresser?”
“It broke.”
I wrinkle my nose. “How the hell do you break a dresser?”
He shoots me a look over his shoulder and wiggles his eyebrows.
It takes me only seconds before I put the pieces together. “Airhead?” I hitch a thumb over my shoulder at the departed female. “You banged her against the dresser?”
“Hey, she was unusually tall, which gave me the unusual opportunity and prime angle to—”
I slap my hands over my ears and start singing Billy Joel’s “Piano Man,” my default protective gesture whenever Ben gets a little too colorful with descriptions of his sexual antics.
Another house rule: Parker absolutely does not want to know what happens in Ben’s bedroom.
“Hey, do you and Lance have plans today?” he asks.
“Maybe you should have asked that before you mandated an IKEA trip. But no, he’s got an all-day study group.”
Lance is getting his MBA from the University of Portland.
“Cool. Let’s grab lunch after.” He heads into his bedroom without looking at me.
Lunch, huh?
I narrow my eyes and sprint up the stairs after him, pushing open his door before he can shut it in my face.
Sure enough, his dresser is definitely leaning unhealthily to one side, and I count two, no make that three, condom wrappers.
He pulls a green polo from the tiny closet in the corner and looks around his messy floor until he finds his jeans.
I wait expectantly.
“What?” he asks.
“Lunch?” I lift my brows. And wait for the explanation.
Ben scratches idly at his slightly stubbled chin. Sharing a bathroom with the guy, I know he shaves every morning, but the stubble seems to be perpetual.
“Well, you know that girl I dated a couple weeks ago? Kim?” he asks. “She wanted me to go to her sister’s engagement brunch, and I told her I was busy all day. But she’s just crazy enough to stop by and see if I’m actually out of the house, so I thought we should be elsewhere….”