“Do what?” he asks absently.
“Check on her. Now.”
He looks toward the waiting elevator and back at me. “I suppose that would be all right.”
“Thanks,” I say. I jam my keys in my pocket and step into the elevator. Henry calls out her apartment number as the doors close.
I tap my fingers on the rail of the elevator and sing a little song as it rises.
I’m afraid of what I’ll find.
I knock on the door and wait, and suddenly the door opens and she stands in the threshold. She has a gallon of ice cream tucked in the crook of her arm and a ladle full of it lifts toward her mouth. “Mick,” she mutters around her mouthful. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m checking on you.”
She steps back and motions me forward by tilting her head. She goes and flops down on the couch. “I’m fine,” she says.
“Shane looked pissed.”
She rolls her eyes. “Shane always looks pissed.”
“What did he want?” I sit down next to her.
She shrugs. “The same thing he always wants.”
“Sex.” I stare at her.
“Well, that too,” she says. “But mostly it was just another chance.”
“And what did you say?”
She blows out a breath through her lips, making them rattle. “I told him to go back home to Kathy.” She holds the ladle out in my direction. “Want some?” she asks.
I eye the shovel she’s using for a spoon and then lean forward. She lets me take a bite off the end, and then she licks the backside of it.
“This is what BFFs do, Mick. One of them has a bad day, and the other commiserates. Ice cream!” She scoops up more and holds it out toward me. I shake my head. “Do you want me to get you your own spoon?”
“No, thanks.” I scrub a hand across my nose. “I should go. You seem okay.”
She nods. “I’m okay.” She laughs. “You know, that’s the first time he’s ever come crawling back that I didn’t fall into bed with him.”
“What’s different now?” I ask. I grab her wrist and bring the ladle toward my mouth, take a bite, and then let her go.
“I think I am,” she says thoughtfully Then she laughs, but it’s a sound with no pleasure in it. “I’m different. I don’t know when that happened, but when I saw him tonight, my gut didn’t twist, my heart didn’t stop, and my girly parts didn’t go crazy.”
“They didn’t?” I have to cough to clear my throat. Her heart may not have stopped, but I think mine just did.
She shakes her head. “Not a bit.” She gets a dreamy look on her face. “He was really good in bed. Like, fantastic. Phenomenal. It was almost extra-terrestrial what he could do with his penis. Like, I expected that fucker to glow! Looking back, it was probably because he stuck it in every hole he could. He had tons of practice.”
I scrub my hand across my forehead. “Okay, this is strange,” I say more to myself than to her.
“Why?”
“Because you’re you and I’m me and I don’t usually talk about other guys’ ginormous dicks.”
“I didn’t say it was ginormous. I said he knew how to use it.” She licks the ladle again.
“Same difference.”