Page 37 of When Annika Met Thom

“Ex,” Annika corrected, her tone hard.

Thom didn’t say that he wouldn’t have put it past Leo to try to charm Annika if he tired of Cerise in the next two weeks.

“Even so.”

“Then what are we?”

This was exactly the kind of thing that drove him crazy and he didn’t care if it showed. “Why do we have to be anything?”

“Because we’re going to be living together for two weeks!”

“Living together? He shook a finger at her. “No. We’re strangers, sharing an apartment for two weeks. It’s not the same as living together.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Sex.”

Annika clearly found this highly unsatisfactory as an answer, but Thom didn’t. “It doesn’t have to be that way.” She chewed. “We could be friends with benefits.”

“This is exactly what I mean. We don’t have to be anything.” Thom put down his slice. “If you were a guy, we would sit here and eat pizza in comparative silence. We would never worry about defining the nature of our relationship. We’d just be two guys eating pizza until it was gone.”

“And that would be okay.”

“It would beperfect.”

She watched him for long moments, finishing her own piece of pizza and pushing her plate aside. Thom knew she wasn’t going to let it go.

“Humor me,” she said and he glanced at her. “Tell me something about yourself.”

“You know something already.”

“That’s all there is to you, the kind of ice cream you like?”

“It’s all that’s relevant to you.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“In two weeks, you’ll be gone and we’ll never see each other again. There is no relationship now. There won’t be one after that either. Why complicate something as simple as sharing a pizza together?”

He knew the answer, of course. Women liked to build connections and bonds.

“Is it significant that the most sentences you’ve strung together so far in our brief acquaintance are to explain why we don’t need to know each other better?”

“It might be if it were true.”

“When did you say more?”

“When I set down the house rules.”

She wrinkled her nose and sighed. “Right, you did.” Then she fixed him with a bright look. “You don’t want to get to know each other.”

“I don’t see the point.”

“If I had to come back to Manhattan, maybe I could stay here again.”

Thom shook his head. “Not a chance.”

“You don’t know me enough to dislike me.”

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