Page 22 of The Devil You Know
Oh God, this will never end.
But when I don’t reply, Leah grasps a lock of my hair firmly with her sticky fingers, then shuts her eyes. I watch her sweet, round face until her breathing starts to slow. I feel my own eyes threatening to drift closed, so I do something that I know I shouldn’t do:
I think about Ryan.
I think about how sexy he looks in his scrubs. How much sexier he looked when we were all alone and the scrubs came off. How sexy his voice was when he said my name.Jane.Ryan was the only man in the world who could make my plain name sound sexy.
When we were together, he was always so confident—the same way he was in the rest of life. And he earned it. When he whispered in my ear, “I’m going to make you feel good, Jane,” he was never wrong. “Good” was definitely not a strong enough word for the way Ryan Reilly made me feel. “Amazing” would be better, but still not quite enough. Incredible. Phenomenal. Unbelievable. Something along those lines.
Is it wrong to think about him? In all the time I’ve been with Ben, I’ve never fantasized about another man. At least, not in any serious kind of way. But there’s nothing wrong with this. They’re just thoughts in my head.
Leah’s breathing has deepened. She’s asleep. That means I can sneak out of here, if I’m very careful. But one wrong move and she’ll wake up. When she was younger, I used to sometimes crawl out of her room on my hands and knees because I was so terrified of waking her.
I miraculously manage to escape from Leah’s room without arousing her. I find Ben in the living room, sitting on the couch and basking in the freedom of it not being his turn to put Leah to bed—he’s got his peanut butter jar with a big spoon sticking out of it. After thinking about Ryan for the last ten minutes, it seems somehow odd to come out here and see Ben, like I’ve stepped through a wormhole into another parallel universe.
He’s messing around on his phone, but when he sees me, he puts it down. “Hey,” he says, “wanna watch something?”
“Sure.” I plop down next to him on the couch. “What do you have in mind?”
He raises his eyebrows. “Iron Chef?”
I nod. “Sure.”
Ben set up our television so that we can both control it with our iPhones. That’s the nice thing about having a husband who’s a tech geek—I’d never even know such a thing was possible, much less know how to do it. He whips out his phone and loads up an episode ofIron Chef, then scoots over to get closer to me on the couch.
“Want some peanut butter?” he asks me.
“What kind is it?”
“Lime chipotle.”
Ew. What’s with him and these lime-flavored peanut butters? “Seriously? No thanks.”
Ben grins at me. “You have no sense of adventure.”
I roll my eyes. “Okay, let’s try it.”
“That’s my girl.” He holds out a spoonful of peanut butter to me, which I take in my mouth.
I chew for a second, and then… the lime hits me. I have to clamp my hand over my mouth to keep from spitting it out. Oh my God, that’sawful. Ben starts cracking up at the expression on my face. I manage to getit down but just barely. I want to wipe it off my tongue with soap.
“How can youeatthis?” I say.
“You need to develop your palate more,” he tells me.
Ben is a self-proclaimed “foodie.” When I first met him, I asked him if that meant he likes to cook, but he told me it doesn’t. “It just means I like to eat,” he told me.
Ironically, it wasIron Chefthat first brought the two of us together. I was at a bar in Manhattan, because my friend Nina dragged me out to meet a bunch of her friends. Ben had been dragged to the same bar by Nina’s boyfriend. He had been brought there for another girl named Angela, because Nina knew that I was “taken” at the time. Ben had been talking to Angela when I arrived, yet I found him oddly attractive. He had these soft brown eyes and brown hair just barely long enough to curl slightly on the ends, but there was something about his smile that I found really sexy. It was obvious Angela found him sexy too, because she was hitting his arm playfully every thirty seconds, and each time he made a joke, she would clutch her chest like he was so funny, she might drop dead of a coronary. (Luckily, several of us were doctors who could perform CPR.)
Because Angela was so busy monopolizing his attention, it took Ben several minutes to notice me after I walked into the bar. But as soon as he did, he did a double-take. In my whole life, I’d never warranted adouble-take before—I’ve never been so attractive that a guy felt he immediately had to take a second look. But Ben did. And the second time, he got this smile on his face that made me determined to find a way to wrench him away from Angela’s claws.
But I didn’t have to make the effort. A few minutes later, while I was at the bar, ordering a drink, Ben came up behind me. “Whatever you’re getting,” he said, “it’s my treat.”
“I’m actually purchasing a small automobile,” I said. (That was a joke. I was getting a Kahlua and Cream.)
Ben never returned to the table where Angela was sitting. We spent the next several minutes making the kind of small talk that would have been tedious if there wasn’t such an overwhelming overtone of sexual tension. Two drinks later, we discovered that we both loved cooking competitions. After discussing the contestants most likely to win on the latest season ofTop Chef, we got to talking about a recent episode ofIron Chefwhere the secret ingredient was duck.
“I can’t believe they made Peking duck in an hour,” I mused.
