Page 65 of The Affair
“We did not hook up! I was sick!” My face was flush from embarrassment.
“Liar, liar, pants on fire!” she began singing.
“We kissed!” I finally relented, belting out my secret, which made my friend’s eyes widen as she squealed in glee, clapping her hands together like an exuberant toddler.
“But!” I said, halting her premature joy. “I stopped it, right in the middle, and now, things are super weird.”
“Weird how?” She gave me a sympathetic expression. “Was the kiss bad?”
“What? No! It was the exact opposite.”
“So, what’s the issue? Why am I feeling all this tension radiating from you?”
“Well,” I began, trying to decide exactly how to phrase my paranoia, “I’m not a hundred percent sure he’s sick. I think he might be trying to avoid me.”
“Why? Did he say something to make you believe he was lying?” She’d since stopped pretending to fiddle with the mugs and taken up residency in the wingback chair near the register—the same one Sawyer liked to frequent.
“No. But it’s not like our night went exactly back to normal after that.”
“How so?”
I threw my head back. “So many questions!”
“Sorry.” She laughed. “It’s just … you’re not exactly forthcoming with information, you know? It has to be plucked from you like tiny little feathers. It’s very time-consuming.”
“And painful,” I added.
She giggled, still waiting for me to answer her last probing question. If I didn’t know better, I could have sworn she and Sawyer had gone to the same interrogation school.
“Okay, let me try to explain it this way. You know how when you were little and you’d listen to your favorite cassette tape?” I said, trying to make sense of what I was feeling.
This was the best I could do.
Her brows furrowed as she waited to see where I was going with this, but instead of trying to figure it out, she just smirked and nodded. “Yeah.”
“My parents weren’t exactly keen on new technology, so I had cassette tapes for far longer than most. CDs didn’t make an appearance in our house until Jack saved up enough money to buy himself a boom box and bought them himself.”
“Anyway,” I went on, getting a little sidetracked, “I remember one particular favorite of mine—Debbie Gibson.”
“Debbie Gibson?” Candace echoed, laughing hysterically.
I merely shrugged. “Do you see where I grew up?” I motioned to the store we were currently occupying, filled with old relics from days gone by. “You’re lucky it was Debbie. She was at least somewhat current. It could have easily been disco or Elvis.”
“Elvis would have been better than Debbie Gibson.”
I shook my head, trying not to smile. “Don’t mock Debbie Gibson. She’s an American icon.”
She smirked. “I still have no idea what this has to do with you and Sawyer and that kiss you keep dodging around.”
“I’m getting to it,” I explained, leaning back against the counter as she sank further into the wingback chair that I was convinced would now become a permanent fixture in the store.
“Could you get to it faster? I have a babysitter who charges me twenty dollars an hour.”
“Are you kidding me? That’s highway robbery.”
She smiled. “Yeah, I’m kidding. She’s with my mom. Now, go on and tell me more of this riveting story about Debbie Gibson.”
I rolled my eyes. “So, as I was saying, I had this perfectly marvelous cassette tape of Debbie Gibson.”
