Page 33 of Heat Exchange
“Can I finish my coffee first?”
“No,” they said at the same time.
“They’d been playing hockey and Danny talked them all into wanting burgers and beer.”
“Danny was there?”
“Yeah. I guess he wanted—”
“How did he look?”
Lydia took another sip of her coffee, trying to summon up a memory of Danny’s face. “He looked...like Danny, I guess. You know he doesn’t give much away emotionally. But he’s sad. You can see it around his eyes.”
Ashley let that sink in, then waved a hand at her. “Okay, back to Aidan.”
She told them the story, not leaving anything out. Halfway through, Ashley got up and went around the table refilling their coffee cups before pulling a package of store-bought blueberry muffins out of the bread box and setting them in the middle of the table.
The hardest part of the tale was, of course, when she panicked and pushed him away by insulting him. She kept her eyes on her coffee and forced herself to get through the entire thing.
“Wow,” Ashley said when she was done.
“Wow, indeed,” Courtney echoed. “Orgasms turn you into a real bitch.”
Lydia would have thrown her muffin at her, but she was too busy crumbling it on the napkin in front of her. “It was too much all of a sudden. I needed some distance and the words just kind of came out.”
“They didn’t just kind of come out, though,” Ashley said. “I mean, I know you didn’t mean to insult him, but he also knows how you feel about being involved with a firefighter.”
“We’re notinvolved.”
“If a man could give me an orgasm in two minutes or less, I’d marry him,” Courtney said.
“I think you’re still drunk. And I don’t normally...I think I was just anticipating seeing him so much that I was already a little worked up, I guess.”
“What are you going to do now?” Ashley asked.
Lydia shrugged. “I don’t know. Part of me thinks I should just leave it the way it is and then we don’t have to worry about it anymore. I don’t have to worry about finding myself in a relationship with another firefighter and he doesn’t have to worry about lying to Scotty anymore.”
“But you guys have been friends a long time, too. I mean, not close friends, but friends. And if there’s serious friction between you, people are going to pick up on it and wonder why.”
“And it hurt him,” Lydia added quietly. “I insulted him. I insulted his career and his friends and pretty much everything that’s important to him.”
“And that hurts you,” Courtney prompted.
“Of course it does. Like Ash said, we’re friends, too. I should go see him.” Courtney nodded, while Ashley shook her head, which made Lydia laugh. She really needed Becca to be there with them because then it was never a tie. “To apologize, I mean.”
“You can apologize to him over the phone,” Ashley said. “That way you can both put it behind you, but you’re safely out of reach of his magical instant orgasms.”
Courtney gave another dreamy sigh and Lydia threw areally?look her way. “I’ll have to think about it. He’s at the station today, anyway. Maybe I’ll know what to say by the time his tour ends.”
She hoped so, at least, because even if it was in both their best interests to not be speaking to each other, she couldn’t stand the thought of leaving things the way they were last night. He deserved better than that.
* * *
ASHLEYFORCEDHERSELFto eat a bowl of soup at five thirty. Technically, it met the definition of food, but it was light enough so maybe she wouldn’t throw it up before Danny stopped by when his tour was over.
She was a mess and definitely second-guessing her insistence on being home when he came by to grab more of his things. But Lydia was right. They needed to start communicating and text messaging wasn’t going to cut it. The limbo was playing hell on her nerves and on her sleep, and she wasn’t going to be able to take it much longer.
At twenty after six, there was a knock on the front door and the sound made Ashley’s heart ache. It wasn’t right, Danny knocking on the door of the home they’d made together.
