Playing By The Rules

And he was closer to it than he knew. I could only imagine Mill’s reaction if Sam—the man I was reputedly seeing—appeared with me in court. “Get back to your point,” I prodded him. “You were philosophizing.”

Sam slanted another look my way. “Okay. The thing is, somebody is always waiting, wanting, hoping for all those little things to click into place and coincide.”

“The mental stimulation, the conversation and the animal attraction,” I said to clarify.

“I didn’t say animal. Who said anything about animal?”

I realized I had claws on my mind again. “Well, that’s what we’re all looking for, right?”

His brows climbed his forehead. “Are you?”

I definitely wasn’t going to get into that discussion again. “We were talking about you, Sam.”

“All right. Fine. We’ll call it animal attraction. But it never happens, you know. Either you get the mental stimulation going, but then the animal business is missing—or it’s there, but the woman turns out to be a Looney-Toon, emotionally unstable. Or she thinks you’re great and you think she’s about as interesting as a can of vegetables.”

I got stuck on the emotionally unstable part. “Like Tammy?”

He didn’t argue it. He just shrugged. “Then you’re left trying to wriggle free without hurting anyone’s feelings or wearing some pink drink,” he said.

He was like that, I knew. He worried as much about hurting women as I did about bad parenthood. “You looked ridiculous, by the way.”

He didn’t rise to the bait. He lifted his glass and swallowed the last of his scotch. “I just get tired of it, Mandy. But it’s like some kind of…of addiction. We keep scrambling after it because we need that male-female thing going on in our lives. And the need makes us keep going out there, bashing our heads against walls, smashing ourselves all up, getting drinks tossed in our faces, just because we had the audacity to look for a partner who’s on the same wavelength.”

“Wavelengths are shifty little things,” I agreed.

He stood and went to the kitchen to retrieve his bottle of scotch. When he came back, he bent and picked up his shoes from my living room floor. Then he stood at the door, armed with all of it. “On that note, I’m going home,” he said. “Thanks for dinner.”

Suddenly I felt an overriding need to set everything back to the way we had been in the courtroom that afternoon. I wanted to banish Grace’s insane observations and Mill’s innuendoes from the air. Maybe I just figured that by reminding us of what we were supposed to be, we would be able keep it so.

“You know, it’s really great to have a male-type friend,” I said. “It’s nice to talk like this, to get a masculine perspective.”

“That’s me,” Sam said shortly. “Male-type.” Then he left. Quickly.

I frowned after him. I knew him well enough to understand that somehow or other, I had just hurt him. But how? Then my heart hit the wall of my chest. Did he not want to be just a male-type friend anymore?

I shook my head. This was Grace’s doing. Such a thought would never even have occurred to me five hours ago.

Or maybe it was the wine, I thought. I’d had too much of it. I narrowed my eyes to focus them on the door he had just passed through. There was only one door there, so I was not drunk. Nope, I was fine.

Either way, now that I was alone, a million little demon thoughts came spewing out of the recesses of my mind to hoot and holler. Most of them wore little T-shirts labeled Sex and Sam. It came to me then that I probably wasn’t going to be able to sleep until I knew why he’d been insulted by what I’d said. I got to my feet, still looking at the door. I put my wine down on the coffee table. The Sex and Sam goblins were jumping gleefully up and down by now, clapping their hands. A tiny, sane part of me told me to go to bed right now. So, of course, I listened to the demon-goblins.

I peeked into Chloe’s room. She was sound asleep. I tiptoed in, kissed her forehead, then I closed her door quietly behind me. I left my apartment and stood in the hall, looking at the stairs to the second floor.

If I came right out and asked him if he wanted to be more than just my male-type pal, I knew I was going to get my pride kicked hard. For one thing I wasn’t his type physically—not a blond hair in sight. For another, if he’d had any romantic designs on me whatsoever, I figured he would have acted on them a long time ago. We’d known each other for nearly six months, and Sam is definitely not the reticent sort.

That realization made me sane again. I started to turn back into my own apartment, but then I saw his legs appear on the landing. The top part of him was chopped off by the next level of stairs.

“Sam?” I said, to be sure.

“What are you doing down there?” he demanded.

“I was coming to your apartment.”

“No need. I’m right here. So you can just stay where you are.”

Talk about one of us acting odd. “Okay.”

“Why were you coming to my apartment?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” I shrugged, though he couldn’t see it. “I was just…thinking.”

“That’s a very dangerous thing to do at this hour.”

I looked at my watch. “It’s only ten o’clock.”

“Yeah, but that makes it something like three in the morning in parts of Europe.”

“Okay. So what are you doing on the stairs at three in the morning in parts of Europe?”

“I’m not sure yet.” Then there was a very long, very quiet pause. “I guess I was thinking, too.”

Somehow, in that very moment, I knew I’d been right. He’d definitely been offended by what I’d said, unhappy about being classified as a male-type friend. “About time zones?” I asked, in case I was wrong.

“About us.”

I’d been expecting it, but I think my heart actually vaulted over its next beat anyway. “Are you drunk?” I asked. I’d ruled myself out—now I needed to make sure he was sober, too.

He took some time to think about it, and I imagined he was probably squinting at doors, too, just to be sure. “No,” he decided finally.

I inched toward the stairs, leaving my door open so I would hear Chloe if she woke up and called me. He headed down. We reached the bottom tread at the same time and I dropped to sit there, but he kept standing beside me.

“I was thinking that maybe we could give each other a kind of break for a while,” he said finally. “From dating. You know, we could do things together.”

“What kinds of things?” I asked.

He scowled down at me. “I don’t know. Just…uncomplicated things. Things that don’t involve pink drinks or timing devices like Frank Ethan’s watch. We could swear off chasing the opposite sex for a while if we keep each other company in the interim. We could assuage all those male-female urges without the issue getting too complicated.”

It wasn’t me who needed the break, I thought. Grace had been right. I’d pretty much been on a dating hiatus since I’d met him. But I decided that it might be prudent not to mention that, because there was a lot in this for me. I could put up a good front for Mill, I realized. If he thought I really was happily involved, maybe he would back down on this whole custody issue. I can rationalize anything, even the irrational.

“Let me make sure I’ve got this straight,” I said. “We’ll do things together for a while—uncomplicated things—while we swear off dating until such time as one or both of us feels up to plunging back into the pool?”

He looked relieved. “Yeah. That’s it exactly. So…what do you think?”

“Define uncomplicated first.”

“I don’t know. Dining, drinks, companionship. Sex.”

He shoved that last part in quickly, and my air stopped somewhere midway in my chest. Well, I thought, this would certainly put Grace’s opinions to rest once and for all. I could claw my heart out with him for a while and get it out of my system.