Walking down to the coffee shop at the end of our street, I couldn’t help but notice my best friend had a certain pep in his step. He was a man who had been having sex and a lot of it. But I was still troubled by the married man part.
“Did you know this guy was married?”
I asked James yesterday, during our second pitcher of mimosas. I watched as James stalled to think about what he would say.
I know what his face looks like when he’s lying to me. It’s normally pensive with this slight smile. To lie, he has to fake looking thoughtful.
But when I asked him yesterday, there was no fakery. There was no trying to find the socially acceptable answer. He was trying to search his brain for the truth.
“Yeah…” he said with a pause, “I think I did. I remember him saying it during one of our meetings.” That revelation hit me like a tonne of bricks.
One of our meetings? One of our work meetings?!
“Stop right there. I know this guy?”
“You do.”
James tucked his top lip under itself. And then I saw gaze off into the distance. I assumed he was thinking about the night before. He looked like a man who was shagged, literally. It had been a long time since I had seen him so content, so physically satisfied, so happy.
“He was one of the suppliers we didn’t go with. I assumed because we weren’t working with him, it wouldn’t matter, right?”
He searched my face for approval.
From a business point of view, I didn’t care. As long as he wasn’t having it off with our current supplier, who cares? Not me, that’s for sure.
But still, I couldn’t help but think about how this man in his bed was a married man. “So he’s married to a woman?”
“No. He’s married to a man. You didn’t think I was hunting a straight man, did you?”
After everything that had happened the last few days, weeks, months, I couldn’t be sure of anything. There wasn’t anything off-limits anymore.
I apologised again on our morning coffee for assuming this, but James didn’t care. Instead, he felt extreme guilt for having not let any of the conversations from yesterday be about me.
“So what about you? How was your Monday? What did you get up to?”
I wasn’t going to tell him about my email from Douglas. I wasn’t going to ever tell him.
“It was fine. Boring. Just the way I like it.”
You’re reading The Andie Chronicles, the 2023 romance-fiction series from the 1 Lovelock Drive (1LD) universe.
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