Page 22 of Thank you, Next

It had taken her about a minute, but she’d given him fifteen. After barging in on him, it seemed more polite than running out on him so she could have a beach day.

“Did he even do it during sex?” Of course that was Jane’s question.

Alex thought back to having sex with Brody. That part she’d liked. He certainly hadn’t been lackadaisical about finding her clit, although she’d had to sit through a lot of lectures on whatever fake, exploitative form of Tantra he pretended to practice so she could come.

Those lectures came with a lot of eye contact. “Yeah, he would gaze deeply into my eyes while we were fucking.”

“I mean, that’s when you only let him hit it from behind.” That came from Lana, and Jane and Alex just looked at each other in silent delight at Lana’s rare sex joke.

“C’mon, I can make a sex joke, too. I’m married, not dead.” Lana sat back and buckled her seat belt so that Jane could point the car toward the beach.

Jane peered at Lana through the rearview mirror and gave Alex a worried glance before turning her attention back to the road. The glance said that they were going to be taking an Uber home—one of Jane’s assistants would come to collect hers— because there would be a need for many, many margaritas once they got to the beach house Jane’s client had loaned them for the day.

TEN

Will was fairly certain that he shouldn’t be interfering with Alex’s quest to find out why she was the secret sauce in getting all her exes married off, but he felt partially responsible. After all, he’d rejected her so harshly and decisively that—along with the benign neglect from her parents and watching Lexi cycle through men like underwear—she’d given up on love.

It was probably a sign that his ego was out of control that he thought he’d had anything to do with Alex’s fucked-up-ness. He probably shouldn’t be thinking about her fucked-up-ness at all, because he had plenty of his own.

But he still pulled up to Lexi’s house planning to tell her about Alex’s stupid search for answers. He didn’t know why Lexi had kept him as part of her family after cutting his father out, but he was grateful. Will had known that Lexi was way too much woman for his father before they’d gotten married. And he had liked Lexi so much upon meeting her that he’d told her as much before the wedding.

Lexi had winked at him and ruffled his hair, even though Will had been too old to have his hair ruffled. But Lexi had treated him like the boy he still very much was and folded him into her heart—like she did with all her strays.

It was heartening and sometimes frustrating to show up at Lexi’s house and find new people there. She was extremely open to new people and new experiences, and Will worried that those new people and new experiences would harm her. Lexi had protected him from his parents when he was young, and he felt responsible for protecting her now, as she grew older.

Too bad Lexi wasn’t really amenable to being protected.

When he walked into her living room, she was hanging upside down from pieces of cloth that were tied to the dark wooden beams that crisscrossed her ceiling. Her eyes were closed and somehow her legs were crossed.

She looked much younger than she probably was, and very peaceful even though she could fall on her head and break her neck at any moment. Didn’t people’s bones get brittle with age?

Will had tried to figure out how old Lexi was at some point, but he was never able to get a definitive answer. Her Wikipedia page wasn’t helpful, and no one had ever seen her driver’s license. Accounts in the media weren’t helpful because different news articles said she was different ages when she’d left Chicago to move to LA, where she’d parlayed her singular jazz voice into movie stardom with a large side of political activism.

Lexi never corrected anyone when they said how old she was. She’d once told him that it was because she considered herself ageless.

Will thought she was deluding herself and needed to be more careful.

“What are you doing?”

Lexi’s eyes snapped open, and she smiled at him. From his angle, it looked like a frown, though. “Aerial yoga. Want to try?”

Will let his scowl speak for itself. He certainly wasn’t going to be encouraging Lexi by joining her. “How did you get up there?”

Regardless of her agelessness, Lexi didn’t need to be hanging upside down on her own, with no one to rush her to the hospital if she fell. Lexi inclined her head toward the corner of the room, and that was the first time Will noticed the man standing there. He looked to be about thirty-five, so square inside Lexi’s dating age range. And he appeared to have come out of central casting for “yoga teacher.”

“Can you get her down?” He motioned to the guy.

Lexi winked at him. “I’m more interested in whether he can get me off, but all the blood has rushed to my head.” The man rushed over and had her out and upright with a few deft hand movements.

Lexi turned to the teacher and said with a smile that implied that she was in fact dating the man, “See you next week?”

“We’ll work on your camel pose and your second chakra then.” And then he walked out the back door.

Will shook his head and took a seat on the couch. Lexi drifted over to the wet bar and poured them both large glasses of water from a jug that had lemon slices and green stuff floating around in it.

“Where do you find these guys?” he asked as Lexi handed him a glass.

She just waggled her eyebrows at him, and he figured it was probably better that he didn’t know.