Page 45 of Thank you, Next

“Understandable. You probably just crooked your finger when you were at school.”

“That’s a laugh. I didn’t have a real girlfriend until April. I was so scared to become my dad, the chronic philanderer, that I just sort of avoided the whole thing.”

Alex let that sink in. She wanted to be his second and only girlfriend. And she wasn’t terrified.

Jesus. She was glad that she hadn’t realized that before they’d fallen into bed. It might have made her terribly nervous about her performance.

“So I’m the—”

“The second girlfriend,” Will said. “You technically have a lot more dating experience than I do.”

“But you were with April for so long that you got a lot more sex reps in than I have.” Will looked behind him. “What are you doing?”

“Making sure there’s not a football coach in my bedroom.” They both laughed, but his face sobered. “Can I ask you something? What was it about your relationship with Jason that made you freak out when he decided to marry someone else?”

“Right after me.” She thought that was the most important part.

“Yeah, right after you.”

“It just came as a shock to me that he wanted more with her.” She wasn’t quite sure how to put this in a way that wouldn’t make it seem like things weren’t right with Will now. “We’re both lawyers, so we understood the hours involved. We’re both biracial, and we both feel the same way about it.”

“And what way do you feel about it?”

“I mean, I grew up with a white mom and my dad wasn’t around most of the time. The summers I spent with Lexi made me feel at home in my Blackness. But I’ve never wanted to erase pieces of myself just to belong with one side or the other.”

“That makes sense.”

“It doesn’t make sense to a lot of people right now. But I’m not going to go around feeling that half the people who made me who I am don’t matter and that my light skin and wavy hair aren’t part of my privilege. That would be delusional. I’m no authority on Blackness. I’m only an authority on me.

“You’ve met my mom. As an anthropology professor, she was always talking about how race—just like gender, sexuality, social class—was made up by people to keep us sorted into our own groups. And, while it’s significant, it means something to people, it’s not real. Or it’s both real and not real at the same time. Whenever someone asks me what my race is, I tell them I’m biracial, and their response is more of a reflection of who they are than it says anything about me. But it took time to get there.

“Anyway, Jason’s dad was a Republican. So me with my anthropology-professor mom and him with his misguided father had a whole lot to sort out for ourselves about race before we met. He was easy to spend time with. It was a nice feeling.”

“Do you miss him?”

“Jason? Not really. Sometimes. Maybe.” There he went having the vulnerable face on.

As much as she didn’t want to hurt him, she knew that it was important to be honest with him. “I miss talking to him sometimes. It was nice to have someone with whom I could leave so many things unspoken, who would get me if I gave the shorthand version of how my day went. But it also didn’t really leave space for growth. We never had a serious disagreement, not even when we broke up. I was always sure where I stood with him. Until I wasn’t.

“But I don’t miss feeling like someone was only half listening to me. The problem with shorthand is that you don’t have to learn someone.”

“I like learning you,” Will said as his hand crept under the sheet and found the warm skin of her belly. “I think I’d like to learn more about what’s... here.”

EIGHTEEN

It had taken about forty-eight hours for the power company to get her electricity back on and for the city to ensure that there hadn’t been any gas leaks during the earthquake. Selfishly, Alex wished that everyone else on her block had gotten power but something in her unit had proven stubborn. She would have had an excuse to stay in bed with Will through the whole weekend, but no one else in her building would be dealing with spoiled food and lack of AC.

And just to spend time with him without their mutual habit of taking jibes at each other constantly. The jibes that remained were usually aimed at getting the other person to reveal something kinky to do. And it was always worth it.

It didn’t totally suck to have a trained chef on call, either. Alex could put together a brunch, but her hollandaise was nowhere near professional.

As long as they were together in his apartment, Lexi on another continent, and their friends out of reach, they didn’t have to talk about whether they were together together and whether they were going to tell the people in their lives.

After feeling how big the feelings were between her and Will, she was starting to see the wisdom in keeping it under wraps until they figured out whether it would burn out with time. They lived vastly different lifestyles, though she had a tiny bit more control over her schedule now that she was a partner with her own book of business. That just meant that she could sometimes delegate time-consuming and tedious work, not that she could have court dates scheduled on nights and weekends when Will was busy with his new restaurant.

It was slightly unhinged that she was planning in her head for a future with Will, even though she didn’t know if he was ready to plan a future with anyone. She hoped he was. Hell, she hoped she was. When she’d asked him about his favorite food cities, he’d talked about hole-in-the-wall restaurants in Milan that he wanted to show her. The idea of traveling the world with him was really appealing.

And even though she’d returned to her apartment, they’d spent every night this week together. Will had come with her to make sure her place was safe the Monday after the earthquake, and he’d still been there when she got home from work. She’d been in such a rush that she hadn’t had time to finish cleaning up the broken glass, but everything had been in perfect order by the time she got home.