“...so I’m not going to sit here and pour out all of Laura’s secrets to you two idiots, but you obviously need someone to hit you with a clue bat.” Josie held up the plastic balls. “Or clue balls. Whatever. You should have been upfront with Laura and told her that you know each other. And that you’re gay— ”
“Nope.” Dylan crossed his arms over his chest. Here we go again. “Not gay.” Mike shook his head.
She smiled slyly. “OK, not gay. But...not not gay?”
Dylan pursed his lips, eyes narrowing, face hard. Mike had closed up, too. “We’re not having this conversation with you.”
“No offense,” Mike jumped in, palm up and facing Josie in a gesture that asked her to give them a second to explain. “It’s complicated.”
“It’s always complicated.”
“Where have I heard that before?” Dylan muttered. Now he was getting pissed, and he could tell Mike could tell he was getting pissed, and he was hard from watching Laura walk away and now this little yippy drowned rat of a friend wanted to tell him allll about him and Mike. Judgment was all fine and good until the other person was just plain wrong.
Then it was torture.
“You don’t know us from Adam,” Mike said in a soothing voice. Josie looked at him with rapt attention, her mouth open slightly, lips parted and face softened. It made Dylan like her a bit. Just a bit. Mike had that effect on women. On men. On dogs, for that matter. He could make almost any living being feel like they were the center of the world.
“And we hope you respect that. We know you’re Laura’s best friend and we know you know her far, far better than we do. Someday we hope to rival you on that,” he added, his grin widening, eyes lasered on Josie’s.
She smiled. Dylan dropped his hands from his chest. Now they were getting somewhere. He couldn’t stop surveying the women’s room. A glimpse of her was what he wanted.
Not really. What he wanted was to storm over to her table, slide in next to her and charm the pants off her. His pants tightened. Damn jeans.
“If you really want to understand Laura, you two need to back the fuck off.” The profanity caught Dylan’s attention; her tone was nasty but matter-of-fact. “You’re not asking for anything she’s ever experienced. Or that most people, much less most women, have experienced. You lied to her—”
“We didn’t lie,” Dylan sputtered. Mike tried to shut him up with a look but Dylan wasn’t having any of it. “We just didn’t tell her everything.”
“You Catholic?”
“How’d you know?” he asked, bewildered.
“You have the Irish-Italian Catholic look. So you know the difference between lies of comission and lies of omission.” She said it flatly. It wasn’t a question. Mike pinged between the two of them, a confused look on his face.
“Yeah.” She had him. Omitting the truth was as bad as telling an outright lie.
“Fill me in?” Mike asked, waving at them both. “Lapsed Lutheran here.”
“You guys didn’t tell her the truth,” Josie said, exasperation coating her words. “You have a lot of trust to regain. A lot.” She screwed her face into a disapproving look that was a bit too reminiscent of those nuns Dylan dealt with back in elementary school. “I don’t see how you ever thought that was a good plan. Date her separately and then assume you could just shift into threesome mode?” Hissing the word “threesome,” Josie twisted her head back and forth, making hard eye contact with each. “Not the smoothest of moves. Who came up with that one?”
Both men dipped their heads, suddenly entranced by the silverware, Mike fingering a fork while Dylan polished his spoon with his old t-shirt.
She snorted. “Yeah. Well, whatever led you to surprise her like that—don’t do it again. Not if you hope to get her back.”
“Any ideas?” Mike asked, a half smile trying to coax some allegiance from her.
She shook her head. “Don’t stalk her?” As she stood to walk back to her and Laura’s booth, Dylan caught a glimpse of a blonde pony tail, Laura’s face down as she hurried back to her booth.
“We didn’t stalk her,” Mike protested. “We just wanted Jeddy’s as much as you guys did.”
“Everyone has a big appetite after a menage,” Josie joked. Madge appeared, arms laden with plates of hot sausage and more, just as Josie spoke. Plates delivered, Madge pivoted three steps, stopping.
“Menage, huh?” Madge muttered as she filled salt shakers the next table over, pointedly taking in Dylan and Mike. “I wouldn’t mind surviving that.” She shot Josie a sideways look. “They must have crushed you to a pulp.”