Suspiciously Obedient Read Free Page A

wondered. More, more, more , she thought. Of course, it was natural that she’d want more, precisely because this, what she had with Matt, was more. It was more intense, more respectful, more emotional, and more promising than any set of interactions, of touches, and sighs, and words than she’d ever had with another man. More.
    Stepping out into the cool evening air, hoping to cool her thoughts, the walk back to the office was reasonably short, and then the question, S he hadn’t driven in today, had he?
    “Where’re you parked?” she asked.
    “In your spot.”
    Both laughed.
    “Why would you take my spot?” she poked, as they walked to the very familiar location.
    “You don’t drive in half the time, so why do you need to defend it?”
    A tiny little piece of irritation mixed with the sheer joy of what she was experiencing. Memories of that first encounter in the parking lot, so long ago, and yet, so recent, fluttered through her mind. She shrugged. “It’s mine when I want it, and it’s yours when I don’t need it.”
    “Isn’t that the toddler creed?” he asked, opening the passenger door to his Toyota.
    She climbed in and had to concede that he had a point. “Fine, what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine.”
    “That sounds like my last girlfriend’s mantra,” he poked back. Starting the car, he pulled out of the parking lot and made his way to the main street, then halted. “I have no idea where you live,” he said.
    She gave him the address and he punched it into an old GPS. “Calculating,” the machine said, and then boom .
    “Seventeen minutes and fifty-three seconds?” she said. “Well, that’s fiction.”
    “The machine doesn’t know Boston or Cambridge,” Matt added.
    “This time of night it shouldn’t be too bad,” she said, as he made a left, and then for the next thirty minutes they chatted—lighthearted banter that gave her the opportunity to live a dual existence, to let her own racing thoughts, assumptions, suppositions, and hopes all coexist with the small talk coming out of her mouth. This was going so much better than she could have ever expected, and taking him back to her apartment was going to be interesting. Grandma was gone for the night, staying at her boyfriend’s house. She’d been spending more and more time there, and it had left Lydia feeling a sense of neglect, of being left alone a little too much. Now she was grateful for the solace; it meant there would be no prying eyes of any kind in her relationship with Matt.

    What the hell are you doing, Mike? he thought as his hands turned the steering wheel to the left, and then, like a good little soldier, he turned to the right, following the GPS’s precise instructions. Going back to her place was a natural next step, perfectly within the order of an evolving relationship, except this wasn’t. Oh, how he wanted it to be, but oh, how he had fucked this one up royally.
    Turning his phone off had been smart. It felt a bit surreal to not have his hip or his upper thigh, or wherever the phone rested, buzzing nearly nonstop. The flood of calls, texts, and email notifications that filled his life so readily, so palpably against his body, had halted, giving him the ability to focus solely on Lydia. If only he had had this awareness back at the office, there were so many ways he could have prevented it happening—and now, a sick feeling growing in the pit of his stomach, he realized that what he was doing with her was scrambling to get the last little bit of normalcy that he could possibly have.
    Claiming a small amount of intimacy with her, carving it out of the remains of the day, would have to fulfill him for the rest of his life, because once she found out what he had done, there was no turning back. He had no way of explaining what had happened. Vicious scenario after vicious scenario whipped through his racing brain. This wasn’t going to be a surprise, for him at least, but for her, it could destroy