“I‘m still having trouble believing you saved that thing, Annie,” Matt Powell said, plunging a tortilla chip into the bowl of salsa in front of him. “It’s been nearly nine years since the wedding.”
The “thing” to which Matt was referring was Eden Keene’s bridal bouquet. He’d discovered it in Annie’s possession—pressed and carefully packed away—several hours ago while helping her settle into her new condominium in Atlanta’s fashionable Buckhead area. He’d been teasing her about it ever since.
Teasing was one of the hallmarks of Matt and Annie’s three-decade-old relationship. They’d been born in the same hospital just twenty-four hours apart and had grown up living next door to each other. They’d shared baths and sandboxes as toddlers, schoolwork and secrets as preteens, and a unique bond of understanding throughout adolescence and into adulthood.
If Annie had been given a dollar each time somebody had told her that she and Matt were “just like brother and sister,” she would have been able to retire as an extremely wealthy woman before reaching age thirty. Heck, receiving just a dime per repetition would have allowed her to build up quite a respectable nest egg!
She’d never liked the sibling analogy. It was such a cliché. More than that, it failed to reflect the fundamental truth about her ties to Matt.
Brothers and sisters were supposed to be close. It was more or less written into their genetic contracts. She and Matt had chosen to bond with each other. Theirs was a purely voluntary alliance that, despite a blood oath of mutual fidelity sworn at age eight, was subject to unilateral abrogation at any time.
When asked how she’d describe her relationship with Matt—and his with her—Annie usually replied that the two of them were best buddies. People unwise enough to suggest that there might be something sexual percolating beneath the apparently platonic surface of their friendship provoked either hoots of laughter or offended glares, depending on her mood.
This wasn’t to suggest that what went on between Hannah Elaine Martin and Matthew Douglas Powell was all sweetness and light. Heck, no. They’d been trading verbal jabs from the time they’d learned to talk. They’d even had a few playground skirmishes that had degenerated into fistfights. But when push came to shove...
Put it this way: Annie was absolutely certain that if she ever telephoned Matt in the middle of the night from equatorial Guinea and said she needed him, he’d come rushing to her aid on the first available plane—no questions asked.
What’s more, she was equally positive that she’d respond in the same unreserved fashion should he ever call her for help.
“I don’t understand why you’re making such a big deal out of this,” Annie complained, selecting a tortilla chip and skimming it across the surface of the salsa. Both she and Matt loved spicy, south-of-the-border food. The Mexican restaurant in which they were sitting was one they’d patronized together many, many times. “I caught the bouquet at Eden’s wedding and I kept it. So what?”
“I don’t remember you actually catching the bouquet,” Matt drawled, picking up the long-necked bottle of beer at his elbow and taking a healthy swig. He surveyed her with amused blue-gray eyes. “It seems to me the bouquet bounced off somebody’s head and fell into your hands by default. You didn’t look very pleased when it did, either. In fact, I think there was a second or two when you seriously considered dropping the thing.”
Annie crunched down on the salsa-coated tortilla chip. In point of fact, Matt’s recollection was right on the money. She’d definitely experienced a moment of dismay when she’d realized that, despite some determined maneuvering to avoid doing so, she’d somehow ended up clutching Eden’s bridal bouquet.
There’d been plenty of female guests who’d tried to catch the ribbon-trussed bundle of flowers, of course. Had there been an inconspicuous way of handing the bouquet off to one of those want-to-be-wedded types, Annie would have opted for it. But there hadn’t been. So she’d been forced to smile and laugh and graciously respond to a lot of prying questions about her matrimonial prospects.
The one thing nobody had asked her nine years ago was, “Do you want to get married?”
Her answer—had someone put the query to her—would have been succinct.
“No,” she would have stated. “I don’t.”
If pressed, Annie would have gone on to explain that although she had nothing against marriage, it wasn’t high on her list of priorities. She craved a challenging career and the opportunity to establish herself as an independent woman. When she imagined the sweet smell of personal success, it didn’t include the delicate odor of orange blossoms.
Her feelings about getting married hadn’t changed much in the nine years since Eden’s wedding. She’d thought they might when she’d reached thirty. This expectation had been the result of watching a significant number of her contemporaries go into husband-hunting frenzies after they’d passed the Big 3-0 unwed.
While the spousal search had paid off for some, it seemed to Annie that most of her single women friends were still frantically seeking Mr. Right. There were even a few so desperate to do the nuptial deed that they were ready to settle for Mr. Not Too Obviously Wrong...or worse.
“Don’t you want to get married, Annie?” an unattached acquaintance had recently demanded of her. The context of the question had been a discussion—a one-sided litany of complaints, really—about the lack of eligible men in Atlanta and the abundance of competition for them.
“Not particularly,” she’d answered frankly. “Although I’m certainly not ruling it out. If I meet someone wonderful and we fall madly in love with each other, I’ll probably want to get married. But I’m not really looking. I like the life I have. The life I’ve made for me. Being on my own is—”
The sound of her name summoned Annie back to the present. She looked across the table at Matt, wondering how long she’d been caught up in her thoughts.
“Have a nice trip?” he inquired wryly.
“Sorry,” she apologized, reaching for the glass of unsweetened ice tea she’d ordered when they’d sat down. She sipped at it, trying to recall what they’d been discussing before she’d gotten so enmeshed in her marital musings. “I, uh, what...?”
“We were talking about your keeping Eden’s bridal bouquet.”
“Oh.” Annie set down the glass and shifted in her seat. “Right.”
“It’s not like you to be so sentimental,” Matt asserted, then paused for a few moments. When he resumed speaking, his tone was tender. “Now if it had been Lisa who’d caught Eden’s bouquet...”
Annie’s breath wedged at the top of her throat as the half-whispered words gave way to an emotionally charged silence. She watched, hands clenched, heart hammering, as Matt retreated into himself—into a world of memories she knew she’d never share.
Lisa, she thought. It’s always going to be Lisa.
“Lisa” was Lisa Anne Davis.
Lisa...
The new girl in school with whom Matthew Douglas Powell had fallen head over heels in love on a September morning nearly a decade and a half ago.
Lisa...
The young woman Matthew Douglas Powell had married in a joyous June ceremony some nine years later.
Lisa...
The adored wife Matthew Douglas Powell had laid to rest on a bleak February afternoon a few months shy of his fifth wedding anniversary.
Annie had been with Matt at the beginning and the end...and afterward. Monitoring his well-being had been one of her chief concerns since Lisa’s tragic passing, fifteen months ago. She’d done everything she could to help him piece his shattered existence back together.
She’d held him while he’d wept for his lost love.
She’d soothed him while he’d raged against the unfairness of life.
She’d spent hours—aching, seemingly endless hours—listening while he’d recalled the soaring happiness that had been his.
The first year after Lisa’s death had been hard on Matt. So hard that there’d been a few desperate days when Annie had genuinely been afraid that he might surrender to his grief and do something irreparable.
Thankfully, those desperate days—and the heartsick fears they’d engendered—had passed. Anger had eased. Sorrow had yielded to resignation, if not acceptance. In recent weeks Annie had begun to believe that Matt had finally come to terms with what had happened and had started to heal.
Or had he? she wondered uneasily, studying the lankily built man sitting across the table from her. If the look on Matt’s face was any indication—
“It’s chow time, y’all.”
The ebullient announcement jolted Annie out of her anxiety-tinged reverie. Its source was a ponytailed young waiter named Rudi. The possessor of an eager-beaver grin, a bodybuilder’s physique, and an apparently inexhaustible store of enthusiasm for his job, he’d served Annie and Matt during many of their previous visits to the Rio Bravo restaurant.
“For the lady, the usual fajitas con pollo.” Rudi said, plunking a sizzling platter of chicken chunks, onion strips and sliced green peppers in front of Annie. “Hold the guacamole, double the side order of pico de gallo. Watch the plate, it’s really hot.”
“Thanks,” she managed, still a bit off-balance.
“You’re welcome,” came the cheerful response. “And for the gentleman—what else but tacos al carbon. Heavy on the onions, forget the sour cream.”
“It looks great, Rudi,” Matt said, surveying the feast being placed before him. The introspective expression that had troubled Annie was gone. He looked as though the weightiest matter on his mind was how to fill his mouth as quickly as possible.
“We aim to please,” the waiter answered. “Although it’s not very difficult with you two.” He tilted his head to one side. “Look, I realize it’s none of my business—but do y’all ever eat anything besides chicken fajitas and beef tacos?”
“Oh, sure,” Matt said easily, flashing a quirky, crook-cornered smile. “Whenever we go out for Chinese, I get shrimp fried rice and she gets Moo Goo Gai Pan.”
“Sometimes we split an order of stir-fried green beans with garlic,” Annie noted.
“In other words, y’all know what you like and you stick to it.”
“At least as far as food goes,” Matt qualified.
Rudi considered this for a few seconds, then glanced back and forth between Matt and Annie. “Anything else?” he asked helpfully. “Another beer, maybe? Or a refill on the ice tea?”
“I’m fine for now,” Matt said, picking up his fork.
“Me, too,” Annie concurred.
“Okay. I’ll check back with y’all later. Enjoy your meal.”
“We always do,” Matt replied.
Rudi grinned in response, then pivoted on one heel and bustled away, his ponytail bobbing against his bulked-up neck.
Matt dug into his entrée almost immediately. Ignoring the tantalizing aroma of her own main course, Annie studied him as he ate. While his show of appetite was reassuring, her mind kept flashing back to the expression she’d seen on his face when he’d uttered Lisa’s name.
He’d seemed much more at peace with himself lately, she reminded herself. And today, when he’d helped her unpack at her new home, she’d felt as though the “old” Matt had been restored to her. The old Matt, who’d never been touched by true love or untimely death—who’d laughed easily, shared unstintingly, and embraced each new day as having the potential to be better than the one before it.
Finding Eden’s bridal bouquet hadn’t appeared to have had an adverse effect on his mood. In fact, if she’d been asked to compare their reactions to the discovery, Annie would have said that she’d been more unsettled by the discovery than he.
She’d chalked her response up to a certain degree of...well, embarrassment wasn’t precisely the word, but it was in the neighborhood. Allocating the silver Wedding Belle locket she’d received from Eden a place of honor in her jewelry box was one thing. Treating a dried-out bunch of ribbon-tied rosebuds as though it were some sort of treasured artifact was entirely another.
Matt had been right when he’d said it wasn’t “like” her to be sentimental. Except for an abiding romantic fantasy that involved waltzing with Fred Astaire, mushy-minded emotionalism had never been her style.
It wasn’t a matter of being insensitive. At least, Annie didn’t think it was. She had feelings. Intense, deeply held feelings. And she cared—passionately—about her family and friends. Nonetheless, if there was a gene for going gooey over raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, it obviously had been left out of her DNA.
Lisa Davis, on the other hand, had sighed about the beauty of sunrises, sunsets and starry nights. She’d sobbed during weddings, baby showers and certain television commercials. She’d also been a total sucker for holidays, happy endings and the music of Barry Manilow.
It had taken Annie a long time to accept that Lisa’s lace-trimmed, hearts-and-flowers attitude was genuine. It had taken her even longer to understand that this attitude was one of the things Matt—her reasonable, rational best buddy Matt—loved most about the woman he’d made his wife.
Annie bit her lower lip and continued to scrutinize Matt. Maybe she’d been wrong, she worried. Maybe his teasing her about Eden’s bouquet had been a smokescreen for his true feelings. Maybe he was suffering inside, haunted by memories of his own wedding. Maybe the fragile, faded flowers had made him think of the baskets of blossoms that had filled Lisa’s hospital room during the awful days near the end of her—
“I’m okay,” Matt interrupted quietly.
Annie stiffened. “What?”
“I’m okay,” he repeated in the same even tone, setting down his fork on the edge of his plate. “You can stop looking at me like you’re afraid I’m going to freak out.”
Aghast, she tried to reject his words. “I—I w-wasn’t—”
“Annie.”
That’s all he said. Just “Annie.” But those two precisely uttered syllables—plus the directness of his gaze—were more than enough to silence her stammered denial.
Annie sustained Matt’s steady, blue-gray stare for the space of a few heartbeats. Then she looked away. “I’m sorry,” she muttered, not entirely certain for what she was apologizing.
“Don’t be.”
Easy for him to advise, impossible for her to comply.
Annie made an awkward gesture, torn between the need to explain herself and the conviction that doing so would only make things worse. The former finally won out.
“Look, Matt,” she began. “I don’t want you to think that—I mean, I wasn’t really...well, yes. I guess I was. But I’m not...not—” She gestured again, frustrated by her inability to express herself. She struggled for several seconds, then blurted in a rush, “It’s just that I get concerned about you, you know?”
“Of course I know.”
The reply was quick and unequivocal. Yet for all its undeniable swiftness and seeming simplicity, something about it triggered an odd jolt of emotion deep within Annie. It also drew her gaze back to Matt’s face.
“I...I don’t...understand...” she faltered.
Matt leaned forward. “Your ‘getting concerned’ got me through hell, Annie,” he told her. “If you hadn’t been there for me after Lisa died, I might not be here now.”
Annie’s throat tightened. This was the first time she’d heard Matt indicate that he realized how dangerously close to the emotional edge he’d come in the wake of his wife’s passing. It was also the first time she’d heard him acknowledge her role in bringing him back from the brink.
“We’re friends, Matt,” she said, hoping her inflection communicated how much the word meant to her. “Friends help friends when friends need it.”
“Yes,” Matt agreed, nodding. A comma-shaped lock of sandy blond hair fell forward onto his forehead. He forked it back into place with an unthinking sweep of his right hand. “But it’s important to realize that the kind of help friends need can change.”
Annie hesitated, sensing that they were entering into uncharted emotional territory. Uncharted for her, at least. There was an expression in her best buddy’s eyes—a tempered, disconcertingly tough expression—that suggested he’d been exploring this ground for some time.
“What are you trying to tell me?” she finally asked.
“I’m trying to tell you that I’m all right,” he answered. “Not one hundred percent, but I’m working on it. Yes, I have moments when I miss Lisa so much it hurts. And I think about her. I think about her a lot. But I don’t obsess the way we both know I did right after she died.”
“So?” Annie could barely get the word out.
Matt remained silent for several seconds, the look in his eyes softening. “So,” he finally replied, “it’s time for you to stop ‘getting concerned’ about my mental stability whenever I mention my dead wife’s name.”
As gentle as the implied reproach was, it still hurt. Annie’s first instinct was to dispute it. She opened her mouth to do just that, but closed it without uttering a sound.
What are you going to say? she challenged. That you’re a better judge of Matt’s state of mind than he is? Are you going to suggest he’s some sort of basket case? Just a little while ago you were thinking how much better he seems!
A terrible thought suddenly occurred to her.
What if she didn’t really want Matt to recover from his grief? What if, in some dark corner of her soul, she was relishing his dependence on her? What if—
No, she denied. No! It couldn’t be. It absolutely, positively, could not be. She knew herself better than that. And she knew her feelings for Matt better than that, too.
Annie took a deep breath and looked the man sitting across from her squarely in the eye. “You’re saying I overreacted when you started to talk about what Lisa would have done if she’d been the one to catch Eden’s bouquet.”
“I’m saying you’ve saved me from myself more times than I can count since Lisa died,” he corrected without missing a beat. “But the kind of help you gave me during the past fifteen months—the kind that involved your being part nursemaid, part psychotherapist and all-round guardian angel—isn’t the kind I need now.”
Annie let several seconds slip by, watching Matt’s face intently. “What kind do you need?” she finally asked.
Matt smiled. Grinned, almost. The expression was shatteringly familiar to Annie. It was a passport back to a carefree past she’d thought was beyond reclaiming.
“I need you to be my best buddy again,” he responded with disarming candor. “And to help me get a social life.”
* * *
It took Annie most of the rest of the meal to determine precisely what Matt meant by this.
“You want me for fix you up with someone?” she asked, rolling up her final fajita.
Matt paused in the act of forking up the last few grains of tomato-tinged rice that had come with his entée. He seemed genuinely startled by her question. Then, astonishingly, he began to laugh. There was a definite edge to the sound.
“Fix me up?” he echoed after a few seconds. “God, no! The last thing I need is anybody else trying to ‘fix me up.’”
“Anybody...else?”
“I’m up to my ears in people who want to introduce me to ‘nice’ girls.”
“Who?” The question popped out, unbidden and unconsidered.
“I don’t know.”
“How can you not know who wants—”
“No, Annie,” Matt cut in, shaking his head. “It’s the prospective dates who’re the strangers to me.”
“Oh.” She paused, mulling this over. “But the people who want to introduce you—”
“Them I know.”
Annie reached for her glass of now lukewarm ice tea and took a sip. “Do, uh, I, uh, know any of them?”
“Oh, definitely.” The response was wryly ironic. “The list includes my mother, Lisa’s mother, Lisa’s older sister, my brother’s wife—”
“Eden?” Annie replaced her glass with a thunk. She’d spoke with Eden about Matt over lunch just two days ago. Her friend had been sympathetic and full of advice. Yet not once had she mentioned that she was attempting to play matchmaker for her brother-in-law. She hadn’t even hinted at it.
“None other,” Matt affirmed, picking up his beer bottle and draining it.
“I see.” And maybe she did, Annie thought. Then again, maybe she didn’t. One thing seemed plain enough, though. While she’d been “getting concerned” about Matt’s emotional state, other people had been judging him sufficiently recovered from Lisa’s death to allow them to start pitching potential replacements at him.
Friends help friends when friends need it, she’d told her best buddy earlier.
Yes, he’d agreed. But it’s important to realize that the kind of help friends need can change.
Annie drew a steadying breath.
“Okay,” she began evenly. “You say you need me to be your best buddy again and help you get a social life. But you also say you don’t need me to fix you up with anyone because you’ve got eligible women coming out of your ears. Exactly what is it that you want me to do, Matt?”
“I want you to clue me in about being single.”
“Huh?”
“You know the scene, Annie,” Matt explained earnestly. “You’re a veteran of the battle between the sexes. You’ve been going out with guys for years.”
“Not that many,” she retorted, stung by what he seemed to be implying. “I’m only thirty-one!”
“But you have been around the block a few times,” he persisted. “You’ve got some mileage on you.”
Was Matt trying to be insulting? Annie wondered. She could live with him describing her as a “veteran” of the dating wars. She’d used the phrase herself once or twice, joking that she had the scars to prove her claim. But when he resorted to automotive analogies...
“I don’t know what kind of social life you think I’ve been leading, Matt,” she observed stiffly. “But I haven’t been cruising the highways or racing in the Grand Prix!”
“You haven’t been sitting in the garage, either,” he countered. “I have.”
Although comprehension didn’t dawn at that point, it definitely began nibbling away at the edges of Annie’s confusion.
“Oh,” she murmured after a moment or two, studying Matt very carefully. His cheeks were slightly flushed and he suddenly seemed to be having trouble meeting her eyes. Yet the squared set of his shoulders signaled determination. So did the stubborn jut of his jaw. “Matt, look—”
He preempted her with a rush of words.
“You and I both know I wasn’t Mr. Suave and Studly before I met Lisa,” he said flatly. “I was a short, hormonally challenged geek in junior high. Even after the testosterone finally kicked in the summer before freshman year, I didn’t pick up any action. Eight inches of height and a crop of zits, yeah. But action? No way, Jose. I hit tenth grade without ever having had a one-on-one date. The only girl I’d ever kissed was you. I didn’t have a clue—”
“Wait a minute,” Annie interrupted. Although she thought Matt’s assessment of his adolescent self was unduly harsh, she was willing to let it pass. Not so, the claim he’d made regarding her. “You never kissed me!”
Matt clenched his right hand and thumped it against his chest, feigning a stab to the heart. “I’m wounded,” he declared with a comic groan. “I can’t believe you’ve forgotten playing Spin the Bottle at Tommy Lombardy’s thirteenth birthday party.”
Annie frowned, trying to remember. After a few seconds of concentrated effort, she began to recall the event under discussion. All things considered, she would have preferred not to.
“That wasn’t a kiss, Matt,” she stated.
“Oh, really? What would you call it?”
“A head-on collision with teeth. You nearly broke my nose!”
“And you split my top lip with your braces,” he riposted. “But don’t worry. I’ve forgiven you. I’ve also acquired a little finesse since that episode. At least...” Matt paused, a smile ghosting the corners of his mouth. “I never had any complaints from Lisa.”
An odd, edgy emotion stirred within Annie. Not envy, exactly. But unnervingly close to it.
“She was a happy woman,” she said quietly, meaning it. “And it was because of you.”
There was a pause.
“You didn’t like Lisa at first, did you?” Matt said after a few moments.
Annie blinked, taken aback by the assertion. “I didn’t dislike her,” she responded, grappling with feelings that were nearly a decade and a half old. “Lisa just seemed... different...from me. She was so feminine, you know? So girly. She was perky and pretty and she looked like she perspired cologne. Assuming she perspired at all, of course. I, on the other hand, was a flat-chested tomboy who sweated like a horse. She made me feel—oh, I don’t know exactly. Self-conscious, I guess. And then there was the way she affected you. I mean, you took one look at her the first day of junior year and all of a sudden you were walking around like a character in Invasion of the Body—”
She stopped abruptly, fearing she might have gone too far. “No offense meant, Matt,” she tacked on awkwardly.
“None taken.”
“You don’t mind me, er—”
“Joking about my relationship with Lisa?”
Annie nodded warily.
“Not at all.” The answer sounded sincere. “I know how careful you’ve been the past fifteen months, Annie. But you don’t have to tiptoe around my sensibilities anymore. As special as what Lisa and I had together was, the memory of it doesn’t have to be treated like a holy relic.” Matt paused, then started to chuckle. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers, huh?”
She smiled. “Your reaction was pretty radical.”
Matt smiled back at her. “Yeah, well, true love has always hit the men in my family like lightning.”
There was another break in the conversation. Annie found herself savoring a buoyancy of spirit she hadn’t felt in a long, long time.
“Lisa didn’t exactly like you at the beginning, either, you know,” her dining companion suddenly remarked.
“She didn’t?” This was news to Annie. Lisa Davis had always been extremely nice to her.
“She was jealous.”
“Of me?”
“Yeah. She used to talk about how smart you were. And about how you always stood up for your convictions. Like the student protest you organized when the school board tried to ban a dictionary from the library because it supposedly contained lewd definitions. She said you made her feel inferior.”
“I certainly never tried—”
“Of course her real problem was you and me.”
“You and me?” Annie shook her head. “There wasn’t any ‘you and me,’ Matt!”
“I know,” he replied with a rueful look. “But it took Lisa a while to accept that. She had trouble believing what I kept telling her.”
“Which was?”
“That I’d never really thought of you as a girl.”
Annie chewed this over for a bit. Then, perversely, she asked, “Not even at Tommy Lombardy’s thirteenth birthday party?”
The question clearly took Matt by surprise. “Uh...uh—”
“Never mind,” she said, letting him—or was it herself?—off the hook.
“What did you tell Lisa you thought of me as? One of the boys?”
Matt tapped a fingernail against his bottle of beer. “It’s hard to put into words,” he admitted. “I guess—well, you always seemed to have your own special category. Sort of, uh, genderless.”
Genderless?
Jeez!
“Thanks a bunch, Matt,” Annie said sarcastically.
“Oh, come on.” His voice held a combination of defensiveness and accusation. “Be fair. Are you going to sit there and tell me you used to think of me as a guy?”
“Not thinking of you as a guy isn’t the same as thinking of you as some kind of—of neuter!”
Matt made a quick, conciliatory gesture. “I realize that. ‘Genderless’ was a poor choice of words. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. Like I said, defining our relationship is hard. It’s just...there!”
“‘Just there,’” Annie repeated slowly. Then she frowned, harkening back to the revelation that had diverted them off in this direction to begin with. “Did Lisa finally understand about us?”
“Yeah. Sort of.” Matt’s mouth twisted. “She ended up deciding there was no reason to be jealous because the two of us were just like brother and—”
“Y’all done?”
It was Rudi, the waiter, eager as ever.
“I am,” Matt responded after a fractional pause. “Annie?”
“Me, too.”
Rudi began clearing the table. Annie and Matt sat in silence until he finished the task and inquired whether they wanted dessert or coffee or both.
“Just the check, I think,” Matt answered, glancing at Annie for confirmation. She nodded.
As the waiter hustled away, Annie decided it was time to get down to brass tacks.
“You know, Matt,” she remarked. “I’m still trying to figure out what kind of help you think you need from me.”
“It’s simple, really,” he replied. “I need you to go out with me.”
Annie’s heart lurched one way. The rest of the world seemed to lurch the other. She put her hands on the table, seeking some kind of stability.
“Go out?” she eventually said. “Go out as in...on a date?”
“Not a real date.” If Matt sensed the tizzy he’d thrown her into, he didn’t show it. “A practice one.”
Annie opened and shut her mouth several times. Finally she stammered, “I, u-uh, don’t, uh, think—”
Reaching forward, Matt covered her hands with his own.
“When people first started offering to fix me up,” he said, “I was shocked. And more than a little angry. It was as though they were suggesting I cheat on Lisa. But after a while, the shock faded and the anger went away. I began to understand that people were making the offers because they cared about me—because they wanted me to move on with my life.”
Annie swallowed, acutely conscious of Matt’s touch. “Lisa would want that, too,” she stated quietly.
“Do you honestly think so?” His fingers tightened around hers. He clearly placed a great deal of importance on her answer.
“Yes,” she told him. “I honestly think so.”
Matt exhaled on a long, slow sigh. His grip relaxed.
Annie eased her hands out from under his. She waited a few moments, then carefully tried to steer their discussion back on track. “About this practice date...”
“One probably won’t be enough,” Matt said, picking up the cue. “More like three or four.”
There had been many times in her life when Annie had felt as though she could read her best buddy’s mind. This, unfortunately, was not one of them.
“I don’t get this, Matt,” she confessed. “You’ve apparently got a huge pool of available women waiting for you to dive into. Why in heaven’s name do you want to go out on three or four ‘practice’ dates with me?”
“Because those practice dates might save me from drowning in what you so picturesquely call that ‘huge pool of available women,’” he answered bluntly. “It all comes down to one thing, Annie. I have no real experience being a single guy. I hooked up with Lisa in my junior year of high school and that was it. For all intents and purpose, I’ve been out of circulation for fourteen years. When it comes to the contemporary male-female thing, I’m lost.”
“And you think going out with me can help you, er, find your way?”
“Don’t you?”
This was not a question Annie was prepared to answer. She parried it by asking, “Exactly what do you mean when you say ‘practice’?”
“We go out. I do what I think a single guy should do on a date and you critique me.”
The scenario had a certain logic to it, Annie decided after a few moments of reflection. A certain twisted logic, to be sure, but logic nonetheless.
Still, she couldn’t help questioning Matt’s basic premise. Based on her familiarity with the “contemporary male-female thing,” she seriously doubted that his self-proclaimed lack of experience would cause him any problems once he started meeting the allegedly nice girls to whom everyone was so anxious to introduce him.
Hmm. Maybe she could match him up with a few—
No. Scratch that idea.
“Annie?” Matt prompted.
She focused on him again, a strange quiver of awareness skittering up her spine. She found herself imagining his impact on some of the unmarried females of her acquaintance. It wasn’t a soothing scenario.
And then Matt smiled at her. It was a smile Annie couldn’t remember having seen before. Then again, maybe she had...but without ever having registered the sensuality it contained.
She certainly registered it now.
Annie cleared her throat. “What do you want me to say, Matt?”
“A simple ‘yes’ would be sufficient,” her best buddy declared.