Худший шафер на свете

Dammit. I can’t unthink it. Now I’m the one flustered enough to do absurd shit—like wonder what would have happened if I’d met Lina before my brother did.

Lina’s having . . . the remaining items on the restaurant’s menu, apparently. The servers tag-team the process of setting bowls in front of her. Chicken. White rice. Black beans. A side that looks like cornmeal. A bowl of tomatoes and onions swimming in some kind of vinaigrette. And a plate of greens.I bend down and lift the tablecloth, scanning the floor.“What’s the matter?” she asks. “Did you drop something?”“No, I’m looking for the other people who are going to help you eat your meal.”

Lina stills, a vein in her forehead popping out like a tiny alien. Then she growls at me. Literally growls. And it’s the most perfect sound I’ve ever heard in my life.Eliciting that response from her is so fucking satisfying—and for some unfathomable reason, I want to do it again and again.

Everything about him bothers me: his complete lack of self-awareness (genuine), his sarcasm (rudimentary), his boyish smile (insincere), his stupidly chiseled jaw that he pretends to stroke absently (totally affected), his thick so-dark-it’s-almost-black hair that I wish with all my heart were dyed so I could picture him sitting in a salon with foil strips clinging to the strands (natural, unfortunately), and so on and so on. Grrr.

I dip my spoon into the thick bomb of chocolate on my plate. “Want to try?”He waves his refusal. “No, I can’t. My tongue’s out of commission.”My gaze dips to his mouth. It’s a nice mouth. Not that it matters.“It’s out of commission for eating things,” he adds. His eyes bug out. “For eating foods.”“Yeah, I get it, Max.”

And Mother of God, the definition in his forearms suggests either he’s a workoutaholic or masturbates frequently. Now that I think about it, his right forearm is more developed than the left one.

“When I said you should be petty,” she says, “I was thinking you’d be more subtle.”I grimace and drop to the ground. “The peppers were too much?”She snorts. “Yes, Lina, yes. It’s as though someone told you to flirt and you decided to flash your tits instead.”I snap my brows together and pretend to be confused. “Flashing your tits isn’t flirting?”

“What do you say? Want to ginga with me?”Max pretends to clutch his nonexistent pearls. “Don’t you think that’s being a little forward? I mean, we barely know each other. Shouldn’t we go on a date or something first?”

We sit across from each other at a table so tiny we may as well be sitting in each other’s lap.“Cozy,” she says.I snort. “Your cozy is my awkward.”She grins. “Oh good. It’s not just me.”

I’ll be stuffing myself with cake as part of a work assignment. How fucking cool is that?