Chapter 10
“You’re out with Shay at a bar? That’s progress, isn’t it?” Lori asked.
Rosie shook her head at Lori’s enthusiasm for her to get serious with Shay. “I don’t need anything to progress. It’s just for drinks. I let it slip about my mom, and she offered to talk about it.”
Lori narrowed her eyes and peered closer at the screen. “Doesn’t conversation about deeper things stray outside the boundaries of a casual relationship?”
“Not if you talk about it casually, it doesn’t.”
“And is it possible for you to talk about your mom that way? Especially under the current circumstances.”
“I guess we’ll see.” Rosie looked up when the bar doors opened, but it was a couple of tall women with long hair and high heels.
Usually that would be enough for her to end the call to Lori and proceed to catch their attention, but tonight, disappointment rather than anticipation of the chase flowed through her.
Comparing those women to Shay was like comparing vinegar to a vintage wine.
“No one of interest?” Lori asked, pulling Rosie back to the phone.
“No one like Shay,” she said.
Lori arched her eyebrow. “Have you agreed to be exclusive?”
Rosie shook her head. “I don’t have the time or energy for anyone else, so it’s a moot point.”
“If you’re not looking at anyone else, and things are just casual with Shay, does that mean you’re still in the ‘not looking for love’ phase?”
“I have paused my search for Princess Charming, yes. But honestly, what I’ve got with Shay is better than anything that came before her. The friends with benefits thing is really working. We get to keep our personal space, and neither of us have to compromise on things that are important to us.”
Lori frowned. “You can get all those things in a more serious relationship too, you know?”
“Everything is still going well with Gabe, I take it?” Rosie had never seen the kind of goofy grin that spread across Lori’s expression in response to her question.
“Everything is fantastic. Taking it slow is harder than I thought it would be, and nights apart are no fun at all.” She began to cough and didn’t stop for a few moments.
“Are you okay?”
Lori sipped from a glass of water. “I think I’m coming down with something. I’ve had a pounding headache all day, and Advil hasn’t touched it.”
“Maybe you should get an early night and rest up instead of playing with Gabe.” The doors opened again, and this time it was Shay. Rosie bit her bottom lip, and she swore there was a collective swooning sigh from a significant portion of the bar’s occupants.
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow then,” Lori said. “And you should probably do something about that loved-up face thing you’ve got going on.”
Rosie snapped back to her screen. “What loved-up face thing?” But Lori had already gone.
She looked at the mirror behind the bar and checked her face.
She wasn’t loved-up. Sexed-up, definitely.
Obviously they must look the same. She turned back to watch Shay cross the room to admiring looks.
Her outfit of tailored trousers, high heels, and a soft-looking blouse open to her cleavage made Rosie want to skip the family conversation and head straight to bed.
It wasn’t like they could solve the mystery of where and why her mom had disappeared just by talking about it.
Shay slipped her hand around the back of Rosie’s neck and drew her in for a deep, hard kiss. She melted under Shay’s touch and when they parted, she smiled at the looks of disappointment and jealousy around her.
“That’s a nice way to say hello to a friend,” Rosie said.
Shay sat beside her on a bar stool. “That’s the benefits part.”
Rosie nodded toward the rest of the bar. “And you don’t mind people thinking we’re together.”
“We are together—right now,” Shay said. “If I came in alone tomorrow, it’d be a different story.”
Rosie didn’t want to imagine that at all. Just because they weren’t exclusive didn’t mean that she wanted to know about all the other women.
Shay ordered white wine for them and picked up the glasses. “Shall we grab a table? Perching on these stools isn’t all that comfortable.”
“Sure.” Rosie took her purse and followed Shay to a table in a quiet area.
She placed the glasses down and ran her gaze over Rosie. “You look hot tonight.”
Shay’s searing look was enough to scorch Rosie’s clothes from her body right there, and it threw gasoline on her low-burning desire. “Do you want to ditch the conversation and head straight to my place?”
“As tempting as that is, I think we can focus on the friend part of our situation for a couple of hours, can’t we?” Shay tapped her watch. “It’s early, and I don’t have to be at the garage tomorrow. Do you have to work?”
Rosie smiled, strangely pleased that Shay hadn’t taken her offer, and now she got to have the best of both worlds.
“That depends on whether or not you convinced your friends that your garage would be the perfect place to launch a brand-new tool company. If the answer is no, I have to spend my Sunday scouring the planet for another all-women run garage, preferably with a rainbow flavor.”
“About that: I neglected to negotiate my personal fee for brokering that deal with my team.” Shay ran her finger around the rim of her wine glass and arched her eyebrow. “What’s in it for me?”
“Are you looking for preferential treatment?” Rosie asked.
“I’m looking for special treatment, something just for me.”
Rosie ran her nails along Shay’s forearm. She liked that Shay wanted something extra from her, and it was a good sign that her friends had agreed to talk about the marketing opportunity. “Something you don’t want to share with your team?”
Shay shuddered and wrinkled her nose. “Definitely no sharing, although you’ve made it clear that my bois aren’t your type. Even if all of them would crawl over broken glass to get to a woman like you.”
Heat rushed through Rosie’s body. “Really?”
“Really.”
“So that makes you their kind of woman too, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, but no.”
Rosie frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Yes, I’m their type, but no, I’ve never hooked up with any of them, because that was bound to be your next question.”
“You got me.” Rosie sipped her wine as relief coursed through her, grateful she didn’t have any of Shay’s butch friends to compete with.
That might’ve made Lori’s late summer party at the Sanctuary a little awkward, although if she’d imagined Shay with any of them, it would’ve been Gabe, and she was happily engrossed with Lori now.
“Circling back to your original question of whether I’m working tomorrow, did you manage to convince your team that they’d be perfect for my marketing campaign? ”
“I did, but maybe we could hold off on the work talk until Monday, and you can tell me all about the family drama of your mom missing in Mexico instead.”
“Fine…but thank you. It means a lot to me.”
“You’re welcome.” Shay gave her a wicked smile. “I’ve always thought I’d make a great calendar model.”
Rosie chuckled. “You could model anything,” she said and then told Shay the sketchy details she’d gathered from her mom, aunt, and the internet.
“You’ve never met this Keith guy that she’s with?”
Rosie rolled her eyes. “I can never keep up with all the men. I see her on Thanksgiving and Christmas, and she always has someone different the next year. Sometimes, there’s even a new guy between the two holidays.”
Shay tilted her head slightly. “Sounds like she swaps guys out like I change the oil on my car. Has she always been that way?” she asked gently.
Rosie narrowed her eyes. “You want to talk family history and not just the here and now?”
Shay leaned back in her chair looking contemplative and didn’t respond for a second or two. “It’ll help provide context, won’t it?”
“Sure, but it might also send you running out of the bar screaming for simple.”
Shay shook her head. “Our lives being complicated doesn’t mean that we have to be complicated, does it?”
“Only if you don’t hold it against me,” Rosie said. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had run for the hills when they realized what they were getting into. “I promise you I’m nothing like my mom.”
Shay’s smile disappeared, and a sadness briefly blanketed her eyes. “I won’t. It’s why I keep my personal life so separate from my family life, and never the twain shall meet.”
Rosie laughed. “‘Never the twain?’”
“Rudyard Kipling. I took an English Lit class at Yale.”
“You went to Yale?” Her opinion of Shay ratcheted up a couple more notches.
Shay straightened as if she was preparing to attack. “You’re surprised because I’m—”
“Because you were a soldier, and now you’re a mechanic. I didn’t think you needed a degree for either of those professions, especially one from such a prestigious university.”
Rosie frowned when Shay seemed to relax her shoulders. She tried to figure out what had just happened, and then the penny dropped. “Oh God, you thought I was surprised because you’re Black, didn’t you?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time a woman—anyone—had that reaction.”
Rosie couldn’t be hurt that Shay had thought she was capable of coming to that conclusion.
She couldn’t imagine the number of times Shay had encountered that kind of racism, and Shay didn’t know her well enough to assess her prejudices or lack of.
There was nothing she could say that wouldn’t sound patronizing or condescending, so instead she asked, “What did you study?”
“Applied mathematics, but we’re straying off-topic.” Shay tapped her nails on her wine glass. “Your mom. Her history with men.”
Rosie fought the deep sense of shame she carried, which was currently trying to convince her to lie about her background.
What if Shay did judge her? How could she not?
Rosie was still judging herself even after all the years of therapy.
She’d thought becoming a therapist would fix it all, but that hadn’t happened either.