The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo Read Free Book Online Page A

interrupt.”
    She laughed theatrically—a single, pronounced ha. “How many opportunities did I just give you to tell me that I was embarrassing the hell out of myself? Wasting my time?”
    “Not that many, actually. You were on kind of a roll.” He shoved his hands in his pockets, and he met her eyes again. The kindness behind them annoyed her, the warm agendalessness. “And to be honest, I…” He trailed off, looked down.
    “For someone who’s so sensitive to interruption, you seem to have an oddly faulty grasp on finishing your own sentences.”
    “I liked listening to you talk,” he said. He must have seen the indignant look on her face because he colored. “I didn’t mean your voice. Though—I mean, your voice is nice too. I’m not being—you know, some sort of creep. I meant I like the way you structure your sentences. There’s something musical about it. I’ve never really noticed that in another person before.”
    “Just when I think this conversation couldn’t get any more bizarre.”

    “I really am sorry. And just for the record, I think it’s ridiculous that you were docked points on a paper because you wrote about something potentially—erotic.” With this, he colored even more deeply. “We’d all get B minuses in anatomy if held to those standards.”
    She lifted a hand to cover her mouth—she sensed a smile forming—and startled at the heat of her own skin. “Ah, good. I was just thinking the world needs more untoward doctors.”
    His face fell.
    “I’m kidding,” she said. “I think. I can’t believe you just allowed that to happen. You easily could have said no when I asked you to sit down with me.”
    “I don’t know that I could have done so easily, necessarily.” He looked down, then up at her quickly. “It’s not every day that a beautiful woman asks me to sit with her.” The line flowed from him, oddly, without sounding staged—without, in effect, sounding like a line —and this made her face heat up again. “But that’s beside the point. I’m a charlatan. I’m sorry, Marilyn. Truly.” He cleared his throat. “You don’t happen to know where Dr. Bartlett’s office is, do you?”
    “Your guess is as good as mine,” she said. “This building’s a labyrinth.”
    There was no way she could find him charming—this earnestness, this aw-shucks passivity. No way that she was intrigued by this self-professed charlatan. She could see that he was older: not much older, but older enough; enough, perhaps, to value her as something more than a stimulated coed with a nefarious mastery of the most confusing building on campus.
    “Guess I’ll begin my quest,” he said. “And again, Marilyn, I—I’m sorrier than I can say. I’ve never done anything like that before.”
    “Well, you might want to check and see if the CIA is recruiting, because you had me fooled.” And now—damn it all to hell—now she was imagining tucking herself under the arm of his stupid charlatan raincoat and running away with him; now she was imagining herself being somewhere else, with him, or allowing him to take her somewhere else. “Here’s the deal,” she said. “You find this elusive Dr. Bartlett before sunset? And manage not to hoodwink some other poor unassuming woman?” Now her heart was in her throat, pulsing to attention. “You achieve that feat, and maybe I’ll let you take me to dinner.”

    “I— Okay,” he said. “Deal.” He held out his hand to shake.
    She could tell that this microscopic act of assertion was hard for him. She would come to find his prudence exquisitely charming, except when she didn’t. There was no shock when she took his hand, no cinematic burst of static electricity, but there was a pleasant warmth, the gentle pressure of his fingers around hers. The lightning-quick pulse beneath the thin skin of his wrist; her hand fitting neatly into someone else’s hand.

CHAPTER THREE
    His mother was, at once, prettier and uglier than he’d been