LITMIR.BIZ

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Eventually, Bar looks at me inquisitively, kisses Fred good-bye on the cheek, then leaves the restaurant.

      Once she is out of my sight, Fred walks back up to our table, and takes his seat. “I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to introduce you. She was just leaving. Where were we?”

      I stare at him. “You’re fucking her, aren’t you?”

      Honestly, I don’t know why I said that. The words came tumbling out of my mouth before I could think about them.

      But suddenly I can’t breathe. It’s as though my entire body instinctively knows what’s happening, and my brain is struggling to catch up.

      “What?” Fred says, unconsciously looking around the room for a moment. “Why would you say that?”

      I take a deep breath, throw down my cloth napkin, and look him dead in the eye. “Fred, do you want to get married or not?”

      “Wow,” Fred says, clearly stunned by my outburst. “Because I’m not ready to get married, somehow I’m now cheating on you?”

      I’m about to answer him with, “Yes. Why else would a man wait six years, unless it’s to sample what else is out there?”

      But before I can say anything, from the corner of my eye I watch a tidal wave of red wine fly past me and hit Fred dead in the face.

      I turn to see Bar, the beautiful blonde, with an empty glass in her hand. “Knulla dig! Farväll lögnare!” she spits out angrily at Fred, then turns on her heel and marches away.

      I’m stunned. My jaw drops. I want to get up from the table, but my legs are frozen.

      Fred begins calmly wiping his face clean. “I guess she didn’t like the settlement I got for her.”

      Chapter Five

      Seema

      “So you’re saying this means I’m about to find my true love?” Scott asks me as he plays with his new charm and smiles so wide that I can’t tell if he’s fucking with me or genuinely thrilled to hear such news.

      “I’m saying Nicole thinks it does,” I clarify. “I know it’s completely bogus, but you should have seen how she flipped out when—”

      “How do you know?” Scott interrupts.

      “How do I know what?”

      “How do you know it’s completely bogus? What scientific proof do you have?”

      My shoulders drop. “Stop that.”

      Scott smiles and shrugs his shoulders. “You just said her friend Ginger just got engaged. Maybe the universe is trying to tell you something.”

      I make a point of sighing loudly and rolling my eyes. “There were twenty-three girls at the party today who pulled charms. One of them pulled a charm that coincided with her future. Twenty-two others—twenty-three, if you include your heart— did not. Mel isn’t suddenly going to have a wild sex life with her boyfriend of six years, Nic won’t get pregnant if she doesn’t want to, I’m not going to work any harder at my job than I already have to, and you’re not falling in love anytime soon.”

      Scott looks me in the eye and seems to genuinely ask me, “How do you know?”

      I cross my arms, irked. “How do I know . . . which one?”

      He shrugs and smiles. “Pick one. Any one. How do you know I won’t be the next person to fall in love?”

      It’s at that point that I realize— maybe he’s already fallen in love with the girl he just started seeing two weeks ago.

      Damn it. Why didn’t I break up with Conrad sooner? Better yet, why didn’t I make my move on Scott sooner? I had almost a fucking year, and I blew it. I should have just kissed him that first night and gotten it all out in the open. Either he would have been interested— in which case I wouldn’t be in this Hell (not even Hell— limbo. At least in Hell, you know who your enemies are), or he wouldn’t have been interested, in which case I could have had him as a coffee friend but never allowed myself to fall for him.

      I look at his beautiful face. He’s smiling, and his sparkling eyes seem to be dancing. His lips are pink and plump and sexy, and I desperately want to kiss him. I do. I ache for it. Even though I know it’s no good for me, I will dream about it a hundred times tonight before I go to sleep. I’ll fantasize about the perfect place, the perfect time, how he’ll kiss me back, and how my life will be changed forever.

      But this isn’t the perfect time or place. There never has been a perfect time or place, and now that he’s dating someone new, there probably never will be.

      Scott jokingly wags his eyebrows up and down like Groucho Marx in an old black-and-white film. My eyes narrow, and I eye him suspiciously. “You are totally fucking with me, aren’t you?”

      Scott laughs. “Of course I’m fucking with you.” He lifts up his silver heart to inspect it in the light. “I’m constantly amazed that women, particularly intelligent women, believe this crap. When was the last time you heard of a guy reading his horoscope or having his tarot cards read?” He slips the heart into his pocket. “I do want to keep this, though. I have a piece I’m working on that I want to put it in.”

      I smirk “Please don’t tell me you’re calling the piece, ‘Crap Women Believe In.’ ”

      Scott laughs. “THAT would be an awesome piece! I could totally get some bachelor to buy that!” He pulls a small notebook from his pocket, and a black ink pen. “The battle of the sexes always fascinates me,” he says, as he begins sketching his new project. “I could do it all in powder-pink and white, like a wedding . . .” I watch him as he quickly (and flawlessly) sketches a three-layer wedding cake as the centerpiece, then surrounds it on all sides with a series of shelves. “For the top shelf, I’d intersperse diet books like The Zone and Ten Days to Skinny with self-help relationship books like Think Like a Lady, Act Like a Man and He’s Just Not That Into You.”

      “It’s Think Like a Man, Act Like a Lady,” I correct him.

      Scott looks up to give me a pitying look. “You disappoint me, Singh.”

      “I didn’t say I bought it, I just know the title. Knowledge is power. And I actually think I like that Ten Days diet book. I was leafing through it at the bookstore— it had some interesting ideas.”

      Scott continues to draw ferociously, a man possessed. “No woman needs a diet book. Every woman I know knows enough on the subject to write a diet book herself. And it would be a short book, too. Page one: walk every day. Page two: if you’re wicked serious, go to a gym three times a week and lift a few weights. Page three: quit eating all that crap. Whether your crap is Zingers every time life throws you a curveball, Twinkies hidden in your desk drawer, or eating a two-thousand-calorie ‘salad’ loaded with dressing and meat, knock it off!” He turns the notebook around for me to scrutinize his work. “What else do I need?”

      I look at the drawing and decide to betray my own sex in the name of flirting. “A Christian Louboutin shoe.”

      “Which a woman believes will help her catch a man. Perfect!” he says, drawing an insanely high heel.

      “Plus a DVD of Sex and the City, an eyelash curler, maybe a deck of tarot cards . . .”

      “You are on fire, girl!” Scott says happily, taking a quick sip of champagne, then going back to his sketch.

      My home phone rings. “Hey, can you do one of these about men?” I ask as I head to the phone.

      “No,” Scott answers me firmly.

      “What? Why not?”

      “I wouldn’t know what to put in the display.”

      “Under ‘Crap Men Believe’?” I exclaim. “You’re kidding, right? How about a Knicks jersey, a letter from Pent

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