Insipid Read Online Free Page B

while sipping our cans of Coke. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pack of cigarettes.
    “Smoke?” he offers.
    “Sure,” I oblige as I take one from the pack. What am I doing? I haven’t smoked in years. “Do you smoke a lot, Lucas?”
    “Actually, I don’t. This is my stress reliever. I’m a runner.”
    “So am I! That’s funny. Does that mean we’re both stressed out?”
    “Definitely. We have the perfect excuse to let go for a little bit.” He flashes me a smile as I lean over to him for a light.
     

     
    LUCAS SHOWS UP at my office at 8:00 pm every evening that week, coat in hand, ready for our nightly jaunt to the little grocery across the street. During the day, we act like colleagues, speaking to each other only about business, working on the merger proposal together. Leigh remains part of the team, acting more like the senior partner in this engagement and leaving Lucas on his own to ask the questions and draft the responses. We spend the evenings together as friends, but we share more than a Coke and a bag of chips. We share stories and experiences, with one cigarette quickly turning into two or three. He does most of the talking, I do most of the listening. Over the past few months, I’ve learned to keep my thoughts and feelings to myself. No one wants to hear about a lonely woman and her sad life, especially when it looks so perfect and fulfilled from the outside. Although I never forget the age difference between us, conversations with him are comfortable and easy.
    “What’s your story, Lucas? How come you don’t have a girlfriend?”
    He doesn’t answer me right away. Sometimes I think it’s because he translates his thoughts first into words and then into another language. “I’m still recovering from something that happened recently. I got in the middle of something against my better judgment.” I begin to sense a tinge of discomfort from the way that his body shifts in the opposite direction.
    “What happened? You can tell me,” I say, before changing my mind. “Only if you want to, of course.”
    “I thought I was in love with a woman who was divorced from her husband. She ended up going back to him. I kind of knew how it would get resolved, but I jumped in anyway.”
    “What was she like?”
    “She was captivating; we hardly knew each other. I met her at a time when she was lost and alone. She’s actually the best friend of Leigh’s wife. He is very close to her. She remarried her husband last year and they just had their third child.”
    I listen without any interruptions, nodding along as he waxes poetic about their relationship, watching him gesture with his hands as he speaks. After a few minutes, I notice that we’re both holding our cigarettes with orange powder caked on our fingers. I let out a laugh as I hold my fingers up to his face. He takes them and swipes them across his pants before doing the same thing to his.
    “I’m sorry,” I say, to both his story and the fact that he now has orange streaks on his pants. I heedlessly reach over to brush the stains off—his thighs are rock solid.
    There’s a peculiar silence between us before he quickly reaches over to take my hand. He lets it go as soon as he catches me glancing around uncomfortably, and continues the conversation with an air of nonchalance. “Don’t be,” he says bluntly. “That’s what life is all about. Leaping in against what seems like obvious odds against you. Taking chances. You’ll never know if you don’t try.”
    “I guess you have that luxury when you’re young.”
    “Oh, here we go again. Why do you always attach age to everything?” He holds my gaze and silently challenges me not to look away. “Those eyes of yours. I can tell that there are things you want to share with me, Jade. They’re like pages of a book just waiting to be turned.”
    “There’s nothing to tell. Life goes on and I’m living it the best way I can.” It’s time to make another attempt to