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someone, yes… If you want me to leave, I can show myself out.”
    The offer carried some weight, if only because some people had hidden depths and others had goddamn Mariana trenches. Hazel mulled it over.
    She shook her head.
     

Chapter Four
     
     
     
    After dinner, Dylan insisted on doing the dishes. “It’s only fair,” he said, once again rolling up his sleeves. “You cooked. I’m in charge of clean-up.”
    “And what am I supposed to do?” Hazel wanted to know.
    He shrugged. “The possibilities are endless.” He wouldn’t be put off his stride, so Hazel threw up her hands in resignation and allowed him to get on with it.
    The kitchen was too small to fit a dishwasher, so Dylan had to scrub the plates by hand. He ran the water hot enough that eddies of steam rose up from the sink and clung to the windowpane like tears. After a beat, they dribbled down—also very much like tears.
    Hazel hopped up onto the counter, a fresh glass of ice tea and gin in hand. The cocktail improved on acquaintance. She spared a thought for the rotting pulped wood beneath her, hoping against hope that it wouldn’t give out under her sizable thighs. Her landlord would be furious, for one thing, and she didn’t want to become Dylan’s ‘fat girl anecdote,’ for another.
    She drowned the notion in gin.
    She couldn’t say when she had started caring what exactly she might be to Dylan, but it was a recent development. Not being revolted by his mere existence had snuck up on her. It was a short journey from there to admiring the slope of Dylan’s shoulders or the hum of his voice as he sponged off the remaining flakes of dried cheese still stubbornly glued to their plates.
    “Does Sadie know?”
    “That my true calling is washing dishes?” Dylan retorted, flashing her a shit-eating grin.
    “No… That you’re not completely single.” The nuance seemed to matter to Dylan. Hazel thought he was lying to himself. Either he was in a relationship or he wasn’t. Either he was cheating on his partner—his male partner—or he wasn’t.
    Dylan embraced the silence for a long beat. Only the clink of knives and forks in the drying rack disturbed the quiet. He shut off the tap. “We didn’t discuss that, no. I was under the impression that my situation was irrelevant to Sadie.”
    When he felt cornered, Dylan’s voice seemed to drop an octave. His speech patterns went all Ivy League. He also pulled back his shoulders, like he was facing down a fashion runway—or a challenger in the boxing ring. Hazel tried not to examine his tell too closely. Reading people was a double-edged sword. Sometimes they wound up returning the favor.
    “What about your other lady-friends?” she pressed. “Do they know?”
    “Yes.”
    “They don’t care?”
    Dylan turned to face her, dishcloth hanging from his hands like a slightly soiled white flag. “Why should they? I’ve never offered to be anyone’s boyfriend. Some of them are married. It’s just that their needs and mine occasionally dovetail, so we meet up.”
    “And your…partner doesn’t feel cheated?”
    “No.” Dylan’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. He helped himself to what was left of his third glass, downing the contents in one gulp. “You must think we’re perverts. First the S&M, now this…”
    “Does it matter what I think?” Hazel asked, because the former had long ago stopped making her uneasy. As far as she could tell, Dylan had a working arrangement with his partner—she kept wanting to call him boyfriend— and he got his rocks off consensually with like-minded women.
    The opinion of a diner waitress who barely made minimum wage wasn’t worth much.
    “I wouldn’t be here and I wouldn’t have told you about my situation if I didn’t care.”
    Dylan’s reply curbed the joke that perched on Hazel’s lips, shooting it down before it could be uttered. He sounded so genuine. And Hazel—well, maybe she wanted to believe. She set the dregs of her cocktail