A Better Man Read Online Free PDF

enhanced by fifteen years of chain-smoking. He reaches into his breast pocket and removes an electronic cigarette—the latest in an endless series of aids in his quest to quit—and takes a deep hit. The tip lights up when he sucks, like a toxic Christmas decoration. Gray holds his breath for a beat, then exhales a strange minty vapour. “Nice suit,” he says, looking Nick up and down. “Your stylist pick it out for you?”
    Nick fingers his lapel and allows an indulgent smile to spread across his face as he examines his friend’s mournful eyes andhead of coarse, dark curls. Gray has never been typically handsome, but he is the sort of man women are naturally drawn to: large, dominant and wounded despite his professional success. The weary, court-battered charm gives him an older man’s extra gravitas, but like Nick, he’s only just pushing forty.
    “You look like shit, as always,” Nick counters. “Firm still working you like a diamond miner?”
    “I wish. Least then I might dig up something pretty instead of profiting from the proliferation of human misery.” Gray says this with a reluctant grunt of pleasure.
    “Ah well, there’re worse ways to make a living. For instance, you could spend your days casting fitness models to sell body gel.”
    “Sounds like the lowest circle of hell to me.”
    “At least they remunerate us for our suffering.”
    “Truer words.”
    Nick gives the waitress a schoolboy smile and removes his cocktail directly from her hand with a dry brush of fingertips. She flutters back to the bar. He raises his glass toward his old friend, then tosses back half the drink.
    “Thirsty?” Gray is watching him with a quizzical look.
    “Mmm, parched.” Nick dabs at the corners of his mouth with a cocktail napkin, looks up at the dark mirrored ceiling with its spider veining and waits a few seconds before letting out an old-man sigh.
    “How’re the custom-built chaos machines otherwise known as my godchildren?”
    “Good, good. Busier than me, what with the Kumon, Zumba, Gymboree …” Nick tails off when he sees Gray looking at him blankly.
    “Was that English you were speaking just now?”
    Nick laughs. “Not entirely.”
    “Maya still keeping up that exercise regimen?”
    “Yep, hmmm.”
    “Is that all you can say, you lucky bastard?” Gray slaps an open palm down on the table, causing the drinks to slosh and the nuts to scatter. “You don’t appreciate what you have, my friend. If any of my three ex-fiancées had been within spitting distance of that woman, I’d be a happily married trigamist.”
    The conversation is not going the way Nick had hoped. Gray’s hopeless crush on Maya is a long-standing source of humour between them. Usually Nick thinks nothing of it. Slobbering over his wife is simply Gray’s way of winding him up and flattering him at the same time. An intimate form of trash talk. But today Nick finds it getting under his skin, which is of course precisely the point.
    “I never should have introduced her to you at the regatta. Should have known she’d chuck me aside for a pretty-boy lightweight like you. Typical fickle sorority girl. Did you know it’s one of my biggest regrets in life?”
    “So you tell me.”
    “Should have kept her for myself. Ditched the race and spirited her away to Vegas for a quickie wedding.”
    “Hard proposition when you’re a fat, geeky undergrad.”
    Gray’s face cracks a rare smile. “Fair point.”
    They clunk tumblers and drink, allowing an amiable silence to descend. Somehow Nick knows it will be his job to break it.
    “That’s actually what I need to talk to you about.”
    “I wasn’t fat. I was just a bit barrel-chested from rugby—”
    “Seriously, dude, I’m being
real.
I need your honest advice.”
    “Don’t tell me we’re here to talk about your feelings.”
    “No,
no.
Well, maybe a little bit.” Nick catches the waitress’s eye and does the loopy international hand signal for another round.