Something Blue Read Online Free PDF Page B

Aureole, despite Dexter’s insistence that Marcus wasn’t a fancy guy.
    Dex and I arrived at the restaurant first and waited at the bar for Marcus. He finally walked in sporting baggy jeans, a wrinkled shirt, and at least two days’ growth of beard. In short, he wasn’t the kind of guy I usually look at twice.
    “Dex- ter !” Marcus shouted as he approached us and then gave Dex a hearty, man-style hug, clapping him on the back. “Good to see you, man,” Marcus said.
    “You too,” Dex said, gesturing at me with a gentlemanly sweep of his hand. “This is Darcy.”
    I stood slowly and leaned in to kiss the fifth groomsman on his whiskered cheek.
    Marcus grinned. “The infamous Darcy.”
    I liked being called “infamous”—despite its negative connotations—so I laughed, put my hand to my chest, and said, “None of it’s true.”
    “Too bad,” Marcus said under his breath, and then pointed to the statuesque redhead hovering beside him.“Oh. This is my friend Stacy. We used to work together.”
    I had seen the woman come in at the same time as Marcus, but hadn’t thought they were together. Nothing about them matched. Stacy was a total fashion plate, wearing a cropped teal leather jacket and a sweet pair of lizard pumps. As we were led to our table, I shot Dex a dirty look, irritated at him for suggesting that I might want to “tone it down” when I had busted out with my Louis Vuitton white cape and red tartan taffeta bustier. So now I was stuck in an understated black-and-white tweed jacket next to splashy Stacy. I assessed her again, wondering if she was prettier than I was. I quickly decided that I was more beautiful, but she was taller, which annoyed me. I liked being both. Incidentally, I had always believed that every woman wanted to be the most attractive in any group, but once when I admitted my feelings to Rachel, she gave me this blank stare followed by a diplomatic nod. At which point I backtracked somewhat and said, “Well, unless I’m friends with her and then I don’t compare.”
    Fortunately, Stacy’s personality wasn’t nearly as scintillating as her wardrobe, and I succeeded handily in outshining her. Marcus was extremely entertaining, too, and kept our table in stitches. He wasn’t an outright jokester, but was full of wry observations about the restaurant, the fancy food, and the people around us. I noticed that whenever Stacy laughed at him, she’d touch his arm in a familiar way, which made me fairly certain that if they weren’t dating, they had at least hooked up. By the end of the night, I reevaluated Marcus’s looks, upgrading him several notches. It was a combination of Stacy’s obvious interest in him, his sense of humor, and something else. Something was just sexy about him: a gleam in his brown eyes and the cleft in his chin, which made me think of Danny Zuko in Grease (that first beach scene in the movie was my idea of romance for years).
    After dinner, as Dex and I were cabbing back to the Upper West, I said, “I like Marcus. He’s really funny and has surprising sex appeal.”
    Dex had grown accustomed to my candid commentary on other men, so it no longer fazed him. He just said, “Yeah. He’s a character, all right.”
    I waited for him to say that he could tell Marcus approved of me as well, and when he didn’t, I prompted, “What did Marcus say to you at the end of the night when you were getting our coats? Did he say something about me?”
    Stacy and I had been chatting a few feet away and I had figured that Marcus was saying something like “You got yourself a hell of a woman” or “She’s way hotter than your college girlfriend” or even a nice, straightforward “I really like Darcy—she’s great.”
    But after I pressed Dex at length, he told me that what Marcus had shared was that he and Stacy had been dating, and despite the fact that she gave “bombass blow jobs,” he was ending things because she was too demanding. Needless to say, the