“Hey, what do you think caused the big bang in the first place?” Suz paused. “Speaking of big dicks, I mean small dicks…”
Damn. “That was a very cheesy segue. I’m going to ignore you.” For some reason, Lynn’s on-again, off-again dating situation with Phil Shotelle, one of the upper management at Bay City Press, was a source of constant annoyance to Suz.
“Tell me you’ve seen the light and dumped the stiff, and I’ll float my bright little wings toward my desk.”
Lynn sighed as she pulled her fingers through her long hair, attempting to straighten not only the tangles caused by the excursion under her desk, but the tangles in her brain. It was a good thing she had work she loved and Suz to distract her, because her current dating relationship wasn’t lighting the night on fire.
And that was fine.
She supposed.
A sense of guilt struck. Poor Phil. He hadn’t done anything to deserve getting dumped on, and she found herself defending him yet again. “He’s not a bad guy, Suz. Really, he’s not.”
Suz took a step forward, finger extended in accusation. “But you’ll admit he’s not a good guy either, right? Or not the right guy for you. He’s boring and old and never ever makes your heart pound.” She clutched her hands together. “Come on, pretty please admit that much.”
“Thirty-nine is not old,” Lynn insisted, dragging her hair into a ponytail and securing it in position with an elastic. Suz had a point, though. Her relationship with Phil wasn’t one of passion. It was more one of…
Convenience. Or reliability. Familiarity?
Shit. Those definitions were too close to boring. Lynn shook off the strange sadness the topic always wrapped her in. “Face it. You’ve never liked Phil.”
“Because I have good taste in men.”
Lynn couldn’t speak for a moment, the constant chain of guys Suz had enjoyed over the years flashing through her brain and making her blink. Her friend was careful not to hook up with axe murderers, but she didn’t resist temptation as far as enjoying herself. Lynn would have been jealous if she didn’t love Suz so hard, and besides, she wasn’t looking for a different lover every night.
Although one who knew where her clit was would be a nice change of pace. Or one who even seemed remotely interested in at least searching. Phil’s chivalrous behavior was positively puritan.
Meanwhile, she lived vicariously through Suz’s escapades. “So you’re insisting you’ve only dated absolute princes among men,” she teased. “All of them. Every. Single. One.”
“Yip,” Suz gloated. “If you let me help pick a guy for you, you too would wear a smile like mine in the mornings instead of needing four cups of coffee before you’re halfway human.”
“Come on, you’ve had a few duds.” Lynn scrambled for an example. “Say…your boxer?”
Suz blinked then shivered hard. “You mean the one who tied me up and made me orgasm so often and so hard I passed out? Yeah, he was such a loser.”
Jeez. “How about the pilot?”
That suggestion brought a heavy sigh from her friend, but the reason for the reaction wasn’t what Lynn expected. Suz lifted a hand and fanned her face. “You talking about Kakeru? The San Fran to Japan-based pilot who brought his copilot along for the ride—nom nom, I might add—or the KLM pilot who taught me all the dirty words in Dutch, or the—”
Lynn’s computer monitor flickered again. “Shit. Sorry to cut this scintillating conversation to a close, but I’m ten minutes away from completing my revisions on the layout, and I need to get them done.”
Suz shook her head sadly. “He’s no good for you.”
“We’ll talk about it after yoga.”
Her friend made a low clucking noise. Lynn whipped her head up, then realized Suz wasn’t commenting on her lack of willpower to call it off with Phil.
Dana Hastings was marching past, four-inch stilettos flashing as she strode forward in her expensive suit. Her nose visibly twitched as if she smelled something funny in their vicinity.
She’d only gone a half-dozen steps past Lynn’s cubicle before Suz turned. “Gotta run,” she muttered. “We will talk about this more tonight.”
She took off after Dana, the long, uneven ends of her sweater flapping behind her like tail feathers, and Lynn giggled. God, she loved that woman.
Turning back to her computer screen wiped the smile off her face. “You, I don’t love. Come on, computer, behave.”
At the moment, solving the power-source problem was more important than mentally debating, again, her love life. Lynn found the electrical cables where they popped up on the far side of the cubicle wall. She followed the black bundle as it slithered along the edge of the moveable wall, finally crossing a structural dip in the hall and vanishing around a corner.
It was like running an obstacle course. Only when Lynn rounded the corner she had the joy of one more obstacle. The left side of Dana Hastings’s desk stood directly in front of the bundle, and no amount of searching on either side exposed a new escape route.