But it didn’t happen. He looked up and found nothing but sympathetic faces.

“She faked . . . orgasms?” Mack asked.

“No, genius. The moon landing.”

“Wow, man. That sucks,” Del said. “I’m sorry.”

“She faked it all the time?” Malcolm asked. “Or just sometimes?”

“All the time.” Bitterness stung his tongue. “As far as I know, I’ve given my wife exactly one real orgasm our entire marriage.”

Mack swore under his breath. “Shit, man. I’m sorry. All the fucking jokes about sex . . . I didn’t know. I’m a fucking prick.”

The apology was surprisingly heartfelt. “There’s no way you could have known.”

Del coughed discreetly. “So, I’m assuming that you figured out she was faking it because . . . ?”

His neck got hot. “Because one night she didn’t fake it, and it was obvious.”

“I don’t understand,” Mack said. “She kicked you out because you gave her an orgasm finally?”

Gavin bristled at the word finally. “No. She kicked me out because I didn’t react well to learning the truth.”

“Meaning?” Del prompted.

“Meaning I moved into the guest room and stopped talking to her.”

The room finally erupted like he knew it eventually would. Every man jumped to his feet. Del began to pace, punching his fist into his other hand. Malcolm stroked his jingly beard and starting chanting like a monk. Mack shoveled angry forkfuls of brown noodles into his mouth, alternating between eating and pointing a silent, angry finger in Gavin’s general direction.

“You dumb fuck!” Del finally said.

“I know I didn’t handle it well,” Gavin said, defending himself instinctively. “I tried to apologize when I went to the house after she asked for the divorce.”

“Gavin, you have a lot more to apologize for than that,” Malcolm said. “Women don’t fake orgasms unless they’re faking other things too.”

Christ. Back to the fucking riddles. “Just . . . just tell me wh-what to do.”

“You need to stop focusing all your attention on the fact that she faked it and start asking yourself why the fuck you didn’t notice.”

Malcolm’s words landed with a thud in his gut.

“Yeah,” Mack said, wiping his forearm across his grease-covered lips. “And why you didn’t have the fucking balls to talk to her when you learned the truth.”

“And then you need to open a vein,” Del said. “She might have been dishonest about the orgasms, but how honest have you been with her? You can turn this around, but not if you don’t take the same kind of emotional risk that you’re asking of her.”

“She’s moving on without you, man,” Malcolm said. “She has plans. Goals. She’s starting school again, and she doesn’t need you. Not unless you give her a reason to trust that you—”

A sudden yellow glow through the front curtains stunned them all into silence. Then a collective oh, shit sent them scrambling.

“I thought you said she’d be gone until ten,” Del barked.

“That’s what she said!” Gavin looked at the floor. “The books. Hide the fucking books.”

Gavin and Mack dropped to the floor and started grabbing and piling paperbacks.

The headlights went dark outside. “Under the couch,” Gavin hissed.

“My nails are still wet,” Mack whined.

Gavin glared and started shoving books under the couch. Thea’s footsteps sounded on the porch.

“Put some behind the cushions,” Del hissed.

The Russian farted and held his hand to his stomach. “I need bathroom again.” He ran to the basement.

The door swung open. Gavin threw the last several books under a blanket and knocked Mack down to sit on them.

Thea walked in, followed quickly by Liv, and every man froze.

Gavin cleared his throat. “Hi. Hey.”

Thea’s eyes darted around the room. “Um . . . ?”

Gavin remembered their costumes. “Oh, uh, the girls w-w-wanted to play dress up.”

“I see.” She looked around again. “And where are the girls now?”

“Asleep upstairs.”

“I see.”

Mack looked over the back of the couch and blew on his nails. “Hey, Thea. Congratulations about school.”

Liv moved into the room and immediately spotted the take-out container. “Who ate my Chinese food?”

Gavin pointed at Mack.

Who had gone strangely still. He stared at Liv with wide eyes. Like, wide eyes. “Hi,” he said stupidly. “I’m, I’m Braden.”

Liv shot him a glare that could have ignited a brush fire, and then she stomped toward the kitchen. In her wake, she left an unnatural, disbelieving silence, like the kind after a streaker runs naked across the outfield.

A woman had just walked away from Braden-Fucking-Mack.

“Never thought I’d see that,” Malcolm said in his calm baritone.

“I feel like we just witnessed Jesus appear in a piece of toast,” Del said.

Liv opened the fridge. “Oh my God! Did you guys eat my left-over pizza too?”

She stomped toward the basement.

“Liv, you might want to wait—”

The slam of the door cut off Gavin’s warning, but no more than ten seconds later, Liv let out a yell. Her footsteps pounded on the steps as she raced back upstairs.

The door flew open. She barreled out, gagging, and bellowed, “I. Hate. Men!”

Gavin pointed to the front door. “Time to go, boys.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Gavin didn’t exhale for twenty minutes, not until the guys had scattered, the women retired to their respective rooms, and he finally had time to retrieve the hidden books. He put them in two shopping bags and shoved them in the guest room closet. Then he sank to the mattress to dig the heels of his hands into his eyes.

That was a close one.

The sounds of Thea’s nighttime routine drew him to her door. The splash of water in the sink as she washed her face. The quiet scratch of toothbrush against teeth. The slide of a drawer as she pulled out her pajamas.

Open a vein, Del had said as he walked out the door, a sleeping Jo-Jo on his shoulder.

Gavin knocked.

“Come in,” Thea answered a moment later.

She stood at her dresser, pulling out pajamas. His heart thudded with want and nerves.

“How, um, how was today?” he asked, lingering in the doorway.

“You mean at Vanderbilt or at the café?”

“Both.”

She gave a shrug. “Fine.”

There it was. She was pulling back again. Take an emotional risk. “I was thinking of turning on the fireplace outside. D-do you want to come out with me?”

Thea glanced at the bed and then back at him. “Um . . .”

“We could read out there.”

“O-okay,” she finally said.

Gavin went out first to turn the fire on. Then he set out a blanket on the patio couch, opened two beers, and waited for his wife. She came out a few minutes later in his sweatshirt, a pair of leggings, and fuzzy socks. She’d piled her hair on her head. In her hands, she held their book.

“Hey,” he said, struck dumb at the sight of her.

She stopped a few feet away from him. “Hey.”

“The fire isn’t hot yet, but I brought out a blanket.”

“OK.” Her eyes darted to the couch, lingered there a moment, and then returned to his eyes. The expression in her gaze sent a shockwave straight to his impatient parts.

She looked at him with longing. Blatant and unmistakable. Her chest rose and fell with labored breath. Her gaze dropped to stare at his mouth. His body went hot and hard. Painfully hard.

He cleared his throat and he could barely get a word out. “You’re killing me, Thea.”

She blinked. “What?”

“You either have to stop looking at me like that or kiss me, but you have to be the one to d-do it, because I d-don’t want to ruin this.”

Her eyes widened, but then she faked a laugh and shook her head. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

Gavin hid his disappointment and waited for Thea to sit first. Then he lowered to the couch next to her. Automatically, as if they’d done it a hundred times before, he turned so his back was against the arm of the couch so she could lean back against his chest. Thea pulled the blanket over their legs. Gavin wrapped his arm around her torso and tucked her against him. “This okay?”

She made an mm-hmm noise and rested the back of her head against his shoulder. They stared silently at the fire for a moment, adjusting to whatever this was, whatever had started last night.

“I hear you thinking,” he said.

She answered with silence. Gavin held back his sigh. It wouldn’t do any good to get annoyed with her. He tried a different tactic. “We should’ve done this more often before,” he said quietly.

“There never seemed to be time.”

Open a vein. “There was, though. I could have made the time.”

Her breath caught.

“I put baseball first. I know that now. I missed everything. The girls’ first steps. Their first words. The trip to the emergency room when they were sick. I justified it all because my career was important, but I would give it all up right now if it meant saving us.”

Thea slowly sat up and turned to look at him, probably to gauge whether he was being honest or not.

She gave no indication either way, but he wasn’t prepared for what she said next. “Remember when you asked me how my mom was taking it that my dad is getting remarried?”

“Yeah.”

“The truth is, I don’t know. I haven’t talked to her since before Easter.”

He had no idea where she was going with this, but it felt important. “Why?”

“She’d gloat if she knew that you and I were having trouble.”