Jennifer Crusie - Anyone but You

He took her hand, trying to ignore how soft and warm it was while he appreciated her, too. Knock it off, he told himself and dropped her hand. "Got to go. See you, Fred," he called back over his shoulder and then he escaped into the hall and down the stairs.

On the way down, he met Rich, looking disgustingly healthy in jeans and a gray-striped shirt that matched the gray in his hair, on his way up to Norma's with a pizza.

"Hello, Alex." Rich punched him in the arm. "Not making time with my woman, are you?"

"Rich, you know Norma wouldn't look twice at me. I couldn't keep up her pace." Alex nursed his bicep where Rich had pounded him. Rich had a mean punch. "I was in three, meeting the new tenant."

"Ah." Rich nodded. "I saw her the other day. Very nice-looking." He squinted at Alex. "She's older than you are."

"You should talk," Alex said.

"No, no, that's good." Rich leaned closer. "Older women know things."

Alex hated to ask, but he had to. "What kind of things?"

Rich raised his eyebrows. "Things. You'll find out." He sighed. "Of course, she's no Norma. They broke the mold when they made Norma."

"I always figured Norma broke the mold because she didn't want the competition," Alex said, and Rich roared with laughter.

"Didn't want the competition. Wait'll I tell Norma. She'll love that one."

"Yeah, and if she doesn't, she'll come down and beat the tar out of me," Alex said, and Rich laughed again and went jogging up the stairs with Norma's pizza.

"Older women, huh?" Alex said to his retreating back, but Rich was too far away to hear.

"I read an article on menopause yesterday," Nina said to Charity, who was sitting on the oriental rug on Nina's living-room floor, looking elegant and sexy in a black silk catsuit. Nina looked down at her own blue-striped cotton pajamas and sighed. You are what you wear, she told herself, and went back to the feast that she and Charity had assembled on the floor around them: nonfat pretzels, nonfat potato chips and a blender full of chocolate Amaretto milk shake.

And Fred.

Fred was turning out to be a world-class mooch.

Charity rolled her eyes and fed Fred a pretzel, which he took gently in his mouth, dropped on the ground, pushed with his nose, examined closely, and then, deciding it was exactly like the other three pretzels he'd had earlier, ate. "Don't rush into anything, Fred," Charity told him and then turned back to Nina. "Why are you reading about menopause, for heaven's sake?"

"Because I'm forty now." Nina crunched into a pretzel. "'It said that pre-menopause starts in the forties."

"Nina, you've been forty for about forty-eight hours. Estrogen deprivation won't start for at least another week." Charity leaned over Nina's blue-striped lap to grab the potato chip bag. "I can't believe you're torturing yourself like this."

"There was a list of symptoms," Nina went on. "Warning signs. They were awful."

"Hot flashes." Charity nodded. "I get those every time I think of Sean. Only I think it's rage not menopause."

"One of them is that your pubic hair starts to thin," Nina said.

Charity stopped with a chip halfway to her mouth. "I did not need to know this."

Nina nodded. "So I was in the shower last night and I looked, but the thing is, I never paid that much attention before, so I don't have any idea if mine's thinner."

Charity dropped the chip back into the bag. "Nina, loney, you're losing your grip."

Nina stuck her chin out. "I just want to know. I want to be prepared."

Charity shrugged and went back to the chips. "So ask Guy."

Nina shot her a withering look. "Ask my ex-husband to check my pubic hair to see if it's thinned in the year we've been divorced? No, I don't think so."

Charity beamed at her. "Well, there's always Rogaine."

"Thank you very much." Nina slurped up more of her milk shake. "And then there's this thing I'm developing for younger men. I was watching 'Friends' the other night and caught myself wondering what Matthew Perry is like in bed."

"I've wondered that myself," Charity said. "You know, whether he'd stop wisecracking long enough to-"

"Charity, I could have given birth to Matthew Perry."

Charity looked at her with patient contempt. "Nina, Matthew Perry is not a real person. He's an actor. He doesn't count. Now, if you were having hot thoughts about MacCauley Culkin, I'd worry. But Matthew Perry, no."

"He counts," Nina said stubbornly.

"Hell, I think about James Dean and he's dead," Charity went on. "That doesn't mean I'm heading for the cemetery with a shovel. Fantasy is not the same as reality. You don't have to feel guilty about it."

"It's happening in reality, too," Nina said. "I met my downstairs neighbor yesterday, and I was thinking about how much fun he looked and what great hands he had, and I swear, he can't be more than twenty-five. It's only a matter of time until I'm cruising the high schools."

Charity sat up straighter, which made her black silk move against her curves. It was a shame there wasn't a man around to watch Charity move, Nina thought. The whole effect was sort of wasted on her and Fred.

Fred was investigating the potato chip bag.

"Downstairs?" Charity said, pushing Fred's nose out of the bag. "You didn't mention any guy downstairs. Who is he? What does he do? Is he married?"

Nina tried to look quelling. "I told you. He's just a baby."

"I like babies," Charity said. "As long as they're not mine. This could be good. Tell me about him."

Nina glared at Charity and her black silk, a combination that could seduce any man of any age. "You're going to jump my infant neighbor?"

"No," Charity said patiently. "I'm going to talk you into jumping your infant neighbor. If he's not married."

"He's not," Nina said, slumping a little. "At least there was no ring, and he didn't mention a wife."

Charity snorted.

Nina gave her a severe look. "And you're not talking me into anything anyway, so just drop it."

"Is he cute?" Charity asked. "What does he do for a living?"

The image of Alex lounging at her table, broad-shouldered and confident, came to mind, but Nina evicted it at once. "Yes, he's cute. I have no idea what he does for a living. Probably something involving a small hat and French-fry oil. He doesn't look too focused."

"That's wonderful." Charity sat back, so enthused she fed Fred a potato chip. Fred ate it cautiously since it wasn't a pretzel. "This is great. Make him your toy boy. If he's got some kind of McJob, you won't end up being a corporate wife, and since he's young, he'll still be interested in sex. This is perfect."

Nina glared at her because the thought was so tempting. "It is not perfect. I'm not dating somebody who's fifteen years younger than I am. I'm not dating again at all, I like being free and not having to go to stupid dinners and dress up for somebody else's career, but if I was going to start dating again, it would not be this guy." She thought again of Alex, loose-limbed and long-fingered in her doorway and way, way too young for her. If she started dating him or, dear God, sleeping with him-she swallowed at the thought-people would say she was in her second childhood. People would look at them on the street and wonder what he saw in her. Guy would sneer. Her mother would roll her eyes. His friends would make jokes about Oedipus Alex. She and Alex would have nothing to talk about. She'd be obsessing over thinning pubic hair, and he'd be playing air guitar.

Worst of all, if she slept with him, she'd have to take off her clothes and her mother was right: her body was forty years old. The whole idea was impossible.

And he wasn't interested in her, anyway. Just what she needed, to start fantasizing about a man who thought of her as a mother figure and who just by existing would make her feel older than she already did. She'd end up literally working her butt off to try to look younger than she was instead of enjoying the freedom she had now. "It would be too humiliating," she finished. "Not Alex. Anyone but Alex."