Crazy Like Fox

Chapter 2-2

I never understood why it’s so hard for people to believe that Jeremy and I don’t fool around on each other. If you’ve got a Michelin-rated chef at home, you don’t waste your time or your money at McDonalds. Okay, we’ve been together a long time. I was twenty, he was twenty-two; essentially my whole life, when you consider that what I’ll claim as my life didn’t even start until right before we met. But it’s not like they’ve been nineteen boring years. Life with a breathtakingly handsome man with a literally insatiable s****l appetite—the dude can recharge in under ten minutes at forty, if that tells you anything about what our twenties might have been like—is not exactly drudgery.

We’ve trotted the globe together, strode side by side across seven continents, sailed every ocean. We’ve sipped champagne on the veranda at the Ritz-Carlton and we’ve huddled together under a roadside lean-to eating crickets and rice out of a tin cup. We’ve crisscrossed the Atlantic on the Concorde and we’ve paddled up the sss in a hollowed-out log. And when we are home, it’s in a sun-soaked penthouse filled with friends, fresh flowers, and fine wines. We’re at the top of every guest list in Seattle, and people would rather miss their own wedding than one of our parties. Well, she didn’t miss it, but she was late, and it wasn’t until his second Thanksgiving at our house that her new husband finally forgave her. They’re divorced now, and can’t even be civil to each other save at a Jeremy/Fox shindig.

And not to bore you, but where exactly do you think he’s going to go looking for something better? I know every guy who crosses his path wants to get with Jeremy. It has always been thus, and I’ve always worked hard to ensure that if his eye does wander, it doesn’t wander far. Okay, I can’t take credit for his weakness for freckle-faced redheads—that’s just a good bit of that old luck on my side again. But I work like a pro athlete to stay in shape, especially after I popped a little pudge on our last Mediterranean cruise. We had fun with the maternity jokes for three or four days, but the reality is, if you let ‘em, the shrimp and the champagne would stick around these days, which they never used to. But they were promptly and permanently banished when we got home, and I don’t just have the body of a guy ten years younger than me, but the body of a smokin’ hot guy ten years younger than me. Jeremy says so all the time, and I only repeat it here because it’s true.

And I’ve seen more than one dude actually lick his chops watching Jeremy walk down the aisle. He shows his age more than I do, but only in the sexiest ways. He’s thickened up, especially in the last couple years, but he hasn’t gone soft, and that big Swedish butt fills a pair of jeans so full it’ll bring tears to your eyes. He’s still got a full head of that gorgeous hair, but there’s as much gray now as black; the apparent gravitas of the salt and pepper all but mocking his mischievous frat boy personality. He can’t pass for younger like I can, but he makes forty so hot that I can’t wait to see what happens when he turns fifty.

Which is why I was so happy to finally get to Miami. It had been five days, after all, that Jeremy and I had been apart. Along with newly-scandalous Schatzie and starry-eyed Thumper, I practically ran for the van when we disembarked the airplane. It was only seven o’clock in the morning, and I knew that Jeremy wasn’t due in until evening, but Thumper had suggested an afternoon by the pool, which sounded delightfully restorative, and I was hoping to grab a nap and a run in the meantime.

The pilots were engrossed in their conversation about the alarming financial state of the airline—apparently the first officer had glimpsed a rather apocalyptic headline passing by a stand of newspaper boxes in the terminal—but I was only half-listening. Everyone knew that we were hemorrhaging money, but the company had steadfastly refused to communicate with its employees in any but the rosiest terms. We were trying to be realistic about our future prospects, but Jeremy and I had agreed we’d keep showing up for work until someone called and told us not to, and until that happened, I found speculation unrewarding. Thumper spent the van ride madly texting, presumably in an effort to track down the new love interest and, despite the insistence of my coffee-filled bladder that something more productive be done, I dozed on the ride to South Beach.