Outside, I pace. My mind fills with images. They’re going to leave and they’re going to go back to his place or her place and they’re going to keep kissing, deeper and wetter, and then he’ll lift her up effortlessly because he’s a freaking gym trainer and she’ll lock her legs around his lower back and he’ll carry her to the bedroom, and . . . I can’t let this happen. I just can’t.

I dial her number. I get voice mail. I dial again; same result. I text her madly: I’m outside. MAJOR emergency. I need your help. PLEASE!

A minute passes and Bree exits the restaurant. Her lipstick is smeared halfway around her face.

“What happened? Are you okay? Are you hurt?” she asks, patting my shoulder.

“I’m fine, I just had to get you out of there.”

“What are you talking about? I did the good signal.” She looks longingly back inside the restaurant. “Did you mix it up with the bad signal?”

“No, I vetoed it.”

“Why? We’re having a great time!”

“You can’t sleep with him. It’s too fast.”

“You asked me to give him a second chance, and now that I have, and it’s working, you think it’s a mistake? This is exhausting.”

What doesn’t exhaust her? “This has nothing to do with me. It’s what you wanted. Here’s what you said to me the day we first talked. Look, I wrote it down.”

I thrust my smartphone in her face, cued up to the notes I took upon meeting her.

DOES NOT WANT TO HAVE SEX TOO EARLY.

(I may have caps-locked, italicized, and underlined it just now to hit the point home.)

Her nose wrinkles and she paces alongside me. “But . . . I’m fully sober. And I want this. Him.”

“WELL, YOU CAN’T,” I blurt out.

“You’re kind of freaking me out right now.”