Excerpt from Blooming All Over      “Casey asked me to move in with him,” Susie said.       Julia’s eyebrows shot up. “You’re kidding!”       “Why should I be kidding?” Susie asked indignantly. “We’ve been seeing each other for a year.”       “No—I mean, he just strikes me as kind of…” Julia seemed to grope for the right words. “I don’t know. I would have expected him to ask you to marry him, not move in with him.”       Susie made a face. “You think I’d spend a year with the kind of guy who’d ask me to marry him?”       “No, I guess not.” Julia toyed with the lace of her canvas sneaker, but her gaze remained on Susie. “What did you tell him?”       “I said no.”       “Susie!” It was Julia’s turn to make a face. “You’re living with two roommates in that teeny-tiny disgusting walk-up in the East Village where the stairway always smells of fried onions, and he’s got a great big apartment!”       “In Queens,” Susie reminded her. “In Forest Hills.” Light-years removed from civilization.       Julia nodded. “Exactly. He lives in Forest Hills. A nice middle-class neighborhood. That’s why he’s the kind of guy who’d ask you to marry him.”       “He lives there because you can get more square footage for the dollar. Plus he grew up in Queens and he has friends there, for some reason.”       “And family,” Julia pointed out.       “I don’t think that was a deciding factor.”       “I think it is.”       “Yeah, like you know Casey better than I do.”       Julia smiled. “I know he’s got long hair and a stoner smile. He’s still a family man. He refused to have sex with you until he got to know you, remember? He’s a traditional sort of guy, Susie.”       “More traditional than me,” Susie agreed dolefully. She couldn’t argue with Julia. Casey did have long hair, and his smile did have a vaguely druggy appearance, although in the year they’d been together the strongest drug she’d ever seen him take was Tylenol Plus. And he loved Susie’s tattoo, and he hadn’t been inside a church since his great-uncle Mike keeled over while watching WWF-Raw last October, and even at the funeral Casey hadn’t taken communion. But other than his hair and his agnosticism and his professed adoration for Susie, he harbored some pretty old-fashioned values. When they’d met, a little more than a year ago, she would have happily jumped his bones within minutes of catching his eye. She’d walked into Bloom’s, made her way to the bagel counter and spotted him standing behind it, all six-foot-two inches of him, with his dirty-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail and his hazel bedroom eyes glittering as he’d handed her an egg bagel, and the saliva fill      ing her mouth had been for him, not the bagel. He’d been the one to insist that they spend some time learning about each other before they got naked.       She’d been intrigued. She’d never before met a man who actually cared more about getting to know a woman’s mind than getting her to spread her legs, but she’d admired his attitude. It had challenged and amused her, and their conversations had been great and the sex, once they’d finally gotten around to it, had been even greater and…      Damn. She wasn’t ready to settle down yet. Not even with Casey.

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