Maren: This isn’t getting any less weird.
Alina: I asked around at Chester Green’s last night. There’s not a single regular who can remember the last time Nick left the bar with a woman. I think he’s already domesticated, he just doesn’t know it yet.
Maren: So, basically, we’re saying have fun, guard your heart, and remember that the commune is still an option if he sends you dick cookies.
Kami: Um, thanks. I think.
Muffy: Oh my god. I just looked in the mirror. I went to my mom’s beautician, and OUR EYEBROWS ARE PLUCKED THE SAME NOW. I need to go lie down. Or possibly get a third job so I can afford to move out.
Kami: Third? What’s your second job?
Muffy: I mean second job.
My doorbell rings, and I sign off the group text and silence my phone while I follow my dogs to the door. I just charged the stupid phone, and five minutes of texting took the battery down to seventy percent. I really need to get one of those portable battery packs.
Or a new phone.
Except do I really need a phone on a date?
Nope, I definitely do not.
Tiger’s howling her adorable deflating-balloon howl. Pancake’s aroof!-ing, and Dixie’s wagging her back end off.
I smooth my hair back one last time before I swing the door open, and there’s Nick.
In dark jeans and a wool coat with a maroon button-down peeking through. He’s freshly-shaven again, though with a serious five-o’clock shadow going on, which I expected since he texted me a picture earlier today of him, Duncan Lavoie, and Tyler Jaeger in Thrusters T-shirts, all holding up kittens at a pet shelter.
I’d forgotten it was the first of their mandatory volunteer days today.
He smiles, his eyes lighting up and all of the hard angles of his rugged jaw and sharp cheekbones softening. “Hey,” he says, just like he has every other time I’ve seen him the last eight months, but this hey is different.
It’s softer. More thorough, if a hey can be thorough. Like he’s saying hi, thank you for giving me another chance, I hope I can talk you out of that sweater tonight, and wow, you look amazing all at once.
Which is crazy, because it’s just a hey.
“Hey,” I reply, and I just stand there, in the doorway, gawking at him like a total nincompoop. He got a haircut. And—oh, he’s wearing that aftershave I couldn’t get enough of back before the season started when someone set off a cologne bomb in the dressing room.
I showed up at his apartment and the whole thing smelled like a metrosexual lumberjack, and I swear I spent two hours with my nose just buried in his neck, sniffing.
Apparently I have a thing for metrosexual lumberjacks.
Which explains why I’m still drinking in the sight of him in his custom-fit coat and the pants that hug his thighs. When I realize his fingers are twitching like he’s facing down an opponent on a breakaway, like he’s nervous, the dragonflies buzzing around my stomach settle down.
He wouldn’t be nervous if he didn’t like me too.
Maybe this will work.
“Did you want to come in?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “I got us a table at—it’s a surprise. Do the dogs need to go out?”
My heart’s getting melty again, because that’s one of those little questions I never thought he’d ask. A detail I always assumed he overlooked, like me not liking mushrooms. “They just came in. Let me grab my coat.”
Two minutes later, we’re hopping into his Cherokee, which smells like it’s been freshly washed too. There’s a hint of lemon in the air, and the leather seats are cushy and warm.
“How was the shelter?” I ask him as he pulls away from the curb.
He grins again. “Awesome. Those animals are so cool. I took home three cats, a dog, and a ferret.”
“No,” I gasp.
His grin turns to a smirk, and I bat at his arm. “Not funny, Murphy. Because we all know who’d be taking care of your pets.”
“There was a kitten that followed me everywhere. Loud little cat. I couldn’t tell if she was chewing me out or asking me to take her home.”
“Probably both. You can’t pick a cat. It has to pick you. And now she’ll never be adopted since you didn’t get her.”
He darts a quick glance at me. “Seriously?”
I just smile.
Odds are relatively good the kitten’s just social and will be adopted in no time, but it’s fun to make Nick squirm.
“You have an evil side.” The blatant admiration in his voice makes me laugh. “What other secrets are you hiding?” he asks.
“According to your sister, my cousin, and all of my friends, my secrets are things you have to earn.”
We’ve barely gone three blocks, but he pulls the car over into the parking lot of my favorite breakfast diner and looks at me. “Why didn’t you ever call me on my bullshit before?”
Answering that question makes me feel more naked than I ever did when I actually took my clothes off for him. “You know that feeling when you’re on a winning streak, and you don’t want to change anything, you don’t want to shave, you don’t want to need new laces on your skates, you don’t even want to turn in a jersey that’s getting beat up for a fresh one that looks so much better, because you don’t want to mess with what’s working?”
He nods, not breaking eye contact.
“That’s how I felt about finally being close to you,” I whisper.
“What changed?”
“Me.” I lift my shoulders, because I don’t know how else to explain it. “I always thought I’d have a family by the time I turned thirty. And then…”
I trail off, but he finishes the sentence. “And then I was a dick on your birthday.”
“No, you were you. I just decided it was finally time I was me.” I don’t mention still wanting a family, because it’s pretty early in the date to freak him out.
But he wouldn’t have asked me out if he wasn’t willing to consider some of my hopes and dreams…would he?
I ignore the little voice in the back of my head that sounds like all of my friends combined sighing, It’s Nick, and instead, I smile at him. “So, are we going on a date to a parking lot?”
His smile returns, and he shuts off the engine. “Nope. We’re going to breakfast.”
“Here?”
“Here.”
“Elmer’s is…” I trail off, because Elmer’s is usually closed by noon. They’re breakfast-only, and it’s six in the evening. Elmer’s should be closed. But there are a few lights on, and two cars are parked at the back of the small lot.
He grins wider. “You like their waffles.”
I’m speechless for half a second, and then I do the only thing that makes sense.
I launch myself across the center console at him. “That’s so—so—thank you.”
His arms circle around my ribs. I kiss his cheek, and he turns so our lips meet, kissing me gently again, like he did Saturday morning, but I don’t want gentle.
I want Nick.
His stomach rumbles loudly.
“Don’t listen to it,” he says, angling back for another kiss, his hand sliding down my back toward my ass. “It can wait.”
My belly rumbles too, and we both crack up. Nick swats me on the butt. “All right, all right. Let’s get going. If I don’t feed your hungry tummy, I’ll never hear the end of it.”
“From who?”
“Felicity. She knows things.”
“She didn’t know about us for eight months.”
His stomach grumbles again, and we once again dissolve in a fit of laughter.
“Okay, okay,” I say. “If I have to eat waffles, I guess I have to eat waffles.”
“That’s the spirit.”
He grins, and if we laugh this much through our entire date, then it’s already shaping up to be the best date of my life.
Twenty-Seven
Nick
I still don’t know shit about being a good boyfriend, but I know that rubbing my foot up and down Kami’s leg while we devour waffles and bacon and she tells me stories about her family and her patients doesn’t feel like a date.
It feels like hanging with one of my best friends.
And I like it.
“Do you ever feel like the dumb one in your family?” Kami asks as she pushes away a mostly-empty plate and sighs happily with her hands on her belly.
“No way. I have like, four entire hockey plays up here all the time.” I tap my temple. “Bet you Felicity doesn’t even understand one of them.”
Kami shakes her head and laughs. “Sorry. Forgot I was talking to Ego Man.”
“You feel dumb?” I ask. “You’re a doctor.”
“I have one doctorate to Atticus and Brynn’s two each.”
I don’t know her brother or sister well, but I know one’s some kind of astrophysicist who writes bestsellers and the other does something with DNA that’s so over my head I don’t even try. Neither one lives in Copper Valley now.
“You still have one up on your cousin,” I point out.
“No making fun of Muffy. She started Muff Matchers after having a nervous breakdown in medical school.”
“I’d have a nervous breakdown in medical school too.”
“No, you wouldn’t. You’d bluff your way through it and convince people the heart actually pumps urine to help the kidneys out when they’re stressed.”
I grin. “You really do know me well.”
“No, you’re just simple.”
I laugh over my orange juice, and she slides her foot up my calf.
I’m hard in an instant. Raging, uncomfortably hard. So hard I can barely swallow the mouthful of juice I’m almost choking on.
She grins at me, and fuck, if I’d known she had this devious side, I would’ve just married her eight months ago.
Whoa.
Whoa.
I sputter out a cough and catch her ankle under the table. “Gonna have to wait,” I tell her as I stroke the ball of her foot, since she slipped her shoe off. “We still have plans.”