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“I know,” I groan. “I won’t spill any of your deep, dark secrets. You have nothing to worry about.”
I press the call button and it starts to ring. But Yakov slams his hand over the speaker and whispers in my ear, “I know I don’t. You do. The last thing I need is two liabilities to take care of. Do you understand?”
The ringing stops and Kayla picks up. “Luna? Hello?”
But I’m frozen because Yakov’s hand is still covering the mouthpiece and his lips are brushing against my skin with every word. “If you tell your friend anything you’re not supposed to, you’ll live to regret it. She won’t.”
My heart is pounding. I’m shaky and I’m not sure if it’s from Yakov’s threat or the fact that I can still feel the heat of his breath on my neck.
“Luna?” Kayla asks. “Are you there? Can you hear me?”
I swallow down my nerves and lean over the phone. “Hi. Sorry. It’s me.”
There’s a long pause, then: “‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘Hi,’ she says. As if I haven’t been blowing up your phone for two straight days!”
I swipe down on my notification screen and, surprise surprise, it is wall-to-wall calls and texts from Kayla.
“Seriously!” she yelps. “I know you’re mad at me about the surprise blind date. I get that. But freezing me out is not cool. I was scared!”
That makes two of us.
When Yakov was rattling off his long list of rules, I wasn’t really paying attention. I know what I can’t tell her. It’s obvious.
What isn’t as obvious is what I can tell her. I’ve never been a good liar. Least of all when I’m lying to my best friend.
“I know. I’m sorry. I was just… really mad.”
There’s a beat of hesitation before Kayla speaks again. “What’s up with you? Why do you sound so weird?”
Yakov is standing next to me, close enough that his arm brushes against me when I jerk away from the phone like I’ve been electrocuted.
I’ve barely gotten two sentences out of my mouth and Kayla is already suspicious. I drag my hands down my face and dig deep for the best explanation I can come up with. “I’m getting over a cold. I’m still a little stuffy.”
“I didn’t mean your voice,” she snaps. “You just sound… off. Are you still mad at me?”
This one, I can answer honestly. “No. I’m not still mad.”
I’d give anything to be able to talk to her right now. She is the reason I was in the restaurant in the first place, but Kayla couldn’t have known what was going to happen. I don’t blame her for any of this.
“Okay, great. So that means you’re ready to tell me how the date went?”
“There’s nothing to tell. It was just a date. A normal date.”
Yakov raises a brow and I swat him away. The last thing I need right now is even more of a reason to be nervous.
Kayla snorts. “A ‘normal’ date for you is kind of tragic. No offense.”
“It was normal for a regular person then. It was fine. Nothing to report.”
Oh, how we will laugh about this later. I have nothing but stuff to report. A nonstop running scroll of information my best friend needs to know immediately. Like the fact that Yakov has made me breakfast twice in two days while Benjy never cooked me anything over the entire course of our relationship. He wouldn’t even stop at a gas station and buy me a slushie when I had to get my tonsils taken out—a slight for which Kayla never forgave him.
She sighs. “Damn. That sucks, Loon. I’m sorry.”
“It is what it is.”
“I wouldn’t dare set you up on another blind date right now because your friendship is too important to me, but…”
“I don’t think that sentence needs a ‘but.’ You can just end it right there.”
