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“Selling sports buttons?”
Lindsey nodded. Luca leaned in, speaking fast. “It’s a totally underserved market, Noles. Like majorly. There are people practically begging to throw their money at this, but they just don’t know it’s there.”
“That’s incredible,” I said. “This feels kind of out of nowhere. I’d have thought you would want to be like a private investigator or something, Lindsey.” Mentally, I added a month or two to my timeframe for when I could afford to leave the nanny gig. It sounded like I also needed an emergency fund to make sure my best friends didn’t starve after this scheme of theirs blew up.
Lindsey shook her head. “That’s just a hobby. This is a money maker.”
“Makes sense,” I said as enthusiastically as I could.
After I endured a ten minute business pitch, Lindsey finally sat back and smiled. “So, what’s up with our favorite nanny?”
I held my hands about eight or nine inches apart, waiting for Lindsey to catch my meaning.
She looked at my hands, then at my devious smirk, then tossed a handful of sugar packets at my face. “Shut up! You got laid? By what, a horse?”
Luca was dutifully playing on his phone, as he’d learned to do when our three-way conversations turned to girl talk.
“By an MLB pitcher, actually.”
Lindsey’s jaw fell open, and then she started whacking Luca’s shoulder blow after blow. He rocked sideways, not taking his eyes from his phone.
“Looks like the pitcher found a catcher he fancies,” Luca noted in a dry voice. “A glove to sink his best shot into, if you will.”
We both rolled our eyes at him.
“What happened? I need details,” Lindsey said.
When I finished filling her in on everything that had happened, she sat back, looking stunned. “So what now? Is he going to give you his promise ring? Introduce you to his parents?”
I tilted my head. “He hasn’t ever talked about his parents. So no, I doubt that. And I have no idea. I only saw him this morning… after. He seemed fine, but then he had to leave for something.”
“Something?”
“Yeah he said he had a meeting.”
Lindsey got a dark look on her face. “A ‘meeting.’”
“Why are you using air quotes like that?”
“It’s suspicious.”
“Very suspicious,” Luca agreed.
“Oh, stop it. There’s nothing strange about having a meeting.”
“All I know is I don’t like it,” Lindsey said. “That’s all I’m saying.”
I shook my head, hating how her completely unfounded paranoia was rubbing off on me, if only a little. “I’m sure he just had to meet with Damon Rose or something.”
“Mhm.”
I drained the last of my coffee and set the cup down roughly. “In fact, I think I’ll give him a call right now just to shut you up.”
Lindsey raised her hands, blinking rapidly in a show of being mock impressed.
I tapped on his name and waited.
“Nola?” Jack said through the phone.
“Hey,” I said, glaring at Lindsey. “I actually just needed to see if you’d be able to pick up Ben and Griff this afternoon. I could swing by right after and take them off your hands for a few extra hours to make up for it. If not, it’s no biggie. I completely forgot I had this appointment. Girly stuff. I can reschedule if—”
I heard a woman’s voice in the background asking him something. Jack replied, but his words were too muffled for me to make out. “Uh. Yeah, sure. That’s not a problem.”
“Okay, great.”
There was an uncomfortable silence.
I licked my lips. “Did your meeting go… okay?”
“I really need to go, Nola. I’ll see you this afternoon.”
The phone clicked and I gave a shaky smile to Lindsey, who was looking at me with a knowingly sad expression.
“Stop that,” I said. “He went to a meeting.”
“And he was acting weird, wasn’t he?”
“Probably because I interrupted his meeting and made him change his plans to cover for a bogus appointment I don’t even have. Yeah.”
Lindsey and Luca obnoxiously shook their heads. Luca did a poor job of “secretly” mouthing, another woman to Lindsey.
“I see what this is, you two. I see exactly what it is.” I was wagging my finger at them like a scolding mother.
They both showed me their palms, innocent as the day they were born. “We have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Not a clue,” echoed Luca.
“You scheming, manipulative creeps want me to be with Jack. You’re just concocting this story because you think it’ll push me to do something desperate that accelerates things.”
“She said accelerate,” Luca said. He spoke in clerical tones, as if he was a scientist studying an interesting monkey in a cage.
Lindsey looked pleased with herself. “Accelerate implies it’s already happening. So she admits something is forming between the two of them.”
I threw my hands up in frustration. “It was just a word. All I mean is you guys want me to go throw myself at him because I’m too paranoid and jealous to stand the thought of him and some other woman.”
