“There’s some history I haven’t told you about,” I confessed.
“With Elise Cormier? Old King Cole, you sly bastard!” Louis sounded both scandalized and inordinately pleased.
My laugh now was bitter. “You’ve got the bastard part right,” I muttered. “I cut her loose back then. I’ve made a lot of mistakes for someone who’s not even thirty, but that was one of the biggest.”
Hetsked.“And you wondered why I made valedictorian and you didn’t.”
“Asshole.” I chuckled.
“So, what’s the deal? You seeing her or not? She tell you to get lost?”
I swallowed. “I’m afraid she will.”
“Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm. Fool me once and all that,” he mused.
I could picture him nodding, stroking his nonexistent beard. Even now he could only sprout a barely-there blond patch on his chin.
“Yep. It could happen.”
A panic — so different from the kind I’d often felt growing up or living with Ava — poured through me. I found myself unable to speak. Acute silence filled the car.
“You know what I’d do if Bree ever decided to leave me.” It wasn’t a question, but the very thought of Louis and Bree parting ways seemed unnatural. I just couldn’t imagine it.
“What would you do?” I asked, hoping my stoner best friend had some kernel of wisdom to share after loving the same woman for twelve years.
“Go with her, of course,” he snapped as though my question were profoundly stupid. “That woman’s never getting rid of me.”
Louis, who couldn’t breathe without making a joke, was, perhaps for the first time in my memory, completely serious.
“Yeah, but she’d never do that.”
This time, his laugh sounded rueful. “Hell, man, you think she’s never tried? With me flunking out of college, walking around in a cloud of ganja for two years straight? The year we turned twenty, she’d been telling me to clean up my act and get my shit together.” His voice dipped with chagrin. “At the time, I took it as more of theoretical suggestion. Until one day, I came back to our apartment, and discovered she’d moved half her stuff to her friend Rachel’s.”
I reeled at this. “You never told me that.”
I heard him sigh. “Well, you had problems of your own, my friend.” The teasing note returned. “Besides, with as many times as you warned me not to fuck things up with Bree, I was sure the minute you heard, you’d try to swoop in and stake a claim.”
The temptation was too great. Stirring up his jealous streak had always been too much fun. “I might have.”
“Hey, now,” he warned. “If things don’t work out with you and Elise, I’ve got some buddies back home who’d love—”
“Shut the fuck up, man.” The words, almost feral, left me without permission. Louis burst out laughing.
He laughed. And laughed. “Old King Cole! The. King. Is. Dead. Long live the king!” he howled.
I rolled my eyes and braked as I approached Flora’s apartment complex. “So, what did you do—” I interrupted. “—when Bree left your sorry ass?”
His laughter dried up. I heard him clear his throat. “I followed her to Rachel’s.” Again, he spoke as if my question were beyond vapid.
“And she took you back? Just like that?”
“No.” Now he sounded pissed, as though the memory still rankled. “I slept in the hall outside Rachel’s apartment until the neighbors complained, and Rachel let me in. And then I begged for mercy.”
I suppressed a chuckle. “How long did that take?” I’d slowed to obey the ten-mile-per-hour speed limit of Flora’s complex. Her building was at the far end of the development. But even as I tried to distract myself with Louis’s story, my heart pounded in anticipation. My Elise was here, and something was very wrong.
“Two days and two nights,” Louis reported grimly. “That hallway was wretched.”
“You mean after you slept there?”
