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“You dirty dog.”
“Huh?” Brent said. He was somewhere between sleep and being awake.
“You heard me. Spending the day with a hot chick. Of course typical, get a message from work and you leave. Didn’t I teach you anything?”
“Rob?” he asked. What the hell? He wondered if he was losing his mind. First, he’d been talking to his sister’s ghost in dreams for years and now his best friend.
“Yeah, it’s me. Are you freaked?”
“I should be, but I’m not.”
“I didn’t think so,” Rob said. “Not much freaks you out. Maureen and I had a little fight over who was going to give you shit. I won.”
“You’re talking to my sister about me?” he asked. Rob was the only one that knew he talked to Maureen. He hadn’t meant to ever admit it to anyone, but one night of too many drinks and it’d slipped out.
Rob didn’t laugh at him. He didn’t look at him as if he’d grown two heads either.
He’d said he thought that was pretty special to have a bond like that.
Simple and accepting. That had always been Rob.
“What do you need to give me shit about?” he asked. “I’d think you’d be happy I got out of the house. It always drove you insane when I stayed in.”
“It did. It does. Maureen told me I had to sit tight that she had it covered.”
“So that is why you haven’t come to see me before now?” he asked.
“I wasn’t sure you were ready. Or maybe I wasn’t ready. Shit, dude. I didn’t want to give you a heart attack. I want to see you again, but it’s way too soon for us to be together.”
“You shouldn’t be there,” he said. “Neither should Maureen.”
“There are a lot of shouldn’t be’s in life, Brent. You know that.”
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “So what have I done wrong this time?”
Rob laughed. “You had a hot chick you were spending time with. Hell, you were doing better than I’ve ever seen you do before. Then you leave for work? Bad move.”
“It was important,” he argued. “You know that.”
“It’s never as important as you make it out to be. You used it as an excuse to get away. You hit your limit of time with someone and you needed to escape.”
He hated when his friends and family knew him better than he knew himself. “There isn’t anything wrong with that. Baby steps. I’d say I skipped over the crawl.”
“You might be right. Still, you were doing so well.”
“And I wanted to end on a positive note. I already said more than I planned. I had to get out of there before we started talking about exes.”
Rob shook his head with a big grin. “Exes. You don’t have much of one other than that chick in college that you hooked up with for a year or so.”
“Cara,” he said. “She was nice.”
“She was boring. The two of you never left your rooms. You sat and coded together. Come on. You need someone the complete opposite of you.”
“We had a lot in common,” he argued.
“And she was jealous that you got recruited and she didn’t.”
He remembered Cara had been jealous and not happy for him. He couldn’t help that he was better than her. Maureen had been telling him for months to drop Cara, but he wasn’t listening.
