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“I want to meet this woman,” Nick said. “Tessa.”
“Are you going to ask if she has honorable intentions toward me?”
“Can you be fucking serious for a minute? This is important.”
I lowered my pen and turned to look at him. He was sitting up on the sofa, scowling at me.
“You don’t think I’m serious?” I said.
“You don’t know this woman,” Nick said. “She just showed up. She could be anyone.”
“Is it your mission to annoy the shit out of me today?” I asked him. “First I have to take a two-hour drive on the highway, and now any woman who likes me is up to something.”
“I didn’t say that.”
The headache was starting again. Nick and I liked to insult each other, but we didn’t fight like this. We usually just sat here, making up stupid stories for comics. That was what we’d done for seven years.
And then Nick had found Evie. And he got married. And now there was Tessa. Everything was fucking changing.
I’d had enough change in my life already. Way too much. Change made everything worse.
“You know what?” I said to Nick. “You’re right. Don’t worry about Tessa. I don’t know how long she’s going to be around.”
“What does that mean?”
I raised my eyebrows. “It means it’s a short-term relationship. You used to be pretty familiar with those.”
He scowled harder.
“We’re not getting married and having babies,” I said. “She’ll bail out after a while. In the meantime, I’m thirty fucking years old and the accident didn’t lower my IQ, so relax.”
Nick opened his mouth, probably to argue some more, but there was a knock on my front door. I checked the security feed. It was Evie. She’d left us to run some errands while we worked, and now she was back. I let her in.
“Hey,” she said, coming into the room and pushing her sunglasses up on her head. Scout jumped off the sofa, wagging her whole body at Evie in greeting, and then jumped back up, adoring Nick again. Evie’s smile faltered a little when she caught the vibe between Nick and me.
“Um,” she said, “are you guys done?”
“We’re done,” Nick said, picking up his notebook and pencil and putting them in his bag. His tone was calm.
“Sure,” I said. “We’re done.”
“Okay. This was on your porch.” Evie scooped up Scout and held out a piece of paper to me. I took it. It was a flyer advertising the neighborhood barbecue on Saturday. “Games for the kids!” it said, in Comic Sans font, the paper printed at the local Kinko’s. “Burgers! Dogs! Come have fun and meet your neighbors!”
I tossed the flyer aside. Nick and Evie left, and I wheeled to the kitchen to get myself a sandwich. It was physiotherapy day, and my head hurt like hell.
TWENTY-THREE
Tessa
I had beento dozens of casting calls in my career. I’d made sacrifices. I’d stood in many studios just like this one, smiling for the camera. Modeling was my dream and my career.
Today I didn’t want to do any of it.
I was standing in my underwear, doing the easiest job in the world, and I didn’t really want to be here. It was cold, and I was hungry because I’d skipped breakfast for black coffee in order to look thin. But aside from that, there was something just… off. I didn’t feel the happiness I usually felt doing this.
Honestly, I wanted to be wearing sweats and a stretched-out T-shirt, lounging on Andrew Mason’s sofa, listening to him shoot barbs at me. Eating his pickles. I itched to text him every time we had a pause, but I refrained. It would seem clingy, like I was feeling sappy about him. He’d probably hate it.
Besides, I wasn’t feeling sappy about him. At all.
