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Delilah zooms toward us from around the counter, her blue eyes bright with pent-up gossip. Her apron of the day reads:Your opinion wasn’t in the recipe.“I heard your car lingered outside her house after you dropped her off.”
Seriously? Is this town that hard up for entertainment they plaster their faces to their windows instead of watching TV?
I mean, Imayhave lingered outside Naomi’s home after dropping her off, making sure she got inside okay. Since when is being a gentleman a crime? The fact that I watched her lights go on and couldn’t seem to drive away is no one’s concern but my own. If I spent that time wondering—alwayswonderingabout Naomi—if she decorated her home in pastel colors like her wardrobe or painted it in shades of blood like her evil alter ego, is my business alone.
I sip my coffee and burn my tongue. Such is my morning. “Naomi fell on the road by the vet clinic. I helped her. Nothing else to report.”
Especially the fact that she just rejected me. Finally. Officially.
Delilah nudges Ricky’s arm. “You should have seen them before. I could’ve used their flirting to steam the milk.”
Ricky raises an I-told-you-so eyebrow at me. “Finally took your head out of the sand, I see? Guess the revelation changed the game.”
“There’s no game to be played,” I say more forcefully than intended. “Naomi wasn’t flirting.”
“She was completely flirting with you.” Delilah’s tone indicates she thinks I’m still a teenage boy. Aka, a complete moron. Gotta love my closest friends. “And of what revelation do you speak?” she asks Ricky.
“Apparently our boy didn’t slander Naomi the day he ruined her campaign.” He twirls his wrists, as though he’s a magician about to reveal an insidious trick. “He was dissing Cameron Diaz.”
Delilah scrunches her face. “Cameron Diaz is gorgeous.”
“She absolutely is. This one”—Ricky hooks a thumb toward me—“has issues.”
“If he thinks Naomi wasn’t flirting with him,” Delilah says, “his issues have issues.” She’s clearly trying not to laugh at me, but Delilah is a crap actress. She was cringeworthy in our high school production ofOliver!
“Heis standing right beside you,” I say, giving them both hard looks. “And I asked Naomi on a date while in line. She turned me down flat. So who has issues now?”
Ricky scratches his beard. “That’s surprising.”
“No, it isn’t,” Delilah says with a hint of gloating.
I bristle. Gloating indicates she knows something we don’t. When Delilah gets ahead of us on town gossip, she loves to rub it in our faces.
Curious, I lead us away from the new line forming. “What dirt are you hiding?”
“Whatever do you mean?” Delilah feigns sweetness so thick my teeth hurt.
“I hate you like this,” Ricky tells her. “I swear one day I’ll hear something before you.”
I don’t have the patience to wait until that day. Not when Delilah’s usurped Naomi’s former role of Woman Who Drives Me to Drink. “Spill it or I tell everyone in town you accidentally did a shot of dog urine at my house.”
On that unforgettable morning, my neighbor, who was worried about his dog but heading on vacation, asked if I’d take the sample into work with me. Happy to help him out, I obliged. Delilah, who popped in to borrow my hand blender, was thirsty and mistook it for apple juice.
Her blue eyes narrow. “Do that and Windfall learns about a certain naked boy hiding in the school closet one afternoon.”
“One word about that,” I whisper-hiss, “and I will murder you in your sleep.” Then I’ll move across the country and live as a hermit. The details of that embarrassing incident will be buried with me the day I die.
We glare at each other, neither of us backing down.
“You mean I wasn’t the only guy in the closet in high school?” Ricky says, his joke effectively ending our stare off.
Delilah gives my shoulder a loving pat. “Your closet secret is safe with me, and Naomi didn’t turn you down because she doesn’t like you. From what I can tell, she’s been into you since high school, even though your unintended insult crushed her. But she has stuff going on. It’s not personal.”
Everything between Naomi and me is personal. We both take each other’s rebukes hard because we both care. “Does this have to do with some fight she had with her mother?”
“In a roundabout way, but I don’t want to spread rumors.”
Ricky and I share asince whenlook.
