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“Do I ever, you painted a pretty good visual.” I can hear her drooling.
“Focus, Sloan, I just saw them together at my favorite coffee place.”
“So what? He’s sleeping with you now.”
“No,” I say, “he’s fighting with me. Travis told me she left town, he obviously lied.”
“Wait,” Sloan says. “Don’t jump to conclusions. This chick sounds a lot like me. If that’s the case, she could have told him she was leaving and then just stayed.”
“What?” I find myself confused by what she’s saying.
“She wants what she can’t have. I’d have done it. If the man I boned occasionally, moved in with a fox like you, I’d stick around. I’d be trying to get him back.”
“Thanks for that, but what if she does?”
“Just barge in there and kiss him. Stake your claim. Then kiss her, and later tell me if she was a good kisser. Who knows this could work out for all three of you.”
“Sloan, I’m not going to do that.”
“Yeah, I know, but you should. You two are going to have to have a serious conversation. The dancing around each other needs to stop. Sexy ex or not, you two have to talk to each other.”
She’s right, but I don’t want to tell her that. She’ll gloat forever.
“They have history,” she continues, “he could just be seeing her off forever.”
“Or getting her off,” I mumble.
“Nina,” Sloan coos, “you made a joke.”
“No, I was being serious,” I say. I can’t stop picturing what he did to my body and then replacing me with Sydney in my brain.
“Go in there, and kiss him,” she orders.
“Okay, love you. Talk soon,” I tell her, unable to get off the phone fast enough. The caterpillar was more help. I’m not going in there and making a public scene. What good would that do me? No, I’m going to let him know I saw him. The challenge now is finding the perfect words to text to him. But first, I have to go somewhere else for my coffee. Rude.
TRAVIS
After dropping Sydney off at her car, she hugged me and wished me well. It was nice to end things on a friendly note. I didn’t want there to be any weirdness. She’d been right, I’d never been fully open to her. The fact I felt ready for a relationship with Nina scared me to death.
Afterward, I arrive at my parents’, and we work straight through lunch. My parents and I get the rest of the framing done and start working on the shelves. With no help from Lindsie and Brian, who claim they’re too tired.
“You know this is a lot smaller than I thought it was going to be,” I say.
Too late, I see my mother making a line across her throat with her index finger and shaking her head violently. She mouths the words ‘shut up,’ and I raise my brows.
“Well, it would have been bigger,” my dad erupts, “but the city apparently thinks it would be an eyesore. I scaled it back, and now this is what we have. They wouldn’t even have had to look at it.” I feel for him, but those are the rules, and there isn’t anything either him or I can do about it.
After a late lunch, we go back to work on the shelving again.
“I think we’re going to sell tomatoes,” Mom tells me, “it will be a good use for the greenhouse, and we can make a little money on the side.”
My dad has a strange idea halfway through the afternoon, to put mulch beds inside the greenhouse so he can plant bushes inside. We end up going to the store twice just to get the mulch, and then he changes his mind again. By the time six o’clock rolls around, I’m starving.
Dinner is a triumph as it always is when my mom cooks. I have seconds and then feel like I’m going to die. The portions I’d taken were huge.
“I just wanted to let you know Lily called, and I told her you were still thinking about it,” Dad says as he leaves the greenhouse.
I shake my head, of course, he didn’t tell them I said no. Somehow, throughout my life, my dad has always known better than I did when it came to what was good for me. If I am going to stay around and make sure Nina falls deep—can’t get out of the water—in love with me, I might as well get a job while I’m at it.
