“This is only the second time.” She says this without a glimmer of remorse.
“And they’re understanding?”
“I guess,” she says while crunching down on something.
“Jade, I’m worried about you.”
“I’m fine, truthfully . . . but enough about me. I was calling to see how your first day with Grumpy Pants is going?”
I cup my hand around the bottom of my phone to conceal my words as much as possible. “You freaking knew about him and didn’t warn me?”
“Oh, he’s not that bad once you get to know him.”
“Jade. Is it true that no nanny has stuck around here for more than a couple of weeks?”
She laughs in response to my question, but I’m not sure I see what’s so funny. “Yes, it’s true, but it isn’t because of Liam.”
“What made you think I’d be a viable candidate for this? Was it all of my experience in childcare?” I know I sound ungrateful for the position she acquired for me here, but she made it sound like it would be a fun experience.
“Jules, I know you. That’s why I thought you could handle it. You’re the sweetest, tough-as-nails, girl I know.”
“Obviously, this kid sounds like trouble,” I tell her.
“Easy with that one,” she warns. I don’t know if she means Dylan, or the topic, but I’m starting to get a little nervous.
“So, tonight, you and I are going out for dinner by ourselves, and we’re having a long talk, okay?” I say this with a smile to my tone, but I’m feeling a lot of things right now, and none of it seems happy.
“I’m all you—Oh my God, can’t you use the crosswalk like everyone else?” she yells. “Sorry, people like to jet out in front of cars in this area.”
“It’s okay. I have to get going, though.” I hear Liam coming upstairs, and who knows what wrath he’s bringing.
“Okay, I’ll see you tonight. Meet me at my place when you get out,” Jade says.
Liam is standing in the entryway of my room with every one of my bags draped over a different part of his body. “Don’t get used to this,” he says, dropping them off beside my bed.
“I didn’t ask you to do that.” But, I do appreciate it.
“I’m aware.” He folds his arms over his chest and looks at me as if he needs to figure something out.
“I don’t understand why you’ve been such an—” Maybe I shouldn’t call him an asshole when he brought my bags upstairs for me.
“Look, girls like you come and go. They see me as a free ride to play house with Dylan all day and leave all their dirty work for me to clean up. For some reason, every nanny this family has had was under the impression that this job is easy.” The thought may have crossed my mind a few times. I figured it would be fun to play with a kid all summer, then move home and start looking for a real-world job.
“That’s why the other nannies have left after a week?”
“Partially,” he responds, dropping his hands to his sides. He walks over to the long dresser and straightens the tall lavender vase filled with white lilies. Perfectionist or OCD? We may have one thing in common, at least. I noticed the crooked vase almost the second I walked in.
“Well, I’m not afraid of a challenge, and I’m not a messy person, so you can take it down a notch.”
A hint of a smile touches his perfect, cupid-bow lips, and for a reason I will not look into, it makes my stomach tighten. Why is it the good-looking, I mean . . . super ugly guys, are always the assholes? I promised to stop going after men for their looks after dealing with Andy—the quarterback, Indiana State’s Mr. August, and the eye-candy for every girl in English Lit during sophomore year. Now knowing I was just a monthly calendar girl he strung along for an entire year, I don’t understand how a man can hide eleven other girls in his life, but that whole experience taught me how naive and gullible I am. I refuse to ever let someone break my heart like that again. Andy killed the image of any good-looking guy in my future.
“So you’re friends with Jade?” he asks, staring out the French windows.
“Best friends since middle school.” She isn’t making me look too good at the moment, though.
“She’s a handful, huh?” What can I say to this? She was certainly the definition of that last night, and from the sounds of it, she’s been acting this way since she arrived here.
“I think she’s going through something right now. For the most part, Jade has always been pretty cool.
“Are you friends with Jared and Cale?” I ask. Obviously, they’re friends. Cale said so and why else would she have met up with them last night? This whole awkward conversation is not quite necessary. I said thank you already.
“Yeah, they’re my buddies. The area isn’t too big around here, so everyone kind of knows everyone, and we grew up together.”
“They’re both very nice,” I offer.
“Until they try to play matchmaker, yeah.” He looks at me with a sheepish glare until it dawns on me what he meant by that. They were trying to set Liam up with Jade.
“Ohhh, they wanted you to—with Jade.”
“She’s just not my type,” he says with a sigh and a raised brow. He means the overbearing, just dumped her fiancé, drunk college girl, can’t hold her own, type. Yeah, I can understand that. “She wasn’t looking for anything either, though, so we sort of became friends . . . but her nightly routines have gotten old over the last few weeks.”
That kind of explains last night, kind of still…not.
“I suppose Jade requires a certain type of man,” I say, not exactly sure how to respond to this either.
“Yeah, that’s not me,” he says.
Normally if a guy were talking about his “type,” I might be intrigued enough to ask him what his type is, but Liam is a good-looking man who I work with, and has an obvious asshole side to him, so, no, I’m not going there.
I will not complain about my first day because I can’t do anything to change it now. The stomach acid burning a hole in my gut is making it clear how wrong this decision was for a “fun” summer job. The temptation was too hard to resist, and now I’m going to pay dearly for skipping town to avoid becoming a full-fledged adult. The worst part is, today wasn’t an actual first day because there was no child to care for.
I pull into Jade’s parking lot and gimp up the stairs to the second level of apartments. I hear her singing at the top of her lungs, which means she’s most likely in the shower. I try the door knob, finding it unlocked. Of course, she wouldn’t think to lock her door while in the shower. Growing up in a small town where farm animals were our neighbors, neither of us realized how lucky we were to feel safe while walking around at night, not until we got to college and found out real quick that you don’t leave your doors unlocked unless you want something stolen.
This town does seem fairly safe, but I’m not sure I could ever get myself to trust as easily as she does.
I knock on the bathroom door. “Jade, I’m here. I didn’t want you to freak if you heard me come in.”
She kicks open the door and the burning smell of hair fogs the air around me. “How was the rest of your day?” She smirks at me in the mirror as she irons a strand of her unruly, coarse hair.
“Just as great as you might imagine with that jackass.” I limp over to Jade’s pullout bed and plop down.
I hear the straightening iron fall into the sink with a loud echoing clunk as she bursts through the door to look at me. “What happened to you? Why are you limping? Oh my God, that kid . . .”
“What kid?” I question.
“The boy your caring for . . . Dylan, isn’t that his name?”
“He wasn’t even there today. Do you know something about him that I don’t?”
Jade flips her head over and fluffs her hair around, but as she whips her hair back, I only see a look of puzzlement on her face. “No, I don’t know much about him at all.” She reaches behind me and snatches a short dress that was draped over the side of the bed.
“I thought we were going out for dinner tonight?” I ask her as she pulls the tight, hot pink dress over her head.
“Yeah, we are . . . why wouldn’t we be?”
I glance down at the clothes I’ve been wearing all day. My blue leggings and white short-sleeve blouse can hardly compare to her fashion statement. “I guess I’ll be your underdressed date for the evening.”
“I knew you’d show up like this.” She walks around the other side of the bed and pulls another dress out from under her rumpled sheet. “That’s why I pulled this one out for you.”
“I’m three inches taller than you and if this dress fits anything like yours does, my ass will be hanging out of it.”
“And that’s a bad thing when you’re single?” Her brow raises as a sinful gleam teases her glossy lips.
“Speaking of which . . .”
“No,” she stops me.
“What happen with Chip, Jade?”
Jade drops down to her knees in front of her tiny closet and tosses several pairs of shoes out before she finds a matching pair. “Come on, get dressed,” she says, ignoring my question.
I stand up from the bed and kneel beside her shoe pile, catching her arm in mid swing. I pull her toward me and wrap my arms around her. “How could you keep this from me?”
A struggling breath rips through her as she falls limp against me. “I didn’t tell you because—” a faint cry hitches in her throat. “I’m a horrible person.”
“You didn’t really cheat on him, did you?”
She pulls her head back, looking me square in the eyes. “No, I didn’t cheat.”
“Then why did you say you did and what could possibly make you a horrible person?”
Jade drags her finger beneath her eye, wiping away a falling tear. “I’m only twenty-two and I’m not ready to commit to someone for the rest of my life. God, the rest of my life is like…I don’t know, I hope seventy more years or something. That’s a long freaking time to be with someone who says things like ‘yipes,’ and ‘holy moly’. I just, I have cold feet so I broke it off.” I reach behind me for the box of tissues on the milk crate she’s using as a night stand. She takes a tissue and continues, “Well, actually, I told him I cheated on him. I figured he wouldn’t want to talk things out and convince me to change my mind if I said that.”
Holy crap. Jade and I tell each other everything and she left this out of every conversation we’ve had over the past month. “Is he okay?” For some reason, I feel worse for Chip than I do for Jade at the moment. It’s one thing to break up with someone, but it’s another to break up with someone because you cheated. “You know, if you talked to me, I probably could have helped you come up with a very different reason for breaking things off, one that didn’t include you sounding like a sleazy girl.”
“He’s fine,” she responds quickly. “It was like he seemed relieved, which just makes this all worse. He wasn’t even jealous or upset. Even if I had really cheated, he wouldn’t have cared.”
“Maybe that’s what he wanted you to think. People do hide their feelings, you know?” Considering this is one of the most serious conversations Jade and I have had over the years, I can’t begin to imagine what is going through her head right now.
“I’m selfish,” she says. “As soon as the words came out and I saw his lack of reaction, I felt like I had made a huge mistake, but it was too late. What was I supposed to do? Tell him I was just kidding, testing him to see how much he loves me? It was over. I think it was meant to be over. God, can you imagine, I could have possibly ended up divorced before turning twenty-five. I’d have this black mark on my relationship status for the rest of my life before I should have even considered settling down with someone. I should never have accepted the ring, or told him I wanted to marry him. I can hardly live with myself sometimes, never mind a man who forgets to put the toilet seat down and likes to eat fish every night.” It sounds like she’s taken the month to come up with reasons why she shouldn’t be hurting. There was an in between choice, which would include pushing out the wedding, but I’m sure she considered the thought and bringing that up right now won’t help.
“This is why you came out here for the summer, isn’t it?” She told me it was to save money for their wedding, but now it looks as if she was running away.
“Originally, I told him I needed some time to think, but I couldn’t leave him wondering, so I said what I said before I left.”
“If you needed time, you needed time.” I still would have left the cheating part out, but I’m guessing she’s figured that out by now.
“I still love him, Jules. That’s the worst part about this. I was just scared.” I figured that was the case, which explains her behavior.
“Drinking isn’t going to make that go away.” I stand up, pulling her with me. “You know that right?”
“I just want to have fun right now. So, have fun with me, okay?”
I grab the dress she’s lending me and nudge her to the side as I make my way into her hairspray and burnt hair infused bathroom.
It doesn’t take long to make myself up. It’s why I like to keep my hair at chin-length. Within five minutes, I flip my ends into different directions and add a little product to give it the rocker chick messy look.
“Do you need shoes?” Jade asks as I shut the light off in the bathroom.
“Nah, I’ll be okay with my flats.”
Rather than respond, she skips over to me and tugs at the ends of my hair, admiring it as if she’s looking for a piece out of place. “I like the dark roots and the bleached chunks. It’s very surferish, and you.”
“My hair has looked like this for two years,” I remind her.
“Well, now you fit in,” she says through a teasing laugh.
“You’re dragging me to a place called Lovers Inn for dinner?” I ask as we enter in through the door with a glowing heart hanging in the front window.
“You love me, don’t you?” Jade and all her quirkiness can’t be taken down, unless you’re her ex-fiancée.
The restaurant doesn’t look much like an inn. In fact, it’s more bar than restaurant. We walk to the end, finding two stools between the side windows and the rounded corner of the bar.
Within a minute of settling down onto the stools, a waiter reaches between Jade and me, handing us each a menu. “Well, if it isn’t the girl who can’t swim.”
His voice and accent are familiar and his joke is as mortifying as it made me feel so early this morning. I swivel around on my stool, careful to keep my knees pinned together in this tight, mini dress.
“Sterling,” I counter. “I thought you were a visitor?” And a surfer.
“Need to make money somehow, eh? The restaurant needs summer help and I’m here every summer to help.” His lips curl into his charming dimples that could make any woman blush. Actually, his hair is similar too, but much lighter—more like a bleachy blonde.
“So you’re a surfer by day and waiter by night?” I ask, feeling Jade’s fingernails dig into my knee, which she’s now grabbing.
“Jules here has always wanted to learn how to surf,” Jade interrupts. “Are you really a surfer?”
“I am, yeah,” he says, chuckling…probably at the weirdness Jade and I are conjuring.
“Oh! You should teach Jules,” Jade continues.
“Jules,” he says, annunciating the shortened part of my name, “must learn how to swim before she learns how to surf.”
My hand is over my eyes, totally embarrassed. This conversation may be between the three of us, but I counted at least three pairs of other patrons’ eyes staring with wonder as the words continued to flow between Jade and Sterling.
Silence finally comes between the two of them and I peek through my fingers, hoping the conversation has shifted, but no such luck, of course. They’re both still staring at me. “You really don’t know how to swim, Jules?” Jade asks.
“It’s because she’s from Indiana,” Sterling defends me, wh
ich I didn’t expect.
But like any good sword fight, Jade counters back. “Well, so am I, but I know how to swim. Everyone should know how to swim.”
“Okay,” Sterling says, “I’ll give you two a couple of minutes to look over the menu, and I’ll come back for your order. If you want anything from the bar, feel free to order that when Richie comes around.” He points behind the bar to the bartender, who I assume is Richie.
“Thank you,” I tell him, intending to express my gratitude for more than just the breather he’s offering.
“Where the hell did you meet him? And how did I not know you can’t swim?” Jade starts in the second Sterling is out of hearing range.
“This morning at the bakery and because we live in Indiana and it never came up. Kind of like your relationship with Chip ending,” I retort.
Jade inhales sharply through her nose and takes one of the menus. “Touché,” she says, flipping the menu over to view the specials.
“While we’re coming out with truths tonight, I’m dying to hear about your Sandwich and Brewster buddies, oh, and the possibility of you and a certain Liam?” I jiggle my eyebrows at her, watching steam pour from her ears as her cheeks darken to a shade of red.
“If he was such an asshole to you, how did you talk to him long enough to find that out?” Honestly, I’m trying to think back to the conversation today. For the number of times we passed each other and said something snippy, it’s hard to believe we were able to manage a normal conversation for more than two minutes.
“I don’t know. It just happened,” I tell her.
Jade places her menu down on the bar top and a squeamish pout stretches across her lips. “So, you’ll be okay if my three amigos join us here in a bit?”
“You invited Liam?” I ask, feeling every age line on my forehead deepen. I wanted a stress-free night where I didn’t have to think about assholes or hot surfers, and here we are, about to be surrounded by both demons.
“He’s just had some bad luck. I promise you, he’ll warm up.” She keeps saying this. I saw it for those two minutes today, but those two minutes were overshadowed by the other eight hours of the lovely repartee he provided.
The Man Cave Collection: Manservant, Man Flu, Man Handler, and Man Buns Page 6
