by Serena Bell
“Pretty much,” Mike says. “Plus, you have Katie; you need to leave her a legacy. This can be her legacy.”
He’s got a point there. I look around the store. It’s the last of a dying breed, the all-purpose outdoor store. Fishing, camping, hunting, and a bunch of outdoor-wear and sporting goods. I love stores like this, have ever since my uncle taught me to fish and hunt and make camp and all the rest when I was barely old enough to tote my own pack.
I don’t completely understand why I haven’t jumped at Mike’s offer. But even though I love the store, I feel trapped when I think about being tied down to it.
I feel the same way about Mike’s “find a nice woman” suggestion. There are many of them out there. I love to catch a good action flick or watch a baseball game or grab dinner with a date. I’m a huge fan of a night’s flirtation and all the fun and rewards that can follow. But when it comes to anything more than that—nah. Makes me feel twitchy to think about it. Maybe what happened with Thea, Katie’s mom, gave me romantic PTSD.
It’s weird, right, that I’m fine with spending the next thirteen years raising Katie, but I can’t picture myself with a serious girlfriend or owning a business?
“Think about it, huh?” Mike says sternly.
“I will,” I say, by which I mean, I probably won’t.
Mike heads to the back of the store to pretend he’s still necessary to its healthy operation. Up front, the store’s bell jingles. I see a flash of coppery-red hair as someone enters. It’s my friend Liv—Olivia Stratten. She weaves her way through the aisles and hurtles herself at me.
“Chase!” She hugs me and dances me around in a circle. “Chase, guess what?”
There’s only one thing that would make Liv this happy, so I know the answer, but I play dumb.
“What?”
“I got the job!”
“That’s great!”
I give her a huge hug, then let her go.
She’s beaming from ear to ear. Liv’s good moods are contagious, maybe because she glows when she’s happy. Sparkling blue eyes, a smile full of straight white teeth, and dimples in her rosy cheeks. She’s wearing her long hair in curls today. I’ve tried to figure out sometimes if you can read Liv’s moods by whether she goes curly, straight, or updo, but no dice.
Liv is probably my best friend, judged purely on who makes me laugh most. We got to be friends after we went on a blind date three years ago and realized that even though we had no romantic potential and even less in common, we still enjoyed hanging out.
Unfortunately, it looks like that’s going to end, and pretty soon.
“So you’re going. To Denver.”
“Yup. Leaving at the end of the month, driving myself out there.”
That’s only two weeks away. I have to admit, I wasn’t letting myself think much about Liv’s actually leaving. I mean, I’d been rooting for her to get the job, but not thinking much past that.
“Are you planning to drive to Denver in the Shitmobile?”
She makes a hurt face, even though we both know it’s a very accurate description of Liv’s car. “Actually, Eve’s getting a new car, and selling me the CRV.”
Thank God for that—wouldn’t want to think of anyone driving Liv’s car a thousand miles.
“And I gave the family I’m working for two weeks’ notice, and they seemed okay with it.”
Liv has been nannying to help make ends meet so she can take unpaid marketing internships. I can’t believe how hard she works, or how devoted she’s been to trying to get her career started. She deserves this success. “We should celebrate,” I tell her.
“I could bring over some takeout. We could watch movies after Katie goes to bed. It’s been a while. The great Chase Crayton hasn’t had any dates in a while.” She leers at me.
“Screw you. You wouldn’t be dating either if you had a five-year-old living in your house. And besides, I have a date Saturday. Oh,” I say glumly, remembering my conundrum. “I did. When I had a nanny. Now I don’t know. I guess it depends on whether Emily’s around.”
Liv was the first person I called when I had to fire Katie’s old nanny for nipping from my liquor cabinet. She was the one who’d recommended Celia in the first place, and she felt pretty bad about not knowing that Celia had a drinking problem. She was eager to help me find someone new, but didn’t know anyone good who was free.
Liv tilts her head. “I have Saturday off. I could watch Katie.”
I raise my eyebrows.
“Then I’d already be there for the consolation party.”
That’s our thing: watching movies together after one of us has gone on an especially crappy date. It’s a long story. I give her a dirty look. “You assume I’ll need consoling. She might be The One.”
She rolls her eyes. “The One? Who are you, and what have you done with my friend Chase?”
That makes me laugh. “Okay, yeah, you’re right.”
“I’ll be impressed if you go out with her twice.”
“She does love baseball.”
“Well, then.”
I sigh. “She’s the most promising candidate in a long time.”
“For what? Sex twice in one night?”
I give her the finger.
“Anyway, what do you think? Do you want me to bring you and Katie takeout tonight? We can watch a movie or not—doesn’t matter to me.”
It’s been a challenge, getting healthy food on the table every night for Katie. When I was batching it, I didn’t worry about what I ate, but now it’s practically all I think about. So I’m grateful to the nth degree for someone else taking care of a meal. And Liv knows it. She’s brought over takeout a bunch of times since Katie moved in.
“Six fifteen?”
We fist-bump.
As she melts off toward the front of the store, Brooks appears at my side, his eyes fixed on Liv’s retreat.
It is a pretty sight, I’ll grant you that, but she doesn’t deserve Brooks’s ogling, so I shove him.
He raises his eyebrows, but I ignore him.
“Wanna grab a beer after work?” he says.
“Can’t.”
“Oho—hot date?”
“Nah. Liv’s bringing Katie and me takeout.”
Brooks narrows his eyes. “You’ve got to explain this to me. How Liv’s bringing you takeout is not a date.”
“It’s not a date because Liv and I are friends. Like you and Rodro and I are friends. So if I eat takeout with you guys, it’s not a date.”
“But Rodro and I aren’t hot redheads with an amazing rack,” Brooks points out.
My friendship with Liv is a mystery to my guy friends, who can’t believe I could hang around her and not want to—their words—tap that.
Liv’s hot, sure. Long and lean and leggy, with a great smile and curves most guys would kill to get their hands on. But I don’t have those kinds of feelings for her, and even if I did, I’d never cross that line. She’s too good a friend, plus we’d drive each other nuts in under twenty-four hours—if we made it that long.
“Never gonna happen,” I say, not for the first time.
Brooks raises his eyebrows. “So what was that about before? When I was appreciating the view?”
“It was about how just because I don’t want to get with her doesn’t mean I want her to get with a guy whose idea of commitment is dinner and a movie before sex.”
I’ve taken so much shit about Liv since we became friends, I’ve got my retorts down to a science.
The thing is, it’s not that hard, in these days of Tinder, to find a way to scratch an itch. Most of the women I meet, they’re interested in getting serious—in settling down, having a kid or two, leaving the whole dating scene behind. But a woman who genuinely wants to be “just friends”?
Rarest beast on ea
rth.
Liv is one of a kind.
Chapter 3
Liv
Katie answers the door.
“Hi, Livvy. I’m watching Frozen,” the world’s most adorable five-year-old proclaims proudly, pushing strands of blond hair out of her face. The strands fall back into her eyes, and I kneel to tuck them behind her ears.
“What part are you at?”
“Elsa’s ice palace. She’s singing ‘Let It Go.’ ” Katie sings a few lines, twirling wildly around the living room, arms thrown out. She finishes with a curtsy.
I stifle a giggle. “That’s my favorite part. I brought you spaghetti.” I display the brown takeout bag.
“Yum, sketti!”
Katie turns her attention back to the unfurling grandeur of Elsa’s ice palace.
“Hey, Liv,” Chase calls. “In the kitchen.”
I head that way. Chase’s house always feels like finally pulling on sweats and taking off my makeup at the end of a long day. It’s super comfy. Not my style at all, or really any style—a mishmash of well-worn furniture and rugs—but the whole thing feels a lot like wrapping up in a fleece blanket and watching a good chick flick. Which I’ve done maybe a hundred times on Chase’s armchair by now, while he watches his action movies on his own laptop on the couch a couple of feet away. It’s our ritual.
This house—and Chase and Katie, of course—is definitely one of the things I’ll miss most when I leave Seattle. It’s weird to think that I’ve been in Seattle more than three years—longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. Maybe it’s the side effect of having moved around so much when I was a kid in foster homes, but I don’t like to stay put too long. That’s why I’ve been focusing my job search on everywhere except Seattle.
In the kitchen, Chase pours me red wine in a juice glass. He doesn’t drink wine, but he keeps it around for me, which is one of the many things that make him a good friend. “Cheers.” He clinks his scotch against my glass and sighs heavily, drawing my gaze to his face. Chase has beautiful brown eyes, flecked with darker brown, gold, and green, fringed with long eyelashes. But right now they have circles under them.
“You okay?” I ask him. I’ve had a hell of a day myself, but he looks worse than I feel.
He brushes his hand through his reddish-brown hair, making it all stand on end. Chase has that kind of not-quite curly hair that won’t behave, but because he’s a guy, no one gives a shit. When he rumples it and it’s all over the place, he looks hot. I say that objectively, because I can appreciate a hot guy when I see one, not because I personally crush on Chase. I know most people don’t think men and women can be friends—for the record, I was one of them until I met Chase. In this case it works because we both know we’d crash and burn as a couple.
“Yeah, just…Emily left. She said she needed to sleep in her own bed and have some downtime. She said she’d come back Tuesday if I needed her, but that still leaves tomorrow and Saturday. Mike says I can bring Katie in if I need to, for a couple of days—I need to find someone permanent, and I don’t really have any leads.”
“I’ll help,” I say. “And in the meantime, I could watch Katie tomorrow and Friday. Turns out the Gershels want me out right away.”
“What?”
“Her sister lost her waitressing job and she’s going to take over for me, and they need the guest room, and—anyway, I could probably kick up a stink about my contract but I didn’t want to. I’ll crash with Eve.”
“On the couch of death?”
Eve’s couch is so sprung that staying on it between nanny jobs is somewhere between uncomfortable and took a year off my life.
“Yeah. I just hope she doesn’t bring anyone home. Those walls are thin.”
Chase grimaces. “Fun, fun, fun. Well, if you can’t sleep, we can both be insomniacs. Watch movies together by text. Good practice for when you’re in Denver.”
“You been up a lot at night?”
“Katie’s not sleeping great,” he admits. “She’s fine during the day, mostly, but she’s having a lot of nightmares. And a lot of times when I wake up, I can’t fall asleep again.”
My heart squeezes for both of them. Even though Chase and Thea didn’t get along great, I know Katie’s grief is hard on him.
He starts unpacking the takeout bags I brought.
“What is this?” he demands.
I hide my smile. Messing with Chase about takeout is one of my favorite sports. “Sushi.”
“Seriously? Whatever happened to, you know, pizza? Chinese? Burgers and fries?”
I hide a smile. “It’s summer. And sushi has lots of omega-3 fats. It’s healthy. And beautiful.”
“Beautiful,” he mutters irritably. “Food is not supposed to be beautiful. It’s supposed to taste good.”
Just so you know, Chase likes to pretend he’s surly and mean, but he’s the biggest softie on earth. You just have to watch him for three seconds with Katie to see it.
I carefully transfer my sushi to a plate.
“Why do you do that?” he asks. “Put everything on plates. It just makes more dishes.”
My turn to shrug. I’ve got this thing for making meals as homey as possible. It’s another side effect of growing up in foster homes. There was a lot of grab-and-go in my life, and I love the idea of sitting down as a whole family and eating with plates and silverware and napkins and all that jazz.
I dump Katie’s spaghetti into a bowl and he says, “Now that looks good.”
“It’s Katie’s.” I warn him off with a glare.
He sighs. “I’m never letting you order the takeout again.”
This conversation is a perfect example of why Chase and I could never be a couple.
While I finish setting the table—best I can with Chase’s limited design resources, which don’t include placemats or actual napkins—Chase goes into the living room, shuts off the movie, and comes back into the kitchen with Katie at his side.
I set the bowl of spaghetti, heated, in front of her. She takes one look at it and bursts into tears.
Chase panics, practically lunging across the table in his haste to help. “Katie, what’s wrong? What’s wrong, baby?”
“Mommy always cut my sketti,” Katie wails.
Chase looks utterly stricken, and I can’t really blame him. He starts to form words, but I know nothing he says now is going to help. At all. I know the only thing that will help. Aside from the one thing neither of us has any power to do, which is to bring Thea back.
“She’s hungry,” I murmur to Chase. “Let’s get some food into her.”
I take a knife and fork and begin slicing the spaghetti into shorter pieces, and Katie’s wails soften immediately.
“Take a bite, hon’,” I tell Katie.
She does. Then another. Until she’s shoveling it in. She’s still sniffling a bit, but no longer crying.
“Slow down, hon’.”
“It’s really good,” she says, through a mouthful. “It’s the best sketti ever.”
Chase’s face slowly relaxes. His shoulders, too.
“She didn’t realize how hungry she was because she was watching the movie, and now she’s too hungry to have any resilience. She’ll be fine. Right, Katie girl? You’re fine, aren’t you?”
She smiles around her spaghetti, sauce smudged in a ring around her mouth.
Chase mouths something at me.
Thank you.
“It’s nothing,” I murmur.
He shakes his head. “Right now,” he says, “it’s everything.”
Chapter 4
Liv
Chase comes downstairs after putting Katie to bed and we settle in to watch our movies. He’s sitting on the couch with his iPad and Jason Bourne, and I’m curled up in the armchair with my iPad and Bridget Jones’s Baby.
Odd,
right? How did this parallel movie-watching ritual ever come into existence? Excellent question.
The first ever Liv-and-Chase consolation party happened after our own ill-fated blind date.
Eve and Chase’s friend Jesse, who’s a Realtor like Eve, set the two of us up right after I moved here three years ago. It wasn’t too long after a really craptastic breakup, and I was feeling…brittle.
We met at a restaurant, Chase’s choice. Before I even got my napkin on my lap, Chase said, “I can tell already this isn’t going to work.”
I raised both my eyebrows. What kind of arrogant jerk judges a blind date that fast? “Oh, really?”
I knew he wasn’t saying it because he wasn’t attracted to me, because I’d already watched him give me an approving once-over.
“How tall are you?” he demanded.
“Five eight,” I said, grudgingly. “You?”
“I’m five ten.”
“Is that a problem for you?” I asked innocently. Honestly, it was a bit of a problem for me, because I liked wearing heels. In fact, that night, I was wearing five-inch heels, and when he’d stood from the table to greet me (points for that), I’d towered over him. But I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of saying so. I’d let him be the asshole, since he was already embracing the role.
“No. Do you always dress like that?”
Half of me wanted to get up and leave, and the other half was fascinated by his sheer nerve. And I suck with fractions, but the rest of me was relieved that he was a jerk so I didn’t have to worry about actually liking him. There was a big part of me that wasn’t ready to go there again after what had happened with Zeke.
“I don’t always wear dresses and heels.”
“Makeup?”
I hid a smile. “Yeah.”
“Your hair all—curled like that?”
That night it had been a particularly difficult battle to put the ringlet curls in my hair—but I was pleased with the results. “I wear it a lot of different ways. Sometimes I straighten it, sometimes I curl it.”
“But you always, you know, style it.”
