Chapter 17
NINA
Lily cackles when I tell her what happened.
I’ve been venting to her about the confusing mindfuck that is my relationship with Art right now. She’s slowly getting back her energy and has reached the point where she is super bored in the hospital, so I’ve been trying to keep her entertained.
She’s propped up on pillows in her hospital bed, finally awake and recovering well. Given that she’s being looked after by staff who know and love her — as well as visits from me whenever I have time — she’s having a gold-plated recovery.
In the process, I may have gone into too much detail about exactly how damn good the other night was. When he ate me out so luxuriously slowly until I absolutely came apart on a chair in my kitchen, in a way that still sends a whole damn flock of butterflies through my stomach.
Even if he did finish the whole encounter by being a manipulative ass.
When I finished telling her, Lily was looking at me with the expression of someone looking at a car crash.
“Oh God. You have it bad, Nina. Like, super-duper bad.”
“I know,” I turn bright red and cover my face with my hands. “I have it so bad. I admit it.”
“What are you gonna do about it?”
“My instinct is to leave the country, but in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m stuck in the middle of a medical residency.” I gesture to my scrubs. “Or, alternatively, I could just avoid him like the plague.”
“Avoidance. Not the most mature response.”
“That’s rich coming from a girl who I know for a fact has ghosted multiple people instead of turning down a second date.”
She scrunches up her nose, smoothing her red hair back against the pillow.
“Girl, that is so different. What you have with Art is messy and complicated. You have history. Like, the kind of history that actually goes into the books.”
My face flushes. I have explained parts of the backstory to Lily. I didn’t want to go into details, but when she asked questions, I ended up telling her pretty much everything.
How I got caught stealing. How Art made me a deal. Why I left. How nothing about this relationship makes sense on paper but I want him more than I want anybody.
“How else can I respond? He made up an emergency to fuck me. And if I try to talk to him about it…” I trail off.
“Yeah, you’ll end up in bed with him. You do seem to have trouble keeping it in your pants where he’s concerned.”
I gasp. “If you were not in a hospital bed right now, I would punch you for that.”
“Only because you know it’s true.”
I shake my head. “You’re unbelievable.”
“You know what you have to do about it? Unless you want to end up getting back with your ex?”
“I don’t want to get back with him,” I insist, even though the other night made me question everything.
No matter what Art says, no matter how good it feels to pretend that I’m his for an hour, he cannot be trusted. He is trying to get back into my life, into Ava’s life, because of some ulterior motive, not because he cares about us.
“You need to get with someone else,” Lily pronounces, picking up my phone and waving it in front of my face to unlock it, so that she could download a dating app.
I do blame Lily for this idea. Post-coma she wants some entertainment in her life.
But I suppose she can only take so much of the blame, given she’s recovering from a brain injury. Besides, I am now the one who’s here, on a date with another man, just a week after Art gave me the best head of my life.
I let Lily loose on my phone with a dating app, and that was how we ended up finding Finneas.
The 6’3 blonde Irishman who is currently buying me a drink at the Irish pub. He’s charming, and muscled, and looking at me like I’m his next snack.
This is what I should be doing, at the age of 24, I tell myself.
What everyone else is doing. Dating around, playing the field, not being sucked into whatever scheme the father of my child is trying to involve me in.
I definitely shouldn’t be having to think about whether the man I’m dating is a security concern, but I do anyway, briefly wondering if he’s part of the Irish mob.
That’s ridiculous. Not everyone is involved in organized crime. The scar on the back of his arm was probably from playing rugby.
I push away the voice in my mind telling me what a bad idea this is and focus on drinking and being charmed by Finneas’s crazy stories. When my phone rings, I answer it on reflex, then hear the deep male voice on the other end.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, what is it now?” I ask him, the alcohol coursing through my veins giving me confidence. “Another fake emergency?”
“Where are you?”
Art sounds pissed.
Really pissed, his voice low and taut like a whip that’s about the crack. But he has no right to be.
“That’s none of your business.”
“Is that your boyfriend?” Finneas lilts, sliding a muscled arm around my waist.
I let him, trying to relax into his touch even as my instinct is to tense every muscle.
The truth is, I’ve never been with someone other than Art, and it feels wrong as hell.
As Lily pointed out when we started swiping through men, Finneas is as close as it gets to Art in terms of appearance.
Tall, blonde, muscled, tattooed. He dresses differently, though, with a brightly patterned shirt buttoned so low that I can see the skull tattooed across his chest, dipping between the swell of his ridiculous chest muscles. Art would never.
“No,” I tell him. “Not my boyfriend…. Just some asshole who can’t take a hint,” I say loudly into the receiver.
“Was that an Irish accent?” Art’s growl on the end of the line makes me think that somehow, he knows exactly where I am and who I’m with. “Are you with the fu—”
“Like I said, it’s none of your fucking business.”
I drop my phone, mid-call, right into Finneas’s pint of Guinness.
“Attagirl.” He continues to knock back the pint anyway, a massive grin plastered across his face. When he offers to take me back to his local bar, I agree.
It’s possible that I’m already a bit drunk. But I don’t regret a thing. Something about Art’s tone makes me think that I will regret it soon.
He sounded like a man on a mission. And for some fucked-up reason, it sent a thrill of anticipation through my nervous system.