Chapter Twenty-Six #2
“Yeah. You, too.” He waved at the bookshop, which was a few stores down. Parking was always trouble on Main Street since the tourists started showing up a few years ago. Then he blinked, the wave turning into an actual wave. “Looks like you’ve got someone waiting for you.”
Vi turned. Gabriella leaned against the front door of Sweethelm Books, looking far too delighted for this early in the morning. She waved at Nick like he was a long-lost friend she hadn’t expected to see, making pointed and not at all subtle eye contact with Vi as she did so.
Vi held back a groan. Why now?
Nick shoved his hands into his pockets, and Vi imagined him twisting his rings inside the fabric. His jaw remained unmarked, no proof that she had dug her fingers into it last night. He still had that stubborn patch of stubble, and Vi’s fingers twitched as she took the bike’s handlebars.
She wanted to say something; you’re the most fun I’ve ever had in bed or I would have really loved to watch you make pancakes or even I really do want to be friends. But she had never been good at saying what she really felt. Not until Nick.
“Did you take my shift at the food bank on Saturday?” she asked instead.
Nick startled. “What?”
“Heath texted me saying I didn’t have to come in because someone else filled my spot,” Vi said. “Was that you?”
“Oh. Yeah, I guess so.”
Vi waited. When he didn’t continue, she asked: “Why?”
“Why what?”
“I just . . . I thought . . .” Vi stopped, squashing her disappointment yet again. “Never mind.”
She turned away, wheeling her bike toward the bookshop.
Gabriella was still waiting for her at the locked door, practically bouncing up and down with excitement.
“How’s your morning?”
Vi sighed. “What are you doing here?”
Gabriella deflated, looking put off that she didn’t get to do the ambush she was planning. “I was out for a walk, saw you guys were closed a whole five minutes past opening. For shame. So I knocked on the windows, and then you showed up! What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” Vi said automatically, rooting around in her pockets one-handed.
Hopefully, she didn’t have a stray button undone or her hair hadn’t been messed up too badly.
If her little sister found out she had sex in a parked car on the side of the road, she’d never hear the end of it.
Gabriella would giggle over it until the day they died.
Gabriella gave her a wide-eyed look, plucking at Vi’s shirt. “Looks like something happened. Are those yesterday’s clothes?”
“No,” Vi replied, reaching into yet another of her endless pockets. Where were her keys? She could use the one above the door to get into the bookshop, but she’d be screwed when she tried to unlock her house after work. All her keys were on one big circle key chain.
“They look like yesterday’s clothes,” Gabriella told her. She craned over Vi’s shoulder toward Nick’s car. “Did you two do your little arrangement?”
“Please shut up,” Vi begged, giving all her pockets another shot. Wallet, phone, gum, loose tampon, painkillers for the stress headaches she denied having.
Gabriella snorted, amused, like this was a regular thing to bug her big sister about and not something that would make Vi cry later when she was alone with a glass of wine and a sad movie that gave her something less pathetic to cry over.
Because Vi had spare time to do that now.
Because of the infuriating orc who kept taking all her duties off her shoulders, but still didn’t want to date her.
Part of her insisted she should be grateful, and she was.
But she was also royally pissed at herself for believing he wanted something more than casual.
Gabriella started, “Okay. But it looks like—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Vi snapped. “We’re friends. Even if . . . He doesn’t . . . He’s not boyfriend material, okay? Where the hell are my keys?”
Gabriella blinked, surprisingly contrite. “Um. I would guess back in the car. If I had to pick.”
“Shit.” Vi thrust her bike’s handlebars at her. “Hold this.”
Gabriella took it wordlessly.
Vi turned around just in time to see a flash of motion near Nick’s car. It almost looked like the driver’s-seat door had closed. But she hadn’t heard anything, and Nick was sitting in the car, staring intently at his phone.
Vi braced herself and headed back to the car, knocking on Nick’s window.
“Hi,” she said, pitching her voice to customer-service perfect before she could stop herself. “I think I left my keys?”
Nick held them up. He didn’t look up from his phone as he wound down the window. He was playing Tetris—no, he was losing Tetris, pixelated columns piling up as he pressed random buttons.
Vi glanced toward Orc’s Garage, where Wyatt was pushing the Open sign out to the street. Then she reached through the window and took the keys from his waiting hand.
“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll . . . see you later?”
He nodded, still pressing random buttons as his Tetris shapes piled up into a blinking Game Over screen. Then, like an afterthought, he looked up.
“See you, bud,” he said, and then grinned.
Vi’s heart twisted. It was a smile, sure. But it was about as real as Vi’s customer-service smile after a harrowing lunch rush on her own. She almost asked if he was okay, if they were okay, if they really were friends like he’d said. She’d take that over nothing, if she got time to mourn first.
But she didn’t say any of it.
Nick looked down.
Vi walked back to her bookshop.