“The dagger? Really?”

“You should take it as a compliment.”

Mitch reached for some peanuts on the coffee table. “That’s pretty impressive.” He nudged her. “What’s my nickname?”

The baby started crying. “Saved by the bell.” Skylar walked over to the playpen in the corner. “Hang on…be right back. I want to hear the rest of Jake’s story.”

I checked my phone to see if Nina had texted again then went to the kitchen to grab a couple of beers for Mitch and me. When I returned to the living room, I handed one to him and said, “Hey, Bitch, I thought I heard the girls talking about your cock once, too. What was it again, Skylar? The Slim Reaper?”

“Good one,” he said. “Actually, I’m pretty sure it’s more like The Bone Ranger.”

Skylar cuddled Mitch Jr. in the crook of her arm. His fuzzy brown hair was sticking up in all directions. A gnawing feeling developed inside me as I looked at their beautiful, healthy baby. It reminded me all too well that Nina and I hadn’t been able to give A.J. a little brother or sister. The stress of infertility had been taking its toll on us in recent months, too.

Skylar interrupted my thoughts. “So, Jake, continue the story. I want to get to the good parts.”

“Okay, well…Nina was still working really hard at studying and ended up getting two more A’s. I couldn’t believe it. She completely threw off my master plan to take her on a helicopter ride over the city. I’d been dying to take her up there.”

“She would have hated that.”

“I know.” I snickered. “It would have been awesome.”

“There weren’t any more excursions?” she asked.

“Not until later.”

“So, things just kept going the way they were…”

“One night, things got pretty intense. Nina finally told me about Jimmy.”

Skylar looked at Mitch and whispered, “Her brother that died.”

“Yeah,” I said under my breath. “I’d always seen the picture of the two of them in her room and assumed he was alive. She never talked about him until she started crying out of the blue during one of our study sessions. I’d rolled some dice for a math lesson, and it reminded her of a game she used to play with him when he was sick. That was all it took.”

“What did he have again?” Mitch asked.

“Leukemia,” I said.

Skylar and Mitch gave each other a look, knowing this conversation would bring up memories of Skylar’s own battle with lymphoma.

I continued, “Nina carried a lot of guilt because she stopped going to see him at the hospital right before he died. She couldn’t handle seeing him suffer anymore. After he passed away, she lived with that guilt for years.” Looking up again at the picture of pregnant Nina on the wall, I thought back to that night. “So, anyway, that was when I first opened up to her about losing my father when I was five. I showed her some of my drawings of him. We realized that we both suffered tremendous losses at a young age. It was just one more thing that bonded me to her.”

Mitch nodded. “Was that the night you first kissed?”

“Unfortunately, no. But that was the night I made a major ass of myself.”

“What happened?”

“After that emotional conversation in my room, I decided it would be a good idea if we went out and got shitfaced.”

He looked stunned. “You managed to not kiss her even while shitfaced? I just can’t believe you were able to keep your control like that.”

“Oh, believe me. There’s not much longer to that side of the story, my friend.”

CHAPTER 9

Past

I chuckled to myself. Nina could seriously throw down. I watched as she ate every last bit of meat off a Chinese chicken wing. It was like watching one of those hot dog eating contests that were always inevitably won by some skinny dude.

We were at Kung Pao Karaoke, a Chinese restaurant and karaoke bar I’d gone to one previous time with some co-workers. We had ordered a Pu Pu Platter that had an assortment of appetizers. There wasn’t a morsel left by the time we got done with it.

My mood also couldn’t have been better because Nina admitted that her date with Alistair was a dud.

Hell yeah.

A few new discoveries were made about Nina that night. One: she loved to eat. Two: she was a major lightweight when it came to alcohol. Three: Her ex-boyfriend had a name: Spencer.

“So…Spencer…was he your last boyfriend?”

“Yeah. We broke up a little over a year ago. In retrospect, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. Besides the fact that I found out he cheated on me, he did nothing but criticize me.”

That was a double whammy. To hear that she’d been cheated on and that he’d treated her like crap made me want to hunt him down. The alcohol from the massive scorpion bowl we’d been sharing was going to my head and intensifying my reaction to every word coming out of her mouth. It was also intensifying my reaction to her mouth itself. I couldn’t seem to take my eyes off of it.

“What do you mean criticize?” My blood was beginning to boil. “What kinds of things did he say to you?”

She looked down, hesitant to answer me. “Let’s see…what didn’t he say? For one, he had no tolerance at all for my anxiety issues. He would just make fun of me instead of trying to understand the condition. And he criticized my body any chance he got.”