Under normal circumstances, I would have helped make the juices, but I really did need to get this conversation over with.

But as one minute went by and then another, and those two turned into five and Noah still wasn’t there, this feeling of just… being resigned… of being over this shit fully hit me.

I glanced down at my watch to see that it was five forty-four.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” the voice that belonged to Noah said over my shoulder a second before the stool I’d been saving for him got pulled out from under my thigh.

Five forty-six.

Some form of disappointment made my chest tighten. Pasting a blank look on my face, I waited until he’d taken the stool, watching his movements. The expectant look on his face was almost enough to get me to want to be nice to him while we did this.

But… nah.

Grandpa Gus said that when you made your bed, you had to sleep in it. So don’t shit or piss in it.

And like with a lot of things, he was fucking right. You made your choices in life, and you had to deal with them. There weren’t take backs. You could never and should never expect a second chance.

“Don’t be pissed. I forgot how much traffic there was,” he said in a huff that pierced my chest a little tighter. He was apologizing because he knew being late drove me nuts. Because he’d known me so well for a while there.

“I’m not,” I told him honestly, because I wasn’t. “I’ve got… thirteen minutes before I have something else I need to do, so I hope you can summarize whatever it is that you need to say in that amount of time.”

“Thirteen?”

I’d told him I was busy, hadn’t I?

“Jesus, Lenny, you can’t reschedule to hang out with me?”

Did he not know me at all? He remembered enough to know that being late drove me fucking batshit. The fact that he didn’t care enough about me and my time to leave early enough and spend the time he wanted to spend with me didn’t bother me.

This was what I expected.

Sometimes you really did outgrow people, no matter how much they meant to you at some point.

“No, I can’t,” I told him calmly. “Twelve minutes now, Noah. What’s up?”

His face went red, and he said, “Are you—” He cut himself off. Of course I was serious. He knew it. His hand went up to his face and brushed the short blond hair to the side, the back of his hand going up to draw a line across his forehead. “Len, I’m sorry. Jesus. I thought you were bullshitting.”

No, he hadn’t.

I slid my gaze to the right so that I wouldn’t roll my eyes.

And when I did that, I immediately spotted the three people sitting at one of the tables across the walkway from the juice bar. There was one green and one beet red drink in between them. And a bottle there too.

A baby bottle.

The two biggest—the two adults—were both staring over at where I was sitting. And if my eyes weren’t deceiving me, Grandpa Gus and Jonah were sitting there muttering to each other, with Mo standing on top of Jonah’s thighs; she was the only innocent party in this entire thing.

I wanted to be surprised. I wanted to ask myself if they were fucking for real. These two people who barely spoke to each other—mostly because Grandpa Gus still hadn’t allowed himself to join the Jonah bandwagon—apparently deciding that they were each the lesser evil, and they were now banding together to spy on me.

Goddamn it.

Goddamn it.

I couldn’t fucking laugh.

I could not fucking laugh even if it fucking killed me.

These idiots….

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Noah move his body so that he faced the stool I was on, reminding me of why I was there and why I had to ignore the wannabe retired CIA agent and whatever secret service New Zealand had. Those two….

Peter was going to die with me when I told him about their little meetup.

One of Noah’s hands went to rest at the top of the bar counter, those navy eyes focused directly on me, searching and searching… like he hadn’t seen me before. He looked sad and a little tired and stressed. I’d forgotten he’d lost his last fight, and there was no way that hadn’t stung his ego.

But I didn’t feel pity. I didn’t feel bad. I just wanted to get this over with. To be done.

The hand he had on the counter inched closer to where mine was, and I wasn’t sure whether to look at it or at him as he said, in a voice too soft, “Look, I… I miss you, Len.”

I faced him again, expecting some level of tenderness to flood me, but getting nothing.

“I miss talking to you about shit.”

A hundred different examples of proof of how that couldn’t exactly be true and hadn’t been in a decade went right through my head, but I was proud of myself for keeping my mouth shut.

“I know that I’ve fucked up a lot. I know that I’ve said a lot of stuff to hurt you, but I love you.” His fingertips grazed mine, and I had to make sure not to look in the direction of Inspector Gadget or Pink Panther again as much as I wanted to.

“We’ve been through everything together,” he kept right on going, and I knew I was going to have to stop him because this little declaration was pointless. “No one knows me better than you, or ever will. I’m sorry, Lenny. For everything. I just… I don’t know. I got so mad at you for getting fucking pregnant. It felt like you cheated on me.”

Cheated on him? Okay.

My eyes strayed toward the table beyond, where I could see Grandpa Gus’s lips moving, probably talking shit—all right, not probably, for sure talking shit, this was Grandpa Gus after all—and Jonah nodding in response.

I had wanted these two to bond, and what the hell did they have to bond over?

Hating Noah.

I swear I didn’t understand my life sometimes.

“Lenny?”

He’d caught me. I glanced back at him and raised my eyebrows. “Yeah?”

“Are you listening?”

“Yeah. Mostly,” I told him the truth because, well… it was the truth. And if he looked butthurt about it, I didn’t know what to say.

He did look butthurt on second glance. His forehead was wrinkling, and he was frowning, insulted. “You don’t give a fuck about what I’m telling you?”

I couldn’t help but give him a long look as I thought about the two goobers sitting together. “It isn’t that I don’t care, Noah. I do. I care about you. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you. But you telling me that you love me and that you’re sorry for the things that you’ve said….” I drew my hands up at my sides as I shrugged at him. “I will always love and care about you, frankly, and maybe I missed something, but we haven’t been in each other’s lives in forever.”

The fingertips on mine jerked away, and I couldn’t say I wasn’t glad.

“Noah, come on. You were here a year ago, but the only time you ever talked to me was when you wanted me to help you train.”

He opened his mouth like he was going to argue but shut it right back.

“But you don’t love me.”

“Yeah, I do,” he insisted, leaning forward, expression intense. “I always have.”

It was way too hard to keep a straight face. “No, you haven’t. Maybe you’ve convinced yourself that you do, but it isn’t real. If you’re going to feel that way about someone, it should be honest. It shouldn’t be because my daughter’s dad is here and you decided to get all possessive for no reason. You care about me, in your own way, but you don’t love me, Noah.”

My words weren’t sinking in. I could tell. “I’ve loved you my whole fucking life, Len!” he claimed, eyes moving around to see if anyone had heard him. I didn’t give a fuck if someone did, so I didn’t bother caring. “Always. There’s never been a fucking day when I didn’t.”

“You should’ve thought about that at some point before I was pregnant, and I wanted my friend around. When I needed some support and you made it out to seem like I was walking around with radiation poisoning. You called me a slut.” I gave him a smile that wasn’t a happy one by any means. “I needed you, and you left me. Not just now but years ago. I used to fucking take you to the hospital, Noah. I stayed with you the whole time, and that was when you needed stitches.”

He tipped his head back. “You’re going to bring that shit up? I was eighteen. I wanted to go away to school, and you’re still pissed off about that? I didn’t give you shit for graduating early.”

Oh hell. Yeah, none of this was doing anything. I couldn’t help but snort and look up at the ceiling as I shook my head.

He wasn’t the boy who had been my brother and best friend. He wasn’t anyone I knew anymore. And that really did suck.

“You know what, Noah? Yeah, I’m going to bring the past up. Because all of this goes back to you not being a real friend to me since then. I never would have just been a chickenshit and gone away to school without giving you a fucking warning. Without telling you I was thinking about it. You never even apologized to me over fucking up my ribs back then either; you know how fucking shitty that is?”

Noah opened his mouth, but I wasn’t letting him get another chance. I’d given his ass enough chances, and I was done. I had been done years ago.

But fuck it.