I clear my throat. “Listen, this is not an issue. There is nothing to worry about. Nadia and I are friends, and we have been forever. I’m hanging out with her. We’re having a nice time. I’m in time-out. She’s in time-out,” I say, a little worked up because how are they not getting it? How do they not see the obvious? “Therefore, nothing can happen between us.” I flap my arm outside the room in the general direction of Nadia, then back at myself. I smooth a hand down my jacket. “And now if you’ll excuse me, I have a reception to go to.”

I leave, joining Nadia at the table. She smells so damn good, but I am not giving into the temptation.

I’ve got this.

8

Crosby

I blame chia seeds.

And kale.

Blueberries are definitely responsible too. They made me the organic monster I am when it comes to food.

My mom, though, is the biggest reason, since she fed me all that before I could walk. She was and is the queen of all things organic, and started her own organic café in San Rafael when I was in grade school.

When the waiter swings by with the chicken entrée, my knee-jerk reaction is to ask the usual question. “Is the chicken organic?”

With a light bow of his head, he answers, “Yes, it is, sir.”

As he deposits the plates in front of the other guests, Nadia pats my shoulder. “You’re safe here, Crosby. We know you and your mango-loving heart.”

“Mangoes and me are like that,” I say, crossing my index and middle finger. “Anyway, old habits,” I say with a shrug and a smile, because this is what I’m talking about—Nadia and I know each other, down to our families and the nitty-gritty of our food preferences.

Nadia tips her forehead in the direction of my mom, a few tables away, her curly red hair falling down her back.

“How is Sunny?” she asks.

My mom is parked next to Nadia’s mom, listening to her intently.

That’s my mom. The only way she knows how to listen is intently.

The universe gave us one mouth and two ears, she likes to say.

“She and Kana opened a ninth location of Green Goddess,” I say, then gesture to the woman next to my mom, a regal-looking lady hailing from Japan, with sleek black hair. They’ve been a thing for a few years now, and they’re holding hands at the table. “And it’s going well.”

“And that’s going well too, I take it?” Her tone says she’s asking about my mom’s romantic interest.

Seeing my mom happy again ignites a smile on my face and warmth in my chest. “Oh yeah. Big time. I keep telling Sunny to lock that down, but she insists, ‘Everything happens according to its own lunar calendar,’” I say, imitating my mom and her soothing tone for dispensing adages.

The thing she loves to serve up most, right along with kale and quinoa.

“That sounds exactly like your mom. She has a mantra for everything,” Nadia says after taking a bite of her chicken dish.

“She does. And it absolutely rubbed off on me. I’m a big fan of mantras,” I say, because mantras are seeing me through this lady diet right now. On that note, maybe I should start thinking of Nadia as sugar. And cake. And cookies.

All the verboten treats that won’t touch my lips.

Resist cookies. Resist Nadia.

There. Perfect.

She lifts her wineglass and takes a drink, her brow knitting as if she’s deep in thought. “Is it hard getting used to her with someone else?”

I shake my head. “Nah, she’s happy. Honestly, she’s just as happy as when she was with my dad,” I say, since my mom’s always been an affectionate person. She was that way with my dad before he died when I was in college after a quick battle with pancreatic cancer.

“Did it surprise you? That she’d fallen in love with a woman?”

I flash back to the night Mom told my sister and me. In her usual fashion, Sunny was up-front, straightforward. She didn’t clear her throat and say, I have an announcement to make. She simply took Haley and me out for dinner after an afternoon game and told us that she’d fallen for Kana, and was happy that Aphrodite had smiled on her again.

“Maybe for about two seconds,” I say. “But when Sunny said she was pansexual, it just tracked.”

Nadia smiles as she spears another piece of the yardbird. “I can see that about her. Knowing how she is with people and how she’s always seemed more attracted to hearts than anything else.”

“Exactly,” I say, digging that Nadia gets it in a way few others have. When Daria met Sunny last year, she couldn’t fathom that my mom had been with my dad for a couple decades before falling for a woman. Daria’s not the only girlfriend I’ve had whose expression went all furrowed and confused when they met Sunny. “That was what Haley and I said to each other the night Sunny told us. We kind of looked at each other and said, ‘Yep, that makes perfect sense. Pass the blueberries.’” I take a bite of the chicken, chew, then ask, “What about you?”

Nadia brings a hand to her chest, her brow knitting in confusion. “Am I pansexual?”

I laugh, shaking my head. Then I think better of it. “Are you? I guess I sort of assumed from our conversation earlier that you weren’t, but maybe you are. I try to operate under the assumption that I don’t assume anyone’s orientation at all—it’s not up to me to try to glean who people love.”

She shakes her head. “I like men, despite the few sons of mailboxes.”

“The douches,” I say, since she won’t. “Or as you might say, the duckweeds.”

A smile spreads nice and easy across her face. “You’ve got it.”

“So you’re really done with men?”

“Confession time,” she says in a whisper. “I tried a matchmaker in Vegas, and it was a disaster. We’re talking category five hurricane level.”

“Does that mean you were caught in the eye of a storm of men?”

Laughing, she shakes her head. “Maybe that was the wrong analogy. More like a black hole. The vacuum of deep space. She couldn’t really find anyone for me,” she says, with a what can you do sigh.

But that shocks the hell out of me. No sighing here. Just a drop of the jaw. “Men ought to be falling all over themselves to get to you.”

“I wish I could tell you I was tripping over a long line of men,” she says. “It was more like a Tampa Bay baseball game,” she says, and I laugh at the comparison to the team with the worst attendance in the Majors. We’re talking rows upon rows of empty seats.

“Why on earth would they not want to be set up with you?”

Nadia takes a sip of wine. “Let’s just say they were more interested in their own ability to buy tickets for a fancy suite at the football game than going on a date with the owner.”

Shock rings through me.

What the hell is wrong with some people? “That doesn’t even compute in my world. My dad was an easygoing dude who took a few years off to raise us when Mom was building her business, then he went back to his accounting practice. And my mom’s always just been open-minded about everything.”