Now she was giggling like she was twelve at a slumber party hyped up on Mountain Dew and Pixy Stix. “You realize we’re talking about someone who doesn’t exist.”
“I don’t care—even fake people would love you.”
The vote of confidence hit her right in the chest, warming her whole body. “Thanks, Meemaw.”
“You got it, baby girl, but now I’ve gotta go.” The phone screen went back to showing the ceiling of Meemaw’s house as she walked from the kitchen to the front door. “Eunice is here to take me to bingo.”
That meant nothing but trouble for Mr. Fairbanks, who had been the volunteer fire department’s fundraising bingo caller for as long as Kinsey could remember—which was exactly how long Meemaw and Miss Eunice had been heckling him for calling out bad numbers.
That, sad to say, was Mr. Fairbanks’s problem to deal with. Kinsey had her own. How to kill off—fine, how to break up with—an almost fiancé?
Chapter Twenty-Two
Griff
No matter what Nash was saying with that look on his face, Griff hadn’t been hiding in his Lego room.
Before his pain-in-the-ass cousin had shown up uninvited, Griff had been working on collection development and rearranging completed projects on the custom-made display shelves so that once he finished the first-edition Lego Taj Mahal that had finally arrived, he’d have the perfect place to put it. And while he was doing that, he had been listening in on the staff call updating Beckett Cosmetics’s progress on Us, a gender-neutral holistic line of hair care, skin care, and supplement products launching early next year.
Then there was the packaging debate going on between his number two and the head of marketing that he was mediating via emails on his phone. Oh yeah, and he was listening to the audiobook of the latest in the Lady Sherlock series. So he couldn’t be hiding. He was just busy.
“You’re so full of shit,” Nash said from his spot leaning against the doorjamb. “You’re hiding from Kinsey.”
“She’s next door, dumb-ass.”
Yep. Just on the other side of his bedroom wall. What? He wasn’t weird; he’d seen the building blueprints and knew how everything lined up. That wasn’t… Okay, it was weird.
But shit, he’d spent hours every night staring at the ceiling instead of sleeping and thinking about Kinsey. When he made breakfast in the morning, he couldn’t help but wonder what she ate first thing. And that was just the beginning—thoughts about Kinsey had become the program running in the background all the time. What kind of music did she like? Would she find that movie funny? Did she toast her ham sandwiches? Did she brush her teeth in the bathroom or while she was walking around the house?
Unaffected by the silence outside of Griff’s head, Nash asked, “And when was the last time you saw her?”
Griff was hit with the image of Kinsey biting down on her bottom lip and giving him one last look before disappearing into her apartment after their first date.
“Last week,” he grumbled as he moved the Death Star on its customized stand to a shelf across the room.
“There is a time limit on these dates, you know.” Nash walked into the room, swiping nonexistent dust off the Technic Bugatti Chiron and then moving along to trace the line of the Millennium Falcon, his gaze on Griff the whole time, obviously knowing he was giving his cousin a set of small heart attacks that he’d never mention. “You can’t just put it off.”
“What’s with you?” He crossed his arms over his chest, trying to work out the twists and turns of his cousin’s mind. “You know she’s engaged. I’m obviously going to win the bet.”
“Wrong.” Nash grinned at him, the I-know-more-than-you-do smirk that was a permanent part of his resting smug face. “You already lost.”
Griff froze. He’d been careful. He hadn’t said shit to anyone. No one knew that he was in love with Kinsey. He locked all his attention on Nash. His cousin didn’t blink, didn’t fidget, didn’t lose a single percentage of pain-in-the-ass from his obnoxious grin. The asshole had gambled and won—even worse, he knew it.
“Fuck off,” Griff said.
Nash laughed and picked up the Captain America mini figure from the 2012 Toy Fair that had been a bitch to track down along with the Iron Man that had been one of 125 made. “You know I’m right,” Nash said, putting Cap back on the shelf but facing the wrong direction. “You’re already in too deep to swim back to shore.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.” Pulse going a million miles an hour as he marched across the room to fix it so Steve Rogers faced straight ahead, hoping with each step that Nash would be distracted enough not to realize that Griff was lying his face off.
“How about you’re in love, besotted, smitten, head over heels, you fancy her. Really, it makes perfect sense. You work out what’s going on and what’s going to happen eons before anyone else does, your brain moves that quick. Of course you’d fall in an instant because that’s just how fast your mind works. Griff and Kinsey sitting in a tree. K.I.S.S.I.N.G.”
“Immature asshole,” Griff said, ignoring the fact that he was in a room completely devoted to an activity that a lot of people considered as being for kids only. “What in the fuck is this bet really about anyway?”
Nash flinched. It was small—barely perceptible—but Griff had clocked it. His cousin was almost unnaturally smooth without even a flicker of nervous energy. He was all confidence and know-it-all answers. But not now. Instead, he fidgeted with mini figurines and the key fob to his Maserati, which he usually left on the dining room table.
“You know the bet is all about winning Grandma Betty’s last present,” Nash said, maintaining eye contact but just barely.
Griff shook his head. “Bullshit.”
“What? That’s it?” Nash scoffed as he turned the key fob over in his fingers like one of the scam artists in the tourist-heavy zones with a quarter, distracting a mark’s attention while their partner picked their pocket. “You have that big, scary brain and bullshit is all you can say?”
He shrugged. “It’s all that’s needed.”
Better to be thought fool than to prove it. His dad was an asshole, but he’d been right about that. Plenty of people ran their mouths when they shouldn’t.
“The next date is tomorrow,” Nash said. “Since you dragged your feet hard enough to carve a pair of ditches into cement, Dixon and Fiona planned this one for you.”
Griff paused midstep as he made his way over to the shelf with the Statue of Liberty displayed on it, complete with an Ellis Island backdrop and a ferry full of sightseers. His gut clenched and he chewed the inside of his cheek like it was a hunk of Hubba Bubba. He wasn’t sure if Fiona being involved was a good or a bad thing. She was pretty great, but she’d also fallen for Dixon, so there were obviously some errors in judgment there. Not really, but he wasn’t ever going to admit that out loud.