She looks like she’s about to tell me to piss off— totally deserved, obviously. But then her shoulders slump, and she lets out a weary sigh that tugs at the place in my chest that never quite got the memo about the Nora ship having sailed.
“Yeah. She met a guy. She fell in love. And she shut down her business because she’s not coming back.” She takes a shaky breath that tells me her flippant tone is as much of a lie as her whatever had been. “I’m happy for her, of course. But it leaves me without a job, three days to find a place to live, and one to finish packing up all her belongings so they’re ready for the movers tomorrow at two.”
She’s moving. Leaving.
“You have some girlfriends you can crash with?” I can probably help with the job part.
She opens her mouth, her head halfway into a shake before she catches herself and, remembering who she’s talking to, cuts herself off with a grumpy growl. “I’ll figure it out. But I need your stuff out of Diane’s place.”
This time, I save the smirk as I push off the doorframe. “Go take your five minutes to mourn your plant. I’ll change and meet you over there.”
Five minutes later, I’m dressed in a pair of red and white Slayers Hockey athletic pants and a T-shirt, and I’ve fired off three texts putting feelers out about jobs.
I shouldn’t care.
Nora was right, we aren’t friends. She’s not my problem, and, after this week, she’s not even going to be my neighbor. She’s just a pretty girl with a stingy smile and eyes that either tell you everything you didn’t want to know or nothing at all.
Except that isn’t who she used to be. And one of the things I know about Nora from back then is that she has something like a dozen siblings and getting out of her parents’ house was a big deal for her. She doesn’t want to go back.
And for whatever fucked-up reason, I don’t want to let her go.
Plus, I’m loving the idea of bailing her out. Landing her a job before that pitiful houseplant is even cold in its grave. Hell, if she really needs a place to stay…
Well, let’s see what her options are first.
I cue up Enrique Iglesias’s “Hero” on my phone, getting my background music ready for when I breeze into her place, solutions to her every problem in hand.
She’ll hate it.
She’ll have to say “thank you” and everything. And because I got her whatever job is about to materialize— which it will because my manifestation game is strong, and I’m currently working it hard for her —I’ll want to pop by from time to time to check in. Ruffle her feathers. Give her something to scold me for. Or maybe see if she’ll give me one of those smiles she was so free with before she realized who I was.
I’m sending one last text to my banker, because I’m almost positive Nettie has a cousin whose roommate just bailed, as a knock sounds at the door.
Stuffing my feet in my gym shoes, I crank the volume and hit play. I swing open the door, expecting my favorite no-nonsense fun-wrecker to be tapping her phone, telling me I’m thirteen seconds late. But instead of the riot of auburn curls trying to bust free of their knot and honey brown eyes narrowed in perpetual irritation, I’m met with the pinched face of a blonde who looks vaguely familiar… and about seventeen months pregnant.
She does not look good.
“Hey, you okay?” I ask, fumbling to silence the phone as I flip through my mental index and come up blank.
She’s blowing out the longest breath in the history of breaths, eyes screwed shut.
Holy shit.
Please don’t let this be some fan looking for me to bless her belly. I mean, I’ve heard of worse. Way worse, actually, but that’s not what my seldom-wrong gut is tensing up to tell me.
Finally, her watery, panic-filled eyes open, and my heart stops as recognition hits, detonating with the force to take out the foundation of my world.
This is the girl I hooked up with last season. The one with the fresh ex and the nice smile who was only in town for her sister’s wedding and a single night of fun.
Chapter 2
Axel
There aren’t a lot of things that scare me, but I’m losing my shit facing down this eight-pound, two-ounce bundle of wrinkly skin and tiny flailing arms. Otto. My son.
I turn to the nurse beside me. “Maybe we should stay another night,” I croak, the panic that’s been a constant since my world blew up and then got blasted to dust claws higher up my throat. “If we give it a few more hours, maybe she’ll change her mind.”
Except it’s already mid-afternoon, and I know they’ve checked. I know what Shelly— not Sarah, as I discovered when I gave the wrong name to the nurse at Labor and Delivery Admitting —had planned, and how fucking lucky I am that her conscience refused to let her go through with it before giving me the chance to keep what her life wouldn’t allow for.
“You’re going to be fine,” the nurse assures, handing me some kind of pre-packed diaper bag that apparently comes free with every baby. It’s pink and purple plastic, and not quite as wide as the span of my hand.
“This is my survival kit?”
Her mouth pulls down, then she loops two more bags around my neck before giving me a gentle pat and a look that says, “But seriously, it’s time for you to go.”
I’m torn between shaking her shoulders and demanding to know what’s wrong with her that she’s letting me walk out of here with an actual human baby… and grabbing my son and running before they realize their mistake and don’t let me have him at all.
Maybe they shouldn’t. It took me forty-five minutes to get his tiny arms into his shirt. And less than one for a passing nurse to shake her head, whip it off his frail body, and put it on the right way.
Heart pounding, gut in knots, I open my mouth again, but she shakes her head.
“Try to sleep when he does. You’ll be fine.”
I swallow and look at Otto, who’s so small and fragile my heart aches with the need to protect him. “Yeah, we’ll be fine.”
Nora
Stepping back from the peephole, I let out an indignant cough.
Oh, this guy is so dead.
Take five minutes, he said. I’ll be right over, he said.
Two damn days ago.
Glaring at the now towering pile of deliveries with Axel’s name on them, I can’t believe I actually thought he understood what I was going through. That maybe he even cared.
Ha! Wrong again, Nora.
The jerk doubled down on his efforts. Cue the ten additional deliveries in the last twenty-four hours— most of which arrived while the movers were here —each box bigger than the last. He probably had his whole stupid hockey team howling about it.
I glance around Diane’s otherwise empty living room, trying to take solace in the knowledge that by tomorrow at noon, I won’t have to worry about letting this guy snow me again.
Yanking the door open, I suck a deep breath, ready to lay into him— and choke. “Axel?”
This cannot be my obnoxiously hot neighbor of the flirty winks and dirty smiles who always looks like he’s fresh out of some expensive cologne ad even when he’s pairing a black eye and split lip with his custom suit. Because this guy—