Rusty Nailed (Cocktail, #2)(13)

“You’ll look good, no one is worried about that.” I laughed as he tickled the bottoms of my feet. “The one that I’m worried about is Sophia. She’s out of her funk as of this morning, and ready to buy the sexiest dress she can find for this shindig.”

“Mmm-hmm,” he replied, concentrating on my instep.

“I think she really just wants to make sure that she’ll look good if Neil comes, you know? I mean, is he coming? For sure?”

“Mmm-hmm,” he replied again, the tiniest of crinkles appearing on his forehead. I let him rub my feet for another minute.

“So, is he bringing anyone to the wedding?” I asked in the most nonchalant tone possible.

“Caroline,” he warned.

“What? If he’s bringing someone, that’s something that would be good to know ahead of time, don’t you think? It’s not like you’re betraying the guy code just by telling me if he’s bringing anyone, right?” I asked, poking him in the belly with my big toe, eliciting a smile.

“Yes, he’s bringing someone,” he allowed, watching my face carefully. I breathed out just as carefully.

“Okay, see, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” I asked, pushing my foot under his hand again. He resumed his kneading. I let one minute go by.

“So, is she pretty?”

“Not gonna do this,” he said, lifting my feet off his lap and standing up.

“What? I’m just asking if she’s pretty,” I insisted as he turned back toward me.

“I’ve told you, this is not something we can talk about. You get too worked up to be rational, and I—”

“I get worked up? Of course I get worked up! My best friend had her heart ripped out because your best friend was an idiot who cheated on her, and—”

“For the last time, he didn’t cheat!” he snapped.

“Kissing is cheating! Of course it’s cheating!” I snapped back, standing up to face him.

“He kissed an ex-girlfriend once—it happened once. And he told her. He didn’t have to tell her about it at all! He could’ve kept it from her, but he told her!”

“Oh, now he’s supposed to get points for that? For telling her after he cheats on her?” I cried.

When I said Simon and I didn’t fight, we really didn’t. Except for this one thing.

So here’s the full story. When Neil’s ex-girlfriend came to town and their dinner ended with the kiss, Neil told Sophia about it, and she left. And since then, she’s refused to talk to him, refused to see him, refused to have anything to do with him. Erased e-mails and deleted texts. She didn’t want him to try and explain anything, because in her mind there was nothing to explain.

The problem is that all of the guys agreed that what Neil did, wrong as it was, wasn’t enough to break up over. Of course, the girls all agreed that kissing was cheating: dicks didn’t need to be inserted for it to be cheating. Sophia had every right to end things with Neil, and as the cheater, he didn’t get much say in how it went down.

Hence the arguments.

Mimi and Ryan had fought over this as well; it was something that everyone had an opinion on. Opinions that Simon and I had agreed weren’t worth sharing, since it made us argue every time we talked about it, yet the subject kept bubbling up.

What was cheating? Where was that line that, if crossed, you couldn’t come back from? Was it different for every couple, or was it black and white?

“He doesn’t get points for it. That’s not what I meant, and you know that—”

“That kind of thing doesn’t just happen, Simon. He made a choice—”

“A kiss! And that had to end everything? What about Sophia? She won’t even give the guy a chance to explain, she—”

“There’s nothing to explain, don’t you get that?” I yelled, throwing my sketchbook across the room.

Quiet.

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” I mumbled, crossing the room to pick up my book. He caught my hand as I walked by.

“This is exactly why I didn’t want to talk about this from the beginning. There’s no right or wrong here”—he raised his fingers to my lips when I started to explain that yes, in fact there is—“or at least it’s a gray area. But no matter what it is, it’s not worth us getting in a fight over, right?”

I sighed, letting him pull me into his chest. I pressed my face into the exact center. The scent of Downy calmed me.

“Right.”

He held me tight.

“I love you,” he told the top of my head.

“Love you too.”

Being half of a “we” is sometimes hard.




chapter three


“It’s melon.”

“It’s marigold.”

“Marigold! It’s pumpkin way before it’s marigold, but that doesn’t matter—because it’s melon.”

“If you think that’s melon then you need your eyes examined, because it’s obviously—”

“Mimi, what do you think? This is totally melon, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Mimi, look at this and tell me how in the world this is melon.”

“Goldfish,” Mimi said.