Life's Too Short (The Friend Zone #3)(10)

He looked annoyed. He had his arms crossed. I couldn’t really hear what they were talking about.

My laptop chimed with an incoming Skype call.

Drake.

I left my post and sat down and answered.

Drake Lawless’s tan face popped up onto my screen. Judging by the palm trees behind him, he was someplace tropical. I was already jealous.

He had on his shark-tooth necklace, no shirt as usual, and his blond hair was wild. I could practically smell the coconut sunblock and ocean through my computer.

“’Sup, gorgeous.” He gave me one of his dazzling smiles. “Sooo…Jesus’s Abs?”

I snorted. “You have no idea. The man is God’s gift to all of us,” I said, poking around my desk for a nail file. “It was like Jesus’s Abs take the wheel over here.”

Too bad I’ll probably never see him again unless I look through a peephole.

Drake didn’t get a chance to reply because Laird walked naked across the back of the screen.

“Laird!” I shrieked, turning hard to the left. Both men laughed from my laptop.

“Hey, Nessa,” Laird called.

I huffed indignantly at my floor. “Laird, I’m still not speaking to you.”

“Oh, come on.” I could hear the smile in his voice. “He made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

I peeked up at the screen. Laird stood grinning at me over Drake’s shoulder, a direct view of his crotch mercifully covered by Drake’s body.

I crossed my arms. “First you leave me for Drake and make me scramble to find a new cameraman, and now you’ve made me see your balls. Just when I thought my week couldn’t get worse.”

Both men laughed again and Laird walked off screen, penis swinging. I looked back at Drake. “Please buy your employee some pants, or give him a fig leaf or a loincloth or something?”

He chuckled good-naturedly.

Typical Drake. Zero decorum. Camp Lawless was like a hippie commune. Naked yoga and going on about chakras. I wouldn’t be surprised if a goat wearing a lei with a chicken riding its back wandered through next.

Drake tipped his head. “You need anything, butterfly? How’s motherhood?”

“Good. Great. It’s amazing how much it changes you. I find myself saying things like, ‘It’s just baby pee.’ Like that’s okay, like it’s superior to the regular kind so I should be fine that it’s on my goose-down comforter.”

He laughed.

I let out a long breath. “I have no idea how I’m going to keep stretching content out of this situation.”

“No change with Annabel? Do you have any idea where she is?”

I scoffed. “I know exactly where she is. She’s at my dad’s. And speaking of Dad, he showed up here with her earlier demanding that I let them see Grace. She was completely high. And then Dad accidently pushed the door into my mouth.” I put my tongue to the scab. “Jesus’s Abs came home and ran them off—because it wasn’t enough that I only seem crazy in front of him once.”

He managed to appear concerned and amused at the same time. “How did she look?”

I glanced away from him. “Not good. Maybe the worst I’ve ever seen her,” I admitted.

Drake was well aware of my family issues. I didn’t need to regale him with the details. He knew all about the day Annabel dropped off Grace and never came back.

She used my bathroom before she left. Stole a whole bottle of hydrocodone and drank all my cough medicine with codeine and then filled the bottle up with water so I wouldn’t notice—I noticed.

“I’m trying to get her into rehab, but she won’t go,” I said.

“Can you talk to your dad?”

I huffed. “Yeah. Dad can’t even help himself,” I said bitterly. I rubbed at my forehead. His eyes followed my hand up and focused on the brace I wore. For the first time, maybe ever, I saw the humor drop away and a frown touch the corners of his mouth. Drake always smiled. I’d seen him smile being carried off on a stretcher with third-degree burns. The man’s happy didn’t have an off switch.

I put my arm off camera. “It’s just for typing,” I lied.

He went quiet for a moment. “Are you going to have it looked at?” he asked, his voice low.

I pressed my lips into a line. “There’s no point in spending months at the hospital getting poked and prodded for a diagnosis that won’t change the outcome. I’m not living my life like the Cyclops, giving up an eye to know the future of how and when I’ll die. My grandma had it. My sister Melanie had it. My aunt Linda had it. My mom had it too. All women, all dead by thirty. There’s a fifty percent chance I inherited the gene and based on the female line, I’d say it’s higher than that. I want to be blissfully ignorant until it’s painfully obvious how this ends. This is my choice. I have to live with it, sort of like everyone else’s shitty choices that I also have to live with.”

I couldn’t even do genetic testing to see if I was a carrier. Doctors couldn’t identify the mutated gene that ran in my family. If I was born with it, I wouldn’t know until it started to kill me.

He studied me quietly. “Are there any new clinical trials? It can’t hurt to try.”

I shook my head. Drake knew my position on this too.