All I Believe (Firsts and Forever, #10)(90)

“That’s because I’m old.”

“You are not.”

“I am,” Luca insisted. “I’m turning thirty next month. It’s all downhill from there.”

“Oh wow, we have to celebrate!”

“Sure. We can go out to dinner and get a nice bottle of wine.”

I smiled at him and said, “Oh no. That’s not how we celebrate in this family.”

“No? What do you do then?”

“You saw that mob and the Flaming Titanic, and that was just on a random weeknight. Now imagine Nana on a mission to make sure you have a happy birthday.”

“Oh my God.”

“Exactly.”

When the cab pulled up in front of Nana’s house, Luca asked, “Are we staying here tonight?”

“Yes. This is home until we get our own place.”

I paid the fare, and he paused when we got out of the taxi and looked up at the grand Queen Anne Victorian. It had been painted in a shimmering rainbow a few months back. “I was too preoccupied to fully appreciate this when we first arrived. It kind of says it all, doesn’t it?”

“It does.”

He pulled me into his arms. “I like that you’re a package deal, Nicky. One incredibly sweet, beautiful boyfriend, plus the kind of huge, crazy family I wished I belonged to when I was a kid.”

“Really? You wished for deranged cousins and quite possibly the craziest grandmother ever to roam the Earth?”

“I wished for a big family. All the rest is just a bonus.” I kissed him before taking his hand and leading him into the house.

It was quiet inside for a change, since everyone was still at the club. Tom Selleck the giant puppy was sprawled out on his side in the foyer waiting for Nana’s return, and his big tail thumped the floor when we came in. He pushed himself to his feet and followed us into the kitchen, and I tossed him a dog biscuit before making a midnight snack for Luca and me.

The dog then followed us upstairs and dropped onto his side right in the middle of my bedroom floor, so we had to step over and around him as we changed into t-shirts and sleep pants. When we were finally seated cross-legged on the little twin bed with the plate of fruit, cheese and crackers between us, I said, “These are going to be pretty tight sleeping arrangements. We can move into one of Nana’s guestrooms if you want, they all have bigger beds.”

“No way. I like this room. The tiny bed means we’ll have to sleep right on top of each other, and I’m all for that. Plus, I like the fact that it’s total and complete chaos in here. I’m learning a lot about you.” He looked amused.

I glanced around at the small, cluttered space. I’d always stayed in that room when I visited Nana as a child, so it was dotted with a few random childhood mementos. I’d changed nothing when I moved in after leaving Los Angeles. More recently, I’d gotten in the habit of tacking up Post-it notes to try to help me make sense of my studies. They covered almost every hard surface, a pastel patchwork of notes, dates, and general reminders. Stacks of books and papers crowded the small desk and built-in bookshelves, and Luca said, “I would have bet you were a neat freak, just based on the way you present yourself to the world. Turns out, not so much.”


“I used to be pretty tidy. I think in a lot of ways, my room is the embodiment of ‘this is your brain on law school.’ It actually had been just as chaotic in here.” I tapped the center of my forehead with my index finger.

Luca gave me a sympathetic look as I took in my surroundings. After a few moments, I reached for the sticky notes lining the wall beside my bed and began peeling them off and stacking them into a neat pile in my left hand. “Aren’t you going to need those?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I needed to throw myself into something after my relationship with Erik ended. The one good thing about this law program was that it was all-consuming. I was so busy being stressed out about it that it left me no time to think or feel. That was the real point of law school. It held the sadness and hurt at bay. Now it’s time to move on.”

“Wait, so you’re dropping out? Just like that?”

“Not exactly just like that, but yeah. I’ve thought about this a million times, but I couldn’t let go of it. Not until now. It serves no purpose anymore. I was never really sure if I wanted to be a lawyer, but I know for a fact that law school was a terrible fit for me. I just had no interest in the subject matter.” As I was talking, I kept adding to the little stack of notes in my hand. When I emptied the wall beside my bed, I got up and started working my way around the room.

“So, what now?”

“In the short term, I want to go back to working as an EMT. I liked that job overall. The part I didn’t like was that there was no follow-through. We’d keep the patients alive long enough to get them to the hospital, and then we’d never see them again. Whether they lived or died after we handed them over was out of our hands.”

“I never thought about that,” Luca said. He got up too and started pulling sticky notes from the walls, making his own little stack.

“When you got shot and I watched the EMTs and later the doctors take care of you, it got me thinking. When I chose Biology as my undergraduate major way back when, I’d had this pipe dream of going on to medical school in the back of my mind. The problem was, I didn’t believe in myself. I thought you had to be a genius to get accepted to medical school, so I didn’t even try. You’d really think all those years with Erik would have shown me how dead wrong I was about that.”