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  Christ, fucking help me.

  Where was his plus one? He didn’t have one.

  Patrick didn’t have a girlfriend with him either. He kept poking at me, trying to make small, side conversation with me. I wanted none of it. And I immediately went into ‘crowd pleaser Nick’ mode, talking to the whole table as if I didn’t have serious underlying issues with anxiety.

  That story about the hand on the burner wasn’t even my story. It was Mick’s. My brother was the lovable rebel type, the kind of a guy with a million good stories from childhood. I had none of those defining type stories of my own. I was a good kid, the kind who listened to his mom when she said the stove was hot, but that sort of thing made for boring conversation.

  Growing up with parents who were so involved in the community meant I had to deal with dinners and social situations all the time. When I gained a brother, I gained a model, and he showed me that there was a way to navigate these types of things, and it was with comedy and complete bullshit. Mick used to encourage me to use whatever story I wanted of his to help me when I was most anxious. He grew up in a trailer park, so he had an endless supply of entertaining stories.

  Everyone at the table laughed. Even John Michaels laughed. Amanda didn’t fully smile though. She did have her eyes on me, watching me. It felt like she was trying to dissect me.

  “So you’re from Maine?” Finn asked. The waitress was down at the other end of the table, taking orders, so I no longer had the whole table’s attention. “What’s that like?”

  I crossed my arms, resting them on the table, shrugging. We weren’t friends, a million miles from it, but he was being awfully friendly all of a sudden. “It’s fine. You have to take a ferry to get to where my parents live. Peaks Island. So it’s secluded. Parts of it remind me of here. Except with much colder winters.”

  “What do your parents do?”

  “My dad makes custom furniture. He has a company in Portland. My mom runs the business side of it. They’re a good team.”

  “And you have a brother?”

  “Yes. He’s a professional baseball player.”

  “Well, that’s cool. You go to college?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “Boston.”

  “Boston what?”

  “Boston University.”

  “When you say professional baseball player, do you mean like major league?”

  “Yes. That’s what I meant.”

  “Oh, okay. Wow.”

  Finn was asking more questions than, I swear to God, any girlfriend or date of mine ever had. What the hell did that say about me? About him? Unless... unless these questions weren’t his questions at all, but instead Amanda’s questions for me. She was about the only reason I answered each one of them easily and truthfully.

  His line of questions came to a halt because it was my time to order from our waitress.

  “Hey, sugar,” the woman said to me. She was young. She was pretty. She touched my arm. This was the flirtation of the south, apparently. Finn asked about the differences between here and where I grew up, and sometimes I couldn’t tell if people were in my space, just like this waitress with her hand on my arm, because that was normal friendliness around here, or for other reasons.

  “I’ll just have the Cobb salad, thanks.”

  She bent over to whisper against my ear. “You look like a movie star, baby. What are you doing with these folks?”

  I didn’t answer. I only politely smiled at her as she pulled away, not interested, instead handing her my menu. I guess, this time, it wasn’t just friendliness. She walked away after that, finished with all of our orders.

  When I looked back at Amanda her cheeks were a little flushed. I wasn’t interested in the waitress, I hoped that was easy to see.

  The rest of the meal wasn’t very eventful. Amanda and I didn’t speak. Finn made more forced conversation with me. Same with Patrick. All of it very civil. A lot of it sports related. Once people knew my brother was a professional athlete, that was usually where the conversation strayed.

  My eyes kept coming back to Amanda’s. I wasn’t here for conversation about baseball. I wasn’t here to make friends with her friends. I was here for her. Finally, the ordeal ended. Dinner was over. It was time to go.

  I realized then how fucking awful it really had been. Painfully... boring. Another meal with a woman who probably could have been napping through it all the same. My stomach felt hollow. It made me tug on Amanda’s hand as everyone else was walking away.

  As they all left out the door, I held her back. “Stay,” I muttered.

  “What?”

  “Let’s stay and have a drink at the bar.”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  “Right.” Obviously. I was an idiot. “Let’s stay and have dessert then.”

  “I’d rather get key lime pie at the place just down the street. We could walk. It isn’t too far.”

  “Perfect.” Anything to redeem myself. I had to redeem myself. We left together, walking away from the building in the opposite direction, toward the place with the key lime pie she mentioned. It was a nice night. Just the walk alone, even along the side of the street with cars passing us by, was better already for me than the whole dinner had been.

  Why couldn’t I be normal?

  Why couldn’t I just talk to her?

  Why did I have to feel anxious all the time?

  ~ CHAPTER 28 ~

  AMANDA

  “This pie is the best, right?” I said to Nick, hoping it made up for everything crappy about that dinner. He was such a gentleman through it all—talking to everyone, joking with everyone, answering every one of the questions Finn grilled him with, talking baseball with the guys when part of me got the impression baseball wasn’t even an interest of his.

  And the waitress. God, she wouldn’t leave him alone. She kept petting his arm, literally petting him like a dog, every time she walked by. I was so embarrassed. He had to have been annoyed by the entire thing. Annoyed with me for inviting him. Annoyed with all of us for being... so basic. We were a group of tattoo artists; I’d never really thought of any of us as basic before, but that was before I learned as much as I learned about Nick tonight from all of Finn’s incessant questioning.

  At one point, I excused myself and went to the bathroom. I googled him like a fucking fanatic in the closed stall. I googled his brother. Red Sox player. His parents. Owners of some fancy, custom-made furniture company. Peaks Island. His hometown. An island full of the most impressive mansions I’d ever laid my eyes on. An island for the rich, it seemed. His college, super prestigious, and apparently one of the best marine biology programs in the country.

  He was a silver spoon baby.

  A millionaire’s son.

  He made conversation easily with all of us regular people. And he was good at it. So nice when put on the spot. It shocked me a little that he wanted to have dessert with me, that he wanted to keep this evening going.

  Because he had to be reconsidering being with me, entertaining me, staying around when he still believed me to be pregnant with Finn’s baby.

  Oh God, what would his parents think if he told them he was dating a pregnant girl? They’d probably both have heart attacks. I didn’t know them at all. But I could imagine it. Were we even dating? Just occasionally... casually... fucking. And me tactlessly showing up to sleep in his bed each night. He probably would never dare tell his family about me.

  “This is the best pie I’ve ever had,” he said to me. “I normally don’t like key lime pie.”

  I gave him a small smile. “Me neither.”

  “We should have eaten here for dinner.” He took another bite. “Alone,” he added. “It’s just I turn into this weird version of myself around other people. This Chaz.”

  Chaz? He had my heart pounding hard. “What’s a Chaz?”

  “A dick. My parents forced me to attend so many social events growing up. I developed this kind of alter ego.”
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br />   “And Chaz is what you call your dick-ish alter ego?” I raised my eyebrows.

  He set down his fork, turning over his hand. “That story about the burner and my hand was bullshit.”

  “What?” I glanced down at his hand. I could see no scars. So he’d made up that story where he slapped the burner completely. He’d done it so easily, so effortlessly. What else had he told everyone that wasn’t true? “Boston College?” I asked. “Did you even go to school there?”

  “No, I went there. The key to bullshitting people is to tell eighty percent of the honest truth, and another twenty percent embellished truth. My brother was the one who slapped the burner. And it was when he first came to live with us and was in this power struggle with my mom. The Chaz version of myself isn’t me at all.” He tugged off his hat, tossing it aside on the table, running a hand through his hair. “I like you, Amanda. I like you, but you need to know I’m not normal. I don’t know how to be normal. Or more exciting, for that matter. The real me is a man with panic disorder who wears a beanie when it’s one-hundred degrees outside and tries to pass it off as fashion. I don’t want to bore you to death the way I did with Emma. I put her to sleep once. At dinner, she literally fell asleep on me one evening. Right at the fucking table. Sorry, I’m either the Chaz version of myself or the put-you-to-sleep version.”

  He took out his wallet and pulled out a few bills. Wait, was that it? We’d only been in this restaurant for a grand total of ten minutes. Now he was ready to go? I wished I wasn’t pregnant because a few drinks together right now might be just what was needed.

  “I want more pie,” I practically shouted at him as he started to stand. “I’m not done. I’m eating for two. Don’t rush me, please.”

  He was so freaking polite. He put the dollars back in his wallet just as fast as he’d pulled them out to leave.

  And he sat back down.

  “Fuck,” I said to him, shaking my head. “I’m not really hungry still. I’m doing this thing where I eat tiny meals all day, so I don’t vomit. My doctor suggested it for the morning sickness I’m having. As long as my stomach never gets fully empty, and I don’t eat too much, I don’t get nauseated. So no more pie for me. But you, I just want more of you. All versions please. Even Chaz. That’s a terrible nickname for yourself, by the way. Terrible. Can we call your alter ego for yourself anything else?”

  That elicited a smile on this handsome man’s lips. “What do you have in mind?”

  “Brad?”

  He laughed out loud. He got my sarcasm. Brad was equally as bad as Chaz. He reached for his hat and he tugged it back on. “You’re good at that,” he commented.

  “At what?” What was his hat about? Part of his Chaz persona? Now I wondered. I wondered why he liked to wear it all the time, even when it was warm.

  “At making me smile.” He reached across the table and he touched a strand of my hair, similar to the way he had on my porch. “I always smile twice as much when I’m with you. Sometimes my cheeks hurt because you make me smile so hard.”

  “We should go now,” I muttered. I was feeling flushed, a little dizzy, and a whole lot of lust for this man. That was hands down one of the sweetest things any man had ever said to me.

  Who the hell was he?

  Really. Not Chaz. Not Emma’s boring ex. Not some random customer anymore. Freaking A—I was crushing hard on this guy. All his strangeness and randomness only made him more attractive to me. And right now, I wanted back in his bed. Only, I didn’t want to keep to my side tonight.

  ~ CHAPTER 29 ~

  NICK

  Amanda came home with me. She rode in my car. She walked up the wooden stairs, rather than sneaking in the sliding glass doors in the back to my room, and she stood with me while I unlocked the front door. “You need to meet Lou,” I muttered to Amanda. Then louder, into the house, I shouted, “Lou! I’m back!”

  Because Lou was home.

  She was always home.

  I wanted to give her a warning so she could either run to her room or prepare for Amanda coming in through the door.

  She must have run to her room. Because Amanda and I walked inside, and Lou wasn’t in the living room. I brought home a slice of key lime pie in a to-go box for her. I bet she’d never tried key lime before in her life. I grabbed a pen in the kitchen, wrote Lou’s name on it, and shoved it in the fridge. She’d find it later.

  Amanda sat down at one of the kitchen barstools. Her stomach was still just as flat as the day I met her. I wondered how long before her body would start to show the pregnancy. Suddenly, thoughts about the baby being Finn’s crept into my mind.

  One minute I’d be convinced—absolutely convinced—the baby was mine. Then the next all these doubts would come slipping into my brain. What if she hadn’t lied? What if it was Finn’s? I wanted to have the same attitude about the baby, about helping her after it came, regardless of whether or not I was the father. But to be honest, despite the way I’d always felt about having a child of my own, about fearing any kid of mine would have panic disorder like me, I wanted the baby to be mine so damn bad. I guess, the more time that passed where I didn’t know with absolutely certainty it was mine, the more I began to believe it wasn’t.

  “Let’s go to bed,” I said to her.

  I was stuck in my head, my emotions running all over the place, and I wanted her as a distraction before I ended up having a panic attack instead.

  She followed me down the hall, back to my room. I flipped on the light, closing the door behind us. She gave me a small smile, touching my arm, and she walked deeper into my room. She took off her shoes, leaving them by my dresser where she always left them when she came in. She tugged off her skirt and the leggings she’d worn tonight, dropping them both to the floor.

  Then in her shirt and just her underwear, she crawled into my bed. The way she smiled at me...

  Wow.

  What a fucking invitation that was.

  “I need to, um, use the bathroom. I’ll be back in a minute,” I muttered, fumbling with my words. Then I left. Shit, any sane man would have been in bed with such a beautiful, sexy woman, inside her, making love to her body, in two seconds flat without a care in the world. Not me. I was out of the room and up the stairs that led to the top level only seconds later.

  At Lou’s door, I knocked softly.

  “Lou, it’s me. Just me. Can we talk?”

  Lou cracked the door open only an inch wide. I saw one of her pale blue eyes through the small crack. “What?”

  “How confident are you about the baby being mine?” I whispered to her. “How confident are you that it isn’t Finn’s? Like on a scale of one to ten. Ten being the most confident. What made you so certain that day in our yard?”

  “What?” she said to me, not giving me even two inches of space to talk to her. “How was dinner?”

  “Boring. Fine. Finn was there. He talked to me like we weren’t enemies.”

  “Maybe you aren’t.”

  “Bullshit. He’s probably just as full of shit as I am. He probably only asked me all the polite questions that he asked because he’s Amanda’s friend. Or maybe, more likely, because he’s in love with her too, and wanted to seem like a nice person. I don’t really know. It just occurred to me that he probably knows her much better than I do. He probably knows how to make her scream about a million fucking times better than me. You know, given their ‘casual sexual relationship’. Probably used to screw all the time at work, I would imagine. And he probably is the fucking father because why would she lie? Why would she lie about that to me?”

  “Where is Amanda now? Did she go home?”

  “No, she’s in my bed. She’s waiting for me.”

  “Okay, first of all... thanks for that visual of Finn making her scream. I didn’t need that in my head. Second of all, you said the word ‘probably’ about fifty times just now. Third, you said, ‘in love with her too,’ implying you love her as well as Finn. Go be with your girlfriend. Go cuddle your girlfrie
nd. Stop talking to me. She has the answers to your questions. I don’t.”

  Lou closed the door.

  She actually closed the door on me.

  Did I say that? In love with her too.

  Christ, I had said that. Now my heart was racing right out of my chest. Part of me considered sinking to the floor outside Lou’s bedroom, riding out the panic attack I could feel was coming at me full force. But I didn’t stay in the hallway.

  I hurried back to my room. Back to Amanda.

  I tossed my hat on the floor, flipped off the light, and I moved into bed with her. “I’m freaking the fuck out,” I said to her in all honesty. I curled into her and I buried my face against her chest.

  Why couldn’t I make love to her like a normal person? Nope, not me. Now instead I was about to showcase all my craziness to her once again. I could feel a panic attack coming, rushing like a tidal wave, straight at me. The thing was, I realized, having a panic attack with her next to me, as sucky as that was, as much as I hated having her witness it, going through that with her was about a million times less sucky than having a panic attack alone.

  ~ CHAPTER 30 ~

  AMANDA

  It was happening again. Nick was having another panic attack. Rather than turning his back to me like last time, he pulled me closer and buried his face against my chest. His breath was hot and rapid, coming through the fabric of my shirt.

  I dug my fingers into his thick hair, holding onto his head, wishing all over again I knew what to do. It was terrifying, feeling so hopeless, while I waited for him to get through it.

  But he got through it. In only a few minutes, his breathing peaked and slowed. He calmed, but my heart kept on beating like mad to the tune of how heightened his rushed, shallow gulps of air had been.