knee over the top of the stool right next to me to save it.
Under normal circumstances, I would have helped make the juices, but I really did need to get this conversation over with.
But as one minute went by and then another, and those two turned into five and Noah still wasn’t there, this feeling of just… being resigned… of being over this shit fully hit me.
I glanced down at my watch to see that it was five forty-four.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” the voice that belonged to Noah said over my shoulder a second before the stool I’d been saving for him got pulled out from under my thigh.
Five forty-six.
Some form of disappointment made my chest tighten. Pasting a blank look on my face, I waited until he’d taken the stool, watching his movements. The expectant look on his face was almost enough to get me to want to be nice to him while we did this.
But… nah.
Grandpa Gus said that when you made your bed, you had to sleep in it. So don’t shit or piss in it.
And like with a lot of things, he was fucking right. You made your choices in life, and you had to deal with them. There weren’t take backs. You could never and should never expect a second chance.
“Don’t be pissed. I forgot how much traffic there was,” he said in a huff that pierced my chest a little tighter. He was apologizing because he knew being late drove me nuts. Because he’d known me so well for a while there.
“I’m not,” I told him honestly, because I wasn’t. “I’ve got… thirteen minutes before I have something else I need to do, so I hope you can summarize whatever it is that you need to say in that amount of time.”
“Thirteen?”
I’d told him I was busy, hadn’t I?
“Jesus, Lenny, you can’t reschedule to hang out with me?”
Did he not know me at all? He remembered enough to know that being late drove me fucking batshit. The fact that he didn’t care enough about me and my time to leave early enough and spend the time he wanted to spend with me didn’t bother me.
This was what I expected.
Sometimes you really did outgrow people, no matter how much they meant to you at some point.
“No, I can’t,” I told him calmly. “Twelve minutes now, Noah. What’s up?”
His face went red, and he said, “Are you—” He cut himself off. Of course I was serious. He knew it. His hand went up to his face and brushed the short blond hair to the side, the back of his hand going up to draw a line across his forehead. “Len, I’m sorry. Jesus. I thought you were bullshitting.”
No, he hadn’t.
I slid my gaze to the right so that I wouldn’t roll my eyes.
And when I did that, I immediately spotted the three people sitting at one of the tables across the walkway from the juice bar. There was one green and one beet red drink in between them. And a bottle there too.
A baby bottle.
The two biggest—the two adults—were both staring over at where I was sitting. And if my eyes weren’t deceiving me, Grandpa Gus and Jonah were sitting there muttering to each other, with Mo standing on top of Jonah’s thighs; she was the only innocent party in this entire thing.
I wanted to be surprised. I wanted to ask myself if they were fucking for real. These two people who barely spoke to each other—mostly because Grandpa Gus still hadn’t allowed himself to join the Jonah bandwagon—apparently deciding that they were each the lesser evil, and they were now banding together to spy on me.
Goddamn it.
Goddamn it.
I couldn’t fucking laugh.
I could not fucking laugh even if it fucking killed me.
These idiots….
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Noah move his body so that he faced the stool I was on, reminding me of why I was there and why I had to ignore the wannabe retired CIA agent and whatever secret service New Zealand had. Those two….
Peter was going to die with me when I told him about their little meetup.
One of Noah’s hands went to rest at the top of the bar counter, those navy eyes focused directly on me, searching and searching… like he hadn’t seen me before. He looked sad and a little tired and stressed. I’d forgotten he’d lost his last fight, and there was no way that hadn’t stung his ego.