stories focused on one thing: both had grown up in Basingstoke, some town I’d never heard of in England.
Nala laughed whenever it seemed appropriate, the sparkle in her eyes missing their usual brightness.
She ran her finger down the side of her glass, creating fine patterns in the condensation. Her fingers were long and delicate, masking the strength that hid within them.
I should know. I’d felt them wrapped around my cock, stroking my hard length, bringing me to completion.
I shifted in my seat at the memory.
At one point, when it became clear that Nala wasn’t having as much fun as Dani, I mouthed, Do you want to bail?
Neither Dani nor David noticed.
They finally clued in when we stood.
“I’m going to drive Nala home,” I told them, tossing money on the table to cover the bill.
Dani started to stand. The guilt on her face would have been less noticeable if it had been written with a Sharpie.
“No, you stay,” Nala said cheerfully. “You two should’ve been the ones on the date, not me. It was nice meeting you, David. Hopefully, I’ll see you again soon, but under different circumstances.”
She hugged her friend goodbye; then Nala and I exited the pub.
“It’s still early,” she pointed out. “You want to come over to my place to watch a movie?”
“I could go for that.”
Once there, she made popcorn and flipped on Netflix, and we settled on a spy action movie with lots of car chase scenes.
Without paying much attention to what I was doing, I slipped my arm around Nala’s shoulders at some point during the movie. Nala made herself comfortable in the crook of my arm, the popcorn bowl perched on our thighs.
We joked around during the movie like we tended to do. Making wisecracks about something the characters said or did.
Unable to fight back the sudden urge to kiss her, I lightly pressed my lips to the side of her head, taking a brief moment to inhale her soft floral scent. A voice in the recess of my mind pointed out this wasn’t normal behavior between two friends of the opposite gender. The rest of me ignored it.
The closing credits scrolled past, and I sat up. “I should go now. It’s getting late.”
Her gaze dropped to my lips, and all I wanted to do was pull her against me again and kiss her long and deep.
But she had a date with Grant tomorrow, and I had already told him nothing was going on between us. Me kissing her was definitely crossing a line—something I had no intention of doing.
No matter how much I wanted to.
25
Nala
To-do List #602
Clean the bathroom.
Call Mom & Dad.
Pick up dry cleaning.
Don’t tell Eli I’m falling in love with him.
I should have known the moment Eli placed his arm around me that I was doomed.
When I was eight years old, I had dreamed of being a prima ballerina after my parents took me to see The Nutcracker. I begged Mom to sign me up for ballet lessons and fasten a barre to my bedroom wall, so I could spend my free time practicing.
I worked so hard to be the best…but I’d missed one crucial point. I didn’t have what it took to be a prima ballerina. I didn’t even have what it took to be the understudy of the prima ballerina’s understudy.
It wasn’t until my delightful teacher pulled me aside and informed me that I didn’t possess the talent required to pursue my dream that I had come to terms with the truth.
Only she hadn’t put it quite as nicely.
I was devastated. Not even my best friend calling my ballet instructor an old warty-faced troll (not to her face, of course) could cheer me up.
Eventually, reality set in, and I moved on.
In the end, the humiliation had been worth it.
All right, that might’ve been stretching things a bit.
But my instructor had been right. Being a prima ballerina—or a ballerina in general—hadn’t been in my future.
I’d had a different, better future in store for me. A future that my grandmother had predicted the moment she’d seen one of my drawings when I was three years old.
Okay, she might have been a little optimistic back then, but she’d been right—a fact she still loved to remind me about.
Why am I telling you this?
Because eight-year-old me learned that sometimes no matter how much you wanted something, it just wasn’t meant to be.
But while eight-year-old me might have learned that, twenty-eight-year-old me knew you didn’t get anywhere in life if you didn’t take chances.
Still