with zero debt. Unfortunately, good looks, money, and that easy-to-win-over heart of his was another bad combination on his part.
“You don’t want to frame me with the dirt I’ve got on you,” he teased. “Dirt that I’m pretty sure you forgot during several alcoholic blackouts.”
A car horn blared behind us, and we moved out of the way so that Tayler could pull into the spot next to mine. Her slim, curly dreadlocks were in another one of her famous buns piled on her head and adorned by a colorful headband. She was beautiful, extremely beautiful, but she never gave it a passing thought.
Tayler and I initially met in medical school when she’d stolen both mine and Kellen’s attention from our textbooks walking into the Eisenhower Library. She had an amazing reddish-brown complexion that reminded me of a California redwood, and which came from a mixture of her mother’s Ghanaian and her father’s Cuban heritage. Her eyes were the same color as mine, a killer combination when you added their oval shape and her dark lashes, and she’d sported locs for as long as we’ve known her although she never let them grow longer than the middle of her back. As she stepped out the car, I thought about how much I couldn’t wait for Alexandra to meet both her and Kellen.
“Of course you two would be standing in the middle of a parking spot on a busy Saturday evening,” she joked, wrapping me up in a hug. “How are you guys doing?”
“Starving,” Kellen answered.
She eyed him. “What’s her name?”
“What’s whose name?”
“The woman that you’ve fallen in love with in Atlanta.”
He grinned sheepishly and glanced away. Whoever this woman was, she had him by the balls.
“Let’s get inside,” he said, turning towards the restaurant. Tayler and I exchanged glances, laughed, and followed him.
I’D BROUGHT ALEXANDRA up in the middle of our conversation three times already; my friends were keeping count. I also need to mention that we were still working on appetizers so it wasn’t as though I’d only brought her up three times during the course of our entire dinner.
“We’ll stop picking on you if you just tell us about her,” Tayler said, scrunching her nose in distaste as Kellen popped calamari into his mouth.
“There’s nothing to say,” I lied, a smile winning out against my battle to keep a serious expression.
“Oh my god, she even has you doing the shy smile?” She pinched my cheek and I pulled away, but the smile didn’t die.
“At least tell us her actual name,” she added, sticking her fork into the shrimp remoulade that we shared. “Have we met this Alle? Have you ever talked about her before?”
“You guys haven’t met her,” I answered. “And I might have talked about her once or twice.”
Kellen chewed on another piece of his fried squid. “Alexandra Miller.”
My head popped up. “How did you know that?”
“I met her.” He turned to Tayler. “Once, when I stopped by his office, we were getting ready to leave to play ball at the park nearby, but then he told me that he had to make sure to say good night to a woman named Alexandra.”
“How the hell do you remember that?” I asked. “I’m pretty sure that was nearly a year ago.”
“Because the woman is beautiful.”
“And you remember her because of that?”
“That and the fact that I came back later to try to get her number.”
I eyed him. “And what happened?”
“Nothing, nothing,” he asserted. “She told me that she had a boyfriend. Some guy in politics. So, I backed off.”
There was the caveat. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to tell my friends, my good friends, that the boyfriend wasn’t entirely out of the picture. Well, yet.
“So, what happened with him?” Tayler asked, leaning back as the server appeared with our orders. She’d ordered Atlantic lobster-tails with butter on the side while Kellen and I had opted for the Angus porterhouse steaks.
I answered with a succinct, “Well…” and then shrugged as I cut into my piece of meat. Kellen’s mouth fell open and Tayler folded her arms. The expression on her face reminded me of the time she’d scolded Kellen and I like children for roughhousing in one of the fountains on campus after board exams before jumping in herself. It was a look that I was pretty sure she’d gotten from her mother dozens of times as a child.
She opened her mouth to begin her lecture, but then looked to the ceiling before slowly letting her arms fall. “Ethan,