menu, and I swear they’re different every time—sometimes so hot I can hardly stand it, and sometimes more sweet. So there’s like this moment before you take the first bite when you’re kinda scared that it might actually be too hot to handle and make you scream, or it’ll be deliciously sweet and make you moan.”
Noah nodded slowly. “Sounds good.”
“It is.”
Our beers arrived, and Noah grabbed his right away, taking a long drink.
“I suppose,” I said as I picked up my glass, “I should be glad Brooks left, right? I mean, he saved me from a life of potato salad sex.”
Noah set down his beer. “That does sound pretty fucking terrible.”
I took a sip. “So what about you? Are you seeing anyone?”
“Not since Holly.”
Nodding, I ran my thumb up the condensation on the side of my glass. Pictured his ex—a beautiful, blond preschool teacher with dimples and a big chest. To be fair, the couple times I’d met her, she’d seemed perfectly nice, and I had no good reason to dislike her . . . and yet, I kind of did. “What happened there? You’ve never really told me about the breakup.”
He shrugged. “It wasn’t any one thing.”
When he didn’t go on, I groaned. “You’re such a guy. Can you elaborate, please? If it wasn’t any one thing, there were probably several things. Can you talk about any of them?”
His expression told me talking about this breakup was his least favorite thing in the world. But to my surprise, he opened up a little. “She wasn’t very supportive when my dad died.”
My jaw dropped. “What? How can that be? You guys had been together for years, and she had to know how important your dad was to you, to everybody! How could she be so completely heartless?”
He grimaced and drank again, and I felt terrible.
“I’m sorry, Noah.” Reaching across the table, I put a hand on his arm. “That was shitty of me. I never really knew her, and I’m sure she wasn’t completely heartless.”
He stared at my fingers on his wrist for a moment. “It felt that way to me. We had been together for a couple years by then. And she did know how close my family was—that was part of the problem. I think she was jealous.”
I sat back. “Of your family? Are you serious?”
“Yeah. She kind of always resented how much time I spent with them. Not at first, maybe, but after a while, especially after my dad’s cancer diagnosis. There were times when I’d have to break plans she and I had made in order to take Asher somewhere so my mom could be with him, or watch my sister’s kids, or take a shift with my dad at the hospital.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was stunned silent.
“Then when my dad died, I think she was expecting things to get easier, like she’d get more of me. She used to say things like that, and I knew it was supposed to make me feel good, like she just wanted to be with me, but it only made me feel worse.” He drank again. “So I was either letting her down or letting my family down—which felt like letting my dad down. There wasn’t enough of me to go around.”
“Jesus, Noah. That sucks.” My throat tightened up as I recalled how devastated he’d been after his dad’s death. He needed support, not judgment. How could she have treated him that way? My eyes filled. “I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah, well . . .” He focused on the wooden table’s scarred surface. “The final straw came right after that.”
“What was it?”
He took a sip of his beer before answering. “I made an offhand comment about Asher coming to live with me one day. I mean, my mom isn’t getting any younger. And I want her to be able to travel, like she and my dad always planned. She’s spent her entire life taking care of everyone.”
“Sure.”
“And I’m his brother. His twin. It should be me taking care of him. I want it to be me.”
I smiled, even though that lump was still stuck in my throat. “Of course you do.”
“Well, she didn’t see it that way. She said we weren’t doing him any favors by babying him, and that if I was serious about having him live at my house one day, she wasn’t sure she could stay with me.”
“She gave you an ultimatum?”
“Yeah.” He frowned. “She didn’t phrase it like that, but it was clear