his wife.
“All of you made bets about me and Rason?”
“I had you holding out for six months,” Jayla admitted.
“I had 10.” Hank shrugged. “I thought you were more sensible than the rest of us.”
“More sensible? You pined after your unicorn for a year!” Mesha laughed.
“I moved in with you after our third date,” Jayla reminded her. “That’s not normal. I thought for sure your sister would be more careful.”
“I’m not moving in with him!”
“Where’s he going to go when all this is over? He’s got nothing,” Mesha reminded me. “He can stay at a friend’s house or you could just move him into yours.”
“I didn’t think about that.”
“Yes, you did,” Nicole argued. “You tried to get him to hide out at your place, but he said no.”
“Is it bad that I kind of miss being an only child right now?”
13.
“I flew back out to California this morning and had brunch with John Hughes.”
Eliza
ELIZA
“What do we do first?” I whispered as I moved closer to Hank.
“We quit whispering and act like we’re supposed to be here,” Hank whispered back and then laughed at me.
“That might be difficult since she’s dressed like Catwoman.” Daughtry laughed.
“Or a French painter,” Mesha mused as she looked me up and down. “She needs a beret.”
“She could be a mime,” Rason’s friend Harley observed. “If she had the beret and some face paint she could definitely pass as a mime.”
“Those creep me out. They’re too much like clowns.” Daughtry grimaced. “You can’t trust anyone that’s that quiet anyway.”
“As much as I am enjoying your critique of my fashion choices, can we please start stealing stuff?” I sighed.
“Sure.” I heard a voice ring out over the back fence of Rason’s house and I jumped. “The door’s unlocked, and there’s not too much debris in front of the back room.”
The gate opened and I saw another of Rason’s friends, Marlin, standing there.
“How did you get in there?” I looked around. “I didn’t even see you pull up.”
“I parked across the street and went through the front of the house.”
“Did you have to pick the lock?”
“Honey, do you not remember what the front of the house looked like when we drove by the other day?” Hank laughed. “He just walked right in through the gaping hole.”
“Oh.”
“I had to climb over some stuff,” Marlin chimed in. “It’s creepy as hell in there. The steering wheel from his Jeep is embedded in the bathroom door. It’s like conceptual art or something.”
“What do you know about conceptual art?” Blaze, another friend of Rason’s who’d shown up a few minutes before, asked.
“I know it’s weird shit like steering wheels sticking out of a door.”
“Can we get to it now?” I asked the group of men. “I don’t want to go to jail. Or prison. Or the pokey.”
“God, you’re funny,” Mesha snorted. “Come on, Catwoman. Let’s go direct traffic.”
◆◆◆
“So this is the infamous love vine,” Nicole mused as she walked around the trellis Hank and the guys had situated in the corner of Nicole’s dining room. One wall of the room was floor to ceiling windows, and I knew it would be perfect for the plant. “How’s it doing?”
“It was really dry, and a few of the vines have some damage, but I think it’s going to make it.”
It had been well past midnight when we got home after “committing the crime of the century”, as Mesha put it. I’d woken up before sunrise after tossing and turning for a couple of hours. As soon as I’d showered and dressed, I’d started pruning the vines and babying them back to health.
“Good,” Nicole said with a smile. “I’m anxious to try some of this fruit. I’ve never even heard of it.”
“It doesn’t really grow well in our climate,” I explained. “I’d never heard of it either until I met Rason.”
“And this is the plant that got you together, huh?”
“It sounds silly, doesn’t it? He came into my bookstore looking for information on how to get it to produce fruit.”
“And you can’t tell him you love him until it does?”
“Sort of.” I could feel a flush of embarrassment rising up my neck. “When we first got together, I had all these feelings about him that I just wasn’t sure about. I think he was feeling the same way, so we decided to wait until we harvested the fruit to talk about it again. You know, to give us some time to think things through before we said or did anything crazy.”
Nicole smiled and then she laughed for