Chapter Six
JORDAN
“Nikki!” I exclaimed, dropping my phone like a hot potato as soon as I ended the call. “What’re you doing here?”
Nicole’s eyes, so similar to those emerald hues to her father’s, fluttered closed, and the door slammed shut behind her. “Best friend time. I need it, so I’m calling it.”
When she opened her eyes again, she smiled weakly and made her way to my kitchen. We were as comfortable in each other’s houses as we were in our own, and it had never bothered me.
Until now.
I felt weird being around Nicole after what happened. For the first time ever, it was hard to be around her. And it sucked. Big time.
Nicole and I often joked that we were soulmates, because it was like we were two sides of the same coin. Being her best friend came as easily to me as breathing.
At least, it used to. I felt awkward around her today. Thankfully, she was babbling on about how much of a jackass her brand new ex-boyfriend was, and she was keeping too busy making us both coffee to notice that I wasn’t really saying anything.
She spun to face me, handing me a steaming mug and sighing happily as she breathed in the scent of coffee beans that hung in the air. Blowing on her mug, her eyes finally turned curious. “Why are you so quiet?”
“I’m not.” I briefly considered telling her the truth instead of covering it up with a lie, but the one time I’d told her that I had a thing for her dad, she’d called me disgusting and told me that if I ever did anything with him, she’d never talk to me again.
Because of that, I knew that I couldn’t tell her the truth. There was no telling how she would react, and I didn’t want to lose her over this. Chances were that I would if she ever found out.
Nicole stared at me pointedly, cocking her hip against the kitchen counter, her gaze rooting to me to my spot. I tried desperately to ignore the guilt that was festering like a ball in my stomach and swallowed past a lump in my throat.
“Okay, I am being quiet. But it’s just because I’m distracted.”
“Really, I couldn’t tell,” Nicole joked, blowing on her coffee again, clearly waiting for me to spill the beans. She prompted me when I was quiet for too long, since it seemed that I’d forgotten how to form the right words. “Well, what’s on your mind?”
Even if I couldn’t tell Nicole the truth about who I had been with, I wanted to tell her that I’d finally lost my virginity. I wanted to tell her every magical detail about my night. Everything always seemed to feel real to me only after I’d shared it with her.
She was the tick to my tock, the paper to my ink.
I didn’t want to hide anything more from her than I absolutely had to. Chewing on my bottom lip, I sank into a rickety chair at my dining room table. I couldn’t hold back anymore. “I finally did it.”
“You finally did it?” Nicole’s eyes grew wider than saucers, and her coffee mug hit the dining room table with a loud thump, causing some of the liquid to trickle down the side of her bright pink mug. “Wait, by it, you do mean sex, right?”
“Yeah, I’m mean sex.” My cheeks grew hot and my palms clammy.
Calm down, I ordered myself. Nicole told me every sordid detail of her sex life. I should be comfortable saying the damn word around her.
She let out a loud squeal and dropped into the chair across from me, leaning forward excitedly, coffee all but forgotten. “What? When? With who? How was it? Why didn’t you text me?!”
Her questions came out so fast that they all sounded like one word. I couldn’t help but laugh a little at her enthusiasm. This was exactly why I had to tell her.
“It’s not like I was going to pull out my phone in the middle of it and say, ‘oh, wait. Let me just let my best friend know that you’re about to hump me’.”
Nicole rolled her eyes, laughing with me. “Don’t say ‘hump’ again. Ever.”
I crossed myself in a joking promise, making her laugh harder. “Never again, but really. When did you want me to text you?”
“After,” Nicole said, sighing exasperatedly. “So, spill it. When? Who? Did you come? It’s okay if you didn’t.” She paused, then let out another excited squeal at my expression. “Oh my god. You totally did!”
I nodded, feeling like my cheeks were about to burst into flames when I whispered the next part of my confession. “Twice.”
“Squee!” Nicole roared, a wide smile on her face. “Details, I need details.”
“It was last night,” I said, and the smile fell from Nicole’s face almost instantly, a deep crease marring the patch of skin between her dark eyebrows.
“Wait, weren’t you with my dad last night?” Her eyes narrowed in suspicion.
Shit. I’d forgotten I’d texted her before I met Brad in the lobby to tell her I was going out with her dad and the people from work to celebrate my first week. I was supposed to meet up with her and her newly-minted ex, but I thought that since it was a work thing, I couldn’t blow it off.
Little did I know. My heart was thundering in my chest, my mind suddenly blank.
“I, uh.” I coughed, trying my very best to get it together. “Yes, I was. But it was after.”
“After?” she asked, arching a brow suspiciously.
“Yes. After the work thing.” Surprisingly, I managed to keep my voice even.
Nicole relaxed a little, but her spine was still ramrod straight. “Who was the guy?”
Who, indeed. “Just a guy that I met out at a bar.”
“You went out by yourself after the work thing?” Nicole sounded hurt and still suspicious. “Why didn’t you come meet up with us? You never go out by yourself.”
Fuck. I was really bad at this whole trying to cover up a lie to my friend thing. “It was a long week. There was a bar near the restaurant we had dinner at. I popped in for a drink and to blow off some steam. It just kind of happened from there.”
Nicole sank back into her seat, reaching for her coffee and taking a long sip of the cooling liquid. I crossed my fingers and my toes that she would believe me, that she’d stop asking questions that were going to make me lose her if she ever got to the bottom of them.
No, it won’t be her questions that’ll do it, It’s what you did that’s going to make you lose her if she ever finds out. The unwelcome thought broke free into my mind, but I pushed it back. That wasn’t happening. I wasn’t losing Nicole.
Finally, another smile spread on her face, and the tension in her shoulders relaxed, her emerald eyes soft and excited again. “So, tell me more. I want to know everything.”
I did as she asked, saving only the most private of details, and of course, the man’s real name. Nicole listened closely, sighing when I was done with the story. “Sounds like you picked the right one for your first time. Are you going to see him again?”
Brad’s voice earlier, telling me to call him back later, played in my mind. “I think so.”
“Good, you deserve a little fun,” she told me, but the corners of her mouth turned down.
Now that my secret was out there, sort of, anyway, I took a good, hard look at my best friend for the first time since she’d arrived. Her eyes were lightly rimmed with red, like she’d cried a bit and hadn’t slept well.
Nicole’s usually squared shoulders were a little droopy, and her borderline black hair, also the exact same color as her dad’s, lacked its usual careful styling. Instead, it was piled in a messy bun on top of her head.
She was wearing yoga pants and an oversized shirt. All was not well in Nicole-land.
“So, now that I’ve told you all about my night, what’s going on with you? What happened between you and David?”
Nicole sighed, then got up to cross my open-area house from the small dining room table to sink into a sofa. She lay flat on her back, folded her arms across her stomach and launched into what an ass the guy was. As she was talking, I found my thoughts drifting to Brad every so often.
No matter how many times I told myself to stop, I just couldn’t get the man out of my mind.