Nash
“I’m at the store. Hey, what’s a good yogurt?”
“Theodore Nash, did you hear what I said? She’s not doing good. You should go see her.”
“I haven’t been to Nashville in ten years, and I have no plans to return now.” I stop in front of the cooler.
“But she’s family.”
I scan the variety of yogurts. Who thought it’d be this difficult to pick one?
“You’re my family, Aunt Lauren.” I grab a container. “What about Dannon? That’s a good one, right?”
I check the calories. Jody is big on watching her count. Not that she needs to worry about anything. She’s got the kind of curves most guys like.
My aunt sighs through my cell. “What do you want the yogurt for?”
“Homemade pizza. Jody’s got a recipe for one that takes two ingredients, plain yogurt and flour but the self-rising kind.”
“Oh, it’s Tuesday.” Aunt Lauren’s smile comes through loud and clear on my phone. She loves Jody. “It’s so nice you kids still do that after all of these years. Tell her to send me the recipe, and yes, Dannon is a good one.”
“Thanks.” I grip the container and start down the shopping aisle.
“Now about—”
“Nope.” I shake my head, not that she can see it. “I’m not going back there. You remember what happened the last time.”
“But—”
“Sorry, Aunt Lauren. Now, I gotta get in line. I’ll stop over Thursday and help you move that treadmill. Love ya,” I say before clicking off my phone.
After checking out, I drive to Jody’s.
She answers the door in a baggy T-shirt, yoga pants, and a smirk—no doubt, aimed at me for being fashionably late.
“Did you get the yog—”
I raise the container.
“Thanks!” Her smirk advances to a smile.
She snatches the container from my hand and heads into the kitchen.
“Fuck, Jody. It’s gotta be ninety degrees in here.” I pull off my T-shirt and toss it on the old but still holding its own brown leather recliner. “I know you’re not ready for central air, but you could at least put an air conditioner in the window to cool the place down or something.”
She glances over her shoulder. “If I did, what excuse would you have to strip whenever you came over?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I could think of some other reasons.” I sit on the stool at the small island. “Like strip poker.”
“In your dreams.” She laughs off my sexual innuendo as usual.
“My dreams?” I snatch a pepperoni from the plate and pop it in my mouth. “Most women need an invite to get in there.”
She pulls out a measuring cup and starts to prepare the two-ingredient pizza dough in a bowl.
“I’m not asking for one.” Her eyes flash to mine with a grin. “That’d only happen in your dreams.” She chuckles before going back to concentrate on how much flour she’s dumping into the cup.
I laugh, enjoying my time with her.
I can be me.
There’s no trying to impress her so I can get into her pants.
She’s no fun when it comes to the kind of teasing that leads to a bed anyway.
She’s just not into me like that.
It’s predisposed.
Dead or not, she’s my best friend’s sister.
So I concentrate on the dark mole just below her left eye. Joe had the same one. When I look at the mole, it reminds me who she is and what that means.
“Hey, did you get the job for that charity app you wanted to create?” I change the subject.
“Not yet, but I’m optimistic.” She pours the flour into the bowl. “I just need to convince Ashley, my boss, that I’m the right person for the job.”
“It’s important to you. Go with that.”
“I did, but it’s not enough. It’s like high school all over again at the company. If you’re not in with the popular crowd, then they forget about you. And you know me, I’m super comfortable being a loner.”
“Really?” I raise an eyebrow. “I took you more for one of the smart kids.”
She was the girl in the class who would sit quietly in her chair smiling when the teacher would ask for an answer. She knew the answer but never felt she had to prove it.
“Joey was one of the smart kids. Well, besides the fact that he hung out with you.” She grins.
“Joe was all of the above.” I smile at the high school memories that flood through me. “He was popular. He was a jock. He was smart. Oh, and he was a floater. He’d go from one group to another. Everyone liked him.”
“And through it all, you two remained best friends.” She kneads the dough in the bowl.
“Yeah.” I shrug. It’s true.
Nothing could break the bond Joe and I had. I’m not sure when it started, maybe from when we first met.
We were so different that it never got boring. We did our own things, always told each other the truth, and sure, people were surprised we were best friends, but it made sense to us.
Joe had my back, and I had his.
“So be like Joe. Make everyone like you,” I suggest, knowing how bad she wants to build the damn app. It’s for some noble shit, right up her honorable-alley-ass. Something I envy and respect about her.
“Joey didn’t force people to like him. He was just likable.”
“You’re likable.”
She glances up at me. Her eyes lower to my mouth and then my shirtless chest.
“I like you,” I tell her.
Her straying eyes pop back up to mine, but the linger on my naked chest hadn’t gone unnoticed.
Sometimes, I catch her looking at me oddly. Well, it’s not really odd. I know what the look means when other women do it. And sometimes, I end up in bed with them.
Not Jody. She’s different.
I must be confusing the look because I haven’t gotten laid in a while.
Besides, I can’t have sex with her.
It’s against the bro-code.
Granted, it’s my bro-code. Joe has nothing to do with it. I mean, he never said she was off-limits, but after he died, I made a pact in his honor to keep her safe from guys like me.
So I shut down the hard-on I get from the sight of her perfect tits and wandering eyes. Not to mention the way she bites her plump-pink bottom lip while concentrating on something or how her eyes linger on me for the same amount of time it takes for me to strip her naked in my mind.
All of that shit gets turned right the fuck off.
And I get it done by convincing myself that she doesn’t want me.
She can’t.
She’s had ample opportunity to take advantage of our friendship and never has.
I’ve come to accept that we are the reminiscence of the love we both share for Joe. To be without each other would be like letting him go, and after almost five years, I don’t think either of us is ready to say goodbye.
Hell, as long as I have Jody in my life, I’ll always have Joe.
I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.
Eventually, she’ll meet a guy, and I’ll have to take a back seat to her life … again.
Fuck. I had to do it with Todd. He was perfect. Joe would’ve approved.
Thankfully, the relationship ended, and I got Jody back all to myself.
Yeah, I know. I’m a selfish dickhead when it comes to her.
Honestly, though, something changed after she dated Todd.
I know she lost her virginity, but something else happened.
“Is this where I’m supposed to say, I like you too?” She smirks, biting her bottom lip while pressing the dough into the pizza pan.
“No. I know how you feel about me.” I wink and pick up the DVD on the counter before she has time to come back with another smart-ass remark. “The Meg?”
She loves shark movies but not the stupid ones where they fly in the air like on Sharknado. She’s more into ones like Jaws and The Deep Blue Sea.
“Sorry, The Kissing Booth 3 wasn’t available.” She scrunches her nose and puts the pizza in the oven.
“What’s wrong with a little rom-com once in a while?”
“Nothing.” She shrugs with a snicker as she backs away from the stove.
“Hey, your brother got me into them. He made me watch Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and it was all over.”
“Joey only liked that movie because he got a full-frontal view of Jason Segel.”
“Oh yeah, that’s right.” At the time, I didn’t know Joe was gay. We laughed our asses off about it. “But it was impressive.” I pick up my cell. “Let me see if I can find it for you.”
“That’s okay.” She laughs, placing her hand over mine. “I saw it.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. Mom grounded us for a week when she caught us watching it.”
“Was it the first penis you saw?”
“Shut up.” She shoves me in the chest. Her cheeks turn red, but as usual, she’s quick to recover. “We’re watching The Meg, end of story.” She picks up the DVD and walks into the living room.
Jumping up from the stool, I follow her. “But there are so many great rom-coms like My Best Friend’s Girl, There’s Something About Mary, Say Anything—”
“And don’t forget 10 Things I Hate About You.” She smirks.
I know what she’s doing. So I return, “Or How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days.”
“Huh!” She slips the DVD into the player. “More like five years and still trying,” she mumbles under her breath.
I heard it just the same.
Standing behind her, I get a strong whiff of her feminine scent.
Fuck, she always smells so good. Clean. Like she was just pulled out of the dryer.
I lean in close to her ear. “P.S. I Love You?”
“Oh!” She circles around, eyes wide and sparkling. “I love that movie!”
“Let’s watch that then,” I say with exaggerated excitement lifting my eyebrows. “Oh, wait, that’s right, we can’t.” I drop my brows. “Just like air-conditioning, you don’t have the internet. You really need to get with the times, Walker.”
“I have internet. I just don’t have it hooked up to my TV.” She waves. “Now, go away and put some clothes on.” She plops down on the sofa.
“What’s the problem? It didn’t bother Joe when I sat around in nothing but jeans.” I lean down closer to her. “And he liked my sex.”
“Shut up, smart-ass.” She shoves my chest. “Just because I don’t get all googly-eyed over you doesn’t mean I’m gay.”
“It’s okay if you are.”
“I know it is, asshole!” She throws a pillow at me.
I dodge it.
“Seriously, I just wanted to make sure you knew I’d be okay with it. I know Joe had no problem screaming it out to the world, but you’re the type who probably couldn’t whisper it alone in your own closet.”
“Why are you so obsessed with this?” She sits up on the cushion. “Is it because I don’t want you? Your ego is so big, you need to find some reason as to why I don’t want to fuck you? We’re friends, Nash. Why can’t that be reason enough?”
“It is.” I shrug at the lie, not wanting to make a big deal about it and draw more attention to the unspoken truth. “Want another beer?”
A few seconds later, I enter the small living room and hand her a beer. “But, really, why no internet on your TV?”
I drop onto the sofa next to her.
Her eyes scan over my naked chest.
“I don’t want it, and as far as the air-conditioning, I can’t afford all of that shit,” she says before taking a long sip from the bottle.
“Oh.” I watch her, waiting for her to finish the healthy gulp.
I love that she loves beer. Most girls drink wine or some kind of fruity shit, but Jody, she’s a beer drinker. Not that her body is any evidence of it. She’s in shape and takes care of herself.
I raise a brow. “I could move in and help out with the bills.”
“Oh-ho!” She laughs. “Wouldn’t that be a disaster?”
“Why?”
“Look around.” She waves a hand. “It’d be hard enough to fit all of your clothes, let alone your ego, into this place.”
“That’s not the disaster I thought you were talking about.”
“What other could there be?”
“I figured it was because you might want to sleep with me, ya know, now that we cleared up the whole ‘you’re not gay’ thing.”
“Well…” Her lips pucker. “That could be a problem, I guess.” She stares at me for a long second.
Is she saying she wants to sleep with me? Or better yet, she wants to have sex with me?
Like the hand of a reluctant kid in the classroom with the answer, my dick slowly lifts.
She’s fucking with me.
We don’t tease about shit like this. Instead, I usually say something sexual, she laughs it off or returns with something sarcastic to shut me down, and we carry on.
I lift my beer, still not ready to let the eager rush of blood pump entirely to the tip of my dick.
“There’s only enough room for one bed.” She smiles.
I grin. “Well, that settles it then.” I say, “We’ll have to sleep in it together.”
At the same time, she says, “You won’t be moving in then.”
I flick my brows and curse my dick.
It’s gotta get it together and stop acting up around her. Not getting laid in a while is no excuse.
I’m not giving it free rein when it comes to her.
Not to Joe’s sister.
My eyes lower to her perfect tits.
Fuck!
I smile, tip back my beer, and take a long swig.
Be a good best friend.
Eat your pizza, drink your beer and go home, asshole.