Page 80 of Boyfriend of the Hour

My reaction didn’t make sense. He wasn’t overtly coming on to me. Between being a dancer and just being a red-blooded teenager growing up in New York, I’d experienced more than a lifetime of that kind of stuff. I’d been on the receiving end of catcalls since my tits had popped out, had been sneaking out to nightclubs before I could even drive, and had learned the art of flirting in a bar as soon as I got my braces off. Kids in New York grew up fast, and I was no different.

But this was different. I shouldn’t be reacting to what was, on his end, just a basic conversation about anatomy.

It occurred to me that these lessons were bullshit. Not because Nathan wasn’t socially awkward—he was. But I didn’t know how to tell him that his lack of game and absence of pretense was sexier than any line I’d ever gotten. There was something so unbearably hot about a man who looked at you without a shifty, unpredictable gaze. Who just straight out said he wanted to be with you instead of spitting games or shouting catcalls. Who didn’t try to hide it at all.

Nathan didn’t need to learn to flirt. He just needed to find a girl he really liked and tell her straight out. If she didn’t appreciate his brand of honesty, then she didn’t deserve him.

The idea of him with another woman struck a nasty chord ofwrongthrough my stomach. I pushed it away and was about to tell him to throw all my advice out the window and just be himself when we were rudely interrupted.

“Joni?”

A deep voice I had genuinely hoped I’d never hear again echoed through the bar and down the little path it had created in my soul over the last eight years.

It had been four months since I’d heard it. Since that shifty gaze and insinuating smile had last landed on me.

Back in my life.

Again.

Fuck.

“Who is that?”

Nathan had turned on his stool toward the owner of the voice, who was currently making his way through the bar.

I ground my teeth and nodded in the direction of the voice.

“That’s…Shawn,” I said with a heavy sigh. “He was sort of…my boyfriend. Or something like that.”

FOURTEEN

WHY SHAWN VAMOS SHOULD WALK OFF A BRIDGE

#28 That naked lady tatoo on his butt. Wy have a butt on your butt??

“You have a boyfriend?”

Momentarily, I was reminded of Wiley E. Coyote after he’d been run over several times. Punch drunk—I supposed that’s what you would call Nathan’s expression.

Addled.

Or maybe a little heartbroken.

I shook the thought away. It was ridiculous. Nathan and I were friendly roommates with a weird kind of arrangement. There was absolutely no reason for him to be sad if I was involved with someone else.

Which I wasn’t. Not really.

Or maybe I was.

“Er, had. Not exactly, but, um, sort of—” I started to say, but couldn’t make it any further before I was interrupted by the bane of my existence—otherwise known as Shawn fucking Vamos.

“Joni, what the fuck?” Shawn stepped up to the bar right next to Nathan as if he and every other person in Opal were just another piece of furniture.

It was what had attracted me to him in the first place. I’d never seen anyone do that—walk into any room like they owned it without breaking a sweat.

That particular talent hadn’t changed in the years since we’d met, and neither had his typical uniform of ripped jeans, a designer T-shirt that revealed two arms full of tribal tattoos, and a thick silver chain that gleamed against his smooth chest. His short black hair and groomed stubble also remained constants. The only real differences now were in the way his shirts were a little tighter around the midsection and the new filling that flashed gold with the others when he smiled, matching the two small hoops in his left earlobe. At fourteen, I’d thought his teeth made him look like a pirate, but now I recognized them as a marker of bad dental hygiene.

“I’ve been trying to reach you for weeks,” he said in his thick Newark accent. “Even went all the way up to your grandma’s shitty house, but apparently, she doesn’t live there no more, and neither do you. What the fuck happened?”