1. Nelly

Chapter 1

Nelly

W ith a half-empty margarita in my hand that was missing far too much of its salt, I stared down at my phone and the Instagram post that filled its screen.

A rock sunk into the pit of my stomach.

The bar's low hum faded away as the news sank in. I felt the urge to run, to leave my drink and bolt before Rosie came back with our second round. The feeling gnawed at me, making my legs twitch.

Morris was getting married.

It shouldn’t have bothered me. At least, not in the way that it did . But despite how awful of a person he was, it wasn’t exactly enjoyable to learn that my ex-fiancé was marrying my ex-best friend. It didn’t help close up any of those old wounds that had been taking their damn sweet time to heal. If anything, it tore at a handful of carefully placed stitches.

“Hello? Earth to Nelly.”

Pastel yellow nails waved between my phone and my face, dragging my attention away from the horrors on my screen. Rosie stood at the edge of the booth’s table, one hand on her hip, her dark, dyed red hair hanging over one shoulder as she stared at me with an uncompromising, flat expression.

“I spoke to you like five times. My card’s not working,” she said, her brows creasing as her gaze dropped lower to the image up on my screen. “Who’s that?”

“Doesn’t matter.” I powered off the screen and reached into my purse, searching blindly for my wallet. “What’s wrong with your card?”

“Think the bank put another hold on it. I need to call them, but the bartender already made our drinks and is getting annoyed with me for not paying. I can pay you back.”

I plopped my wallet into her waiting hand. “More late-night ordering from random Japanese sites flag it up again?”

Rosie’s nose scrunched up as her lips pursed together, her fingers closing around the black leather. “You know, when you say it like that, it makes me feel like you think I should be ashamed.”

“There’s only so many times I can feel bad for you being scammed.”

She scoffed and turned on her heel, returning to the bar as she thumbed through my wallet.

The temptation to unlock my phone and look at literally anything other than what I’d seen, purely to take my mind off it as I sat there alone with nothing but my thoughts, was maddening — but I’d shut off the screen with the image still up. I’d have to look at it the moment it recognized my face.

Morris was one of those men who wormed their way into your heart when they had no good reason to. He wasn’t a great partner, he wasn’t some walking, talking god that made every woman stop and stare, he wasn’t some prince charming that had swooped in at the right place and right time to whisk me off my feet. But he was someone I’d given five years of my life to, from the moment we met my freshman year of college until days after my twenty-third birthday. He was someone I grew with, someone I learned with, and in the two years that had passed since we’d broken off our engagement, I’d had to repair myself brick by brick.

And Ruby’s engagement to him felt like someone had just slammed a giant wrecking ball against all the hard work I’d done.

“You can’t be that sour about me using your card. I said I’d pay you back,” Rosie said, her words breaking through the building storm in my head. She hoisted herself back into the raised booth after setting my second margarita in front of me, her fingers wrapped tight around a Long Island iced tea. She plopped my wallet back onto the table between us, the leather sticking to the epoxy atop the myriad of different printed images of newspapers.

“It’s fine.”

She rolled her eyes and placed her hand over my phone instead, dragging it back to her with a squeaking sound as my phone case rubbed against the tabletop. Across the bar, a group of men erupted into a fit of cheers, and the large screen played a slow-motion replay of someone scoring a touchdown from a million different angles. It snagged my attention just long enough for her to swipe open my phone and type in my password.

“Rosie…”

“ Jesus ,” she breathed, the sound barely cutting through the noise of Smokey’s Bar. The light of my phone screen lit her face and reflected off her red curls, and all I could manage was a sigh. “Why didn’t you say that Morris was engaged? ”

“Because I’m still processing it.”

“Wait, is that…” With her thumb and index finger on the screen, she spread them, zooming in. “Oh my God, that’s Ruby, right?”

I nodded. Rosie had met both of them briefly before I’d called everything off — I’d only just started working for her in the last few months of our relationship, and since then, we’d grown increasingly close. She knew pretty much everything about me and Morris and what had gone down. She’d helped me pick up the pieces when I was still just a fresh face at her nannying business.

“Do you want me to kneecap him?” Her lips wrapped around her straw innocently as she passed my phone back, blinking as if she hadn’t said something utterly deranged.

“No, but thanks for the offer,” I chuckled half-heartedly. “It just feels a bit like a stab in the chest, you know?”

“Understandable. He’s a fucking asshole.”

“I mean, on one hand, yes,” I sighed. “But on the other, he wanted kids, and I couldn’t give that to him. Is it my fault he didn’t believe me? I wasn’t what he envisioned. We never should have been engaged in the first place.”

Rosie blinked at me as she sucked from her straw, the cocktail slowly disappearing from her glass. “Nell, no.”

“What?”

“You’re defending him again.”

“I’m not.”

She rolled her eyes dramatically, her fluttering fake lashes lowering over her eyes in irritation. “You told him at the start that you couldn’t get pregnant. Correct?”

“Yeah, but…”

“He strung you along for five years, having blind faith every time you brought it up. He pretended he was fine with the idea of you not being able to have children without medical intervention because he didn’t believe you. And the moment he tagged along to one of your gyno appointments, and they asked if you’d be considering IVF after the wedding, he lost his goddamn mind because his fragile view of reality was smashed to pieces.”

The disgust was evident on her face, from how her brows furrowed to the slight curl of her upper lip.

“And instead of being a man and admitting he’d fucked up and didn’t want to pursue things any further, he started sleeping with your best friend. And now he’s marrying her. You have every right to be upset about this.”

I bit back the urge to down the entirety of my margarita in one gulp. I’d been trying not to remind myself of every little detail, but here we were. I settled for licking the salt off the rim and downing half, trying my absolute best to appear fine .

But I wasn’t fine. It felt like a hurricane was brewing inside of my chest.

“If anything, Rosie, it all just makes me feel inadequate.”

————

Rosie had insisted on celebrating instead of wallowing. She’d also insisted on starting a tab so she wouldn’t have to keep feeling bad about taking my card every time she got us drinks.

But that meant that when her Uber arrived earlier than expected, and she had to run, I was left to wander up to the bar tipsy and alone to settle the tab.

It was fine. I was fine . The alcohol and the chats and the shit-talking had calmed me down enough, but there was still a part of me that feared going back to my apartment alone and the weight of it all crashing down on me, submerging me, drowning me.

“I just need to settle my tab. Table…uh…” I turned to glance behind me, hopeful I could see the little number embossed on the edge of the table, but my eyes were tired, and my contacts were starting to scratch, and the moment I thought I had a clear enough view, a waitress covered it with her body as she started cleaning it down.

“Eighteen,” the bartender said, dragging my attention back to him as he absentmindedly polished a glass. “You’re the only one who started a tab this evening.”

“Oh.”

“Tuesday nights aren’t exactly popular for long stays.” The cash register popped open and he plucked my card from one of the slots, handing it back across the counter.

I tried not to let his words rub me the wrong way — it wasn’t my fault that Rosie and I mostly worked weekends lately. Weekdays were our best days to go out. “Your total is eighty dollars and twenty-seven cents.”

The bar stool creaked beside me, and a second later, as I slid my card into the reader, an unfamiliar voice filled the space from my right.

“Weak tab.”

I chuckled and typed my pin behind the shield of my hand. “Yeah, well, there were only two of…”

Oh my God.

I hadn’t even noticed him sitting there when I walked up, but the timbre of his voice, low and smooth with a touch of humor, had intrigued me enough to turn the moment my card slipped from the machine — and I swear, I knew how to breathe, but it was like my body somehow forgot.

He leaned forward on the bartop, one hand casually holding up a short glass of something amber, looking entirely too comfortable in his own skin. Brown waves of hair fell around his temples effortlessly but somehow deliberately, like he’d taken the time to style it in that way that looked the right amount of messy, framing a face that could have been carved by Michelangelo himself — sharp and angular jaw, high cheekbones, and those fucking lips curved up in a slight, knowing grin. But it was his eyes that roped me in, held me like a vice grip for half of a second too long, their warm, blue depths catching the dim light of Smokey’s just enough to make them glisten.

The rest of him was somehow just as demanding. Broad shoulders with built arms that strained at the leather of his jacket, the faintest outline of muscles beneath his white tee, the way… Christ, the way his jeans hugged his thighs and told me they could probably break a watermelon between them like I’d see that guy online do. He looked like he could hold his own without even trying, without even lifting a fucking pinky.

“You good? You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he laughed. Shit, even that sound was pretty.

Oh my god, Nelly, stop staring, stop staring, stop ? —

“Yes, sorry, I, uh, I think I left my oven on at home,” I blurted, grabbing my purse from the bartop and frantically searching the inside for my wallet. I just needed to put my card away, check where my Uber was, and get the hell out of there before I did something absolutely absurd like stay and try to talk to this man. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to…”

Apparently, the death grip I thought I had on my bag wasn’t nearly tight enough, and the dark brown leather satchel tumbled to the ground, knocking the flap open and spilling the contents.

All of the contents.

My wallet, my keys, my stupid handfuls of change, my business cards.

When I was seven, back when the world was easy, and I was still full of questions, my mom and I played soccer with these little makeshift cones as a goal in our front yard. She always wanted to be the goalie since I had so much more energy. I remembered a day in the middle of the Georgia summer heat, the weather so humid it made my hair start to curl. It felt like I was breathing in water at the bottom of a pool. I had kicked the ball a little too hard, and it bounced straight out of the storm drain and into the road. I’d run for it despite Mom’s shouts not to, and the moment I’d grabbed the ball, I came to the horrifying realization that a truck about four times my size was barreling straight toward me.

And I froze.

The truck had gone around me in the end, but Mom had spent the next few days talking non-stop on the phone to her friends about how her daughter hadn’t ended up with the fight response or the flight response.

No, I got the freeze response, and I’d never been able to kick it. And right there, in the middle of the emptying bar with one of the most attractive men I’d ever spoken to in my life staring at me, I froze as I stared down at the curved, deep purple silicone with fucking air pulse technology . It made me want to throw myself off of the Jackson Street bridge onto the solid, hot tarmac beneath it. It made me wish that the truck hadn’t swerved when I was seven.

The damn thing had the audacity to gurgle violently from the lack of suction. Something must have pressed against the power button as it tumbled out.

Every millisecond that passed felt like an hour felt like the world had tilted on its axis and I was slipping into frigid waters like the passengers on the Titanic. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe , could only feel my cheeks heat and heat and heat?—

A set of strong fingers wrapped around the silicone and held the top button to shut it off, and I wanted to fucking die.

It didn’t even have a power symbol. I couldn’t let my brain run wild with what that meant, with the idea that he’d held one before, used it, knew it well enough to know the buttons…

Jesus, I was hitting new lows tonight after the Morris bullshit.

“I-I’m…”

Trying to get words out was fucking pointless, but as I squatted down to take it from his hands, he was already down beside me, already shoving it into the opening of my purse. “It’s fine,” he said, but there was a lilt to his voice, an air of amusement that sent a shiver down my spine.

He started grabbing the rest of my things before I could stop him. “I’ve, uh, I’ve got hand sanitizer in here somewhere?—”

He laughed, his nose crinkling as I forced myself to look at his face. “Well, I mean, if it was used recently, then yes, please.”

“It…it was clean,” I choked, my hand absentmindedly searching for the little container at the bottom of my bag as he held my wallet with an absurd amount of patience. With one knee on the ground and the other bent, his jeans strained , and I had to force myself not to let my eyes drift. “I haven’t, uh, used it…recently…”

The Jackson Street bridge was on my way home. I could so, so easily convince my Uber driver to let me off there and let me end it all.

He sucked his teeth for a moment and deposited my wallet back into my back, holding out an empty palm for a dollop of Purell. But it was the words he spoke and the way his lips tilted up at one side that made every hair on my body stand on end, made my pulse skyrocket, and made the cogs in my brain come to a screeching halt.

“Maybe we should fix that.”