Page 55 of The Write Stuff

I was determined to mean it.

15

FIFTEEN

Our next reader event was at a restaurant I’d been dying to visit. I’d considered taking Wylie — something told me she would be thrilled to pretend she had a peg leg — but we just hadn’t managed it yet. We’d only been eating dinner together for a week and a half, and we were careful to space out our non-date dates. That meant a visit to The Pirates’ House hadn’t happened yet.

“This is fun,” I mused, looking around. There was a statue of a pirate in one corner and what looked like a scary dungeon fenced off in another.

“We’ve been here before,” Brody replied. “It is fun. The food is good, too.”

“Cool.” I didn’t realize I was holding a chair out for Wylie until multiple sets of eyes snapped to me. “Um …” Suddenly, I felt as if I was a zoo animal on display, and I had no idea what I should do. It had felt natural to pull out a chair for Wylie so we could sit together. It hadn’t even occurred to me that we had yet to sit next to one another at any of the author dinners. We’d been careful … until now.

“Thank you,” Wylie said brightly as she sat. She pretended it wasn’t a big deal, but obviously, she was feeling the strain because her eyes looked as if they were going to bug out of her head. She was trying to look natural, but it wasn’t going well.

“I …” What was I supposed to say here?

“Oh, don’t have an aneurysm,” Bree chided. She was already seated next to Brody, and she didn’t look particularly PG this evening. She didn’t even look PG-13. No, she was rolling up to a hard R. It was frightening to anticipate. “We already know you two are dating.”

My mouth fell open. “What?”

“I already told you we’re not dating,” Wylie fired back. She sounded tired. “Just because you have some spy who saw us together at The Olde Pink House — a spy you won’t identify by the way — that doesn’t mean that we’re dating. We had dinner and went ghost hunting. That’s not a date.”

“I think it depends on how you do it,” Nathan argued. He didn’t look nearly as invested in this conversation as Bree. “Personally, Bella and I love a good ghost tour night. We haven’t had a lot of them since Sidney joined the family, but I can’t remember a single ghost tour that didn’t lead to nookie.”

Bella shot her husband a scandalized look. “You did not just call it nookie.”

His smile turned lascivious. “Yes, I did.”

“That’s such a weird word.” Bella buried her face in her hands.

“Don’t worry, Bellarina.” Nathan patted her wrist. “I’ll make you feel better about the nookie with some nookie later.” He focused his attention on me. “The tours can be dates. I think you need to boast a specific personality type to consider them dates, though. I can see why you wouldn’t.”

He almost said it as if it were an insult, and I had to give it some serious reflection. I was fun, right? I was the type of guy who could turn a ghost tour into a date. That’s what a fun guy would do.

I didn’t realize I was obsessing over it until Wylie gave me an odd look. “Sit,” she hissed. “You’re making it awkward.” She might have thought that she said it so only I could hear. That wasn’t the case, though.

Laughter bubbled up from the others, and I shook my head as I sat. “It’s not a big deal,” I said to everybody at the table, recovering relatively quickly. “Wylie and I have been reminiscing about when we were kids. It’s harmless.”

“Yes.” Wylie bobbed her head. “His mother was like an aunt to me — a really fun aunt — so that kind of makes him my brother.”

I didn’t realize I was frowning until I snagged gazes with Bree. She was watching me far too closely. It was just … she didn’t really think of me like a brother, did she? It wasn’t that I wanted something else — of course, I didn’t — but we didn’t have a brother and sister vibe. Just no.

“Have you read Game of Thrones?” Bree asked. “Cersei and Jamie were brother and sister.”

I snapped my eyes back to her. “Can you not take it to a weird place?” I was horrified at the picture she was painting.

“Yeah. I’m going to have nightmares,” Wylie agreed.

Nightmares because of the brother and sister thing, I hoped. Not because the mere thought of being near me when I was naked was enough to traumatize her for life.

Ugh. I wanted to smack myself. Why had my head even gone there? What was wrong with me?

“We spent a lot of time together as kids,” Wylie volunteered. “We kind of fell out of the habit when we went to college, but I always thought, in the back of my head, we would have a chance to see each other again after college. Then the incident happened, and we lost that chance. We’re just hanging out and making up for lost time.”

“The incident you won’t give us the dirt on,” Bree pressed.

Now it was my turn to be frustrated. “I’ve already told you that I don’t know what really happened between our mothers. My mother won’t talk about it.”