Page 19 of Hold Me Today

I can’t look away from the very obvious proposal that’s going down in the pictureTMZuploaded. “She turned you down?” Emotion I’d rather not name blooms in my chest.Don’t ask, don’t ask, don’t ask.I ask because, clearly, I’m a glutton for punishment. “Do you love her?”

Silence.

It steals into the room like an unwanted visitor and turns my skin to ice.

“What do you think?”

The words aren’t voiced in English, and it takes me a solid ten seconds to work through his flawless Greek and translate it all in my head. I jerk my gaze from the screen to Nick’s face. He looks as surly, as unapproachable, as always.

I hate that it’s such a good look on him.

“Ermione?”

At his quiet, but adamant push for me to answer, I plop back down in my abandoned chair with a swallowed sigh. “You look about as thrilled as the time I stole your swimming trunks and replaced them with a flamingo-pink speedo.”

He’d been sixteen to my fourteen, and I’m only a little ashamed to admit that that day, of all days, is when I learned the definition of a “dick print.” Thank you, horrible hotel Wi-Fi. Thank you, Google. Thank you, sixteen-year-old Nick who was already hung like a horse.

The last bit of gratitude has me shifting in my seat and crossing my legs at my ankles.

Nick chokes out a rough laugh. “It was a bikini bottom, not a speedo.”

I give a littlewhat-can-you-doshrug. “I’m resourceful, what can I say?”

A mischievous smile curls his full lips. “Were they Effie’s?”

It’s not hard to imagine him in that moment. Still growing, still half a foot taller than me, he’d barged out of his room in a pair of boxers, waving the bikini bottoms like a flag of truce. Or war, more likely. Then he’d demanded, in no uncertain terms, to know where his swimming trunks were.

I’d bet that he didn’t have the balls to strip down to what essentially were tighty-whities.

He proved that he did.

In epic, hot-pink, dick-cupping fashion.

Going forward after that, my dreams were a little more vibrant, a littlefuller, if you get my drift.

I lick my lips, then meet his inquisitive stare. “Mine,” I say just above a whisper, “trust me when I say how surprised I was to see that they fit you.”

It’s a throw down, I know. One of my old, customary barbs just to get a rise out of him.Will Good Guy Nick take the Bait?TMZmissed out on an epic headliner, if I do say so myself, although perhaps not. Nick proves that he’s all mature adult and leaves me hanging.

How disappointing.

“Read the article title.”

With a little grumble at his command, I nevertheless do what he says.

Nick Stamos—Brokenhearted and Alone: How One Man found Himself Dumped Twice By Women He Loved.

Uh oh.

“Brynn?” I ask slowly. Had his ex spilled the beans about their almost-wedding?

He doesn’t mistake my meaning. “Hell if I know. Effie got me on the show. She knows how . . . well, she knows how much I’ve been wanting to meet someone new.” With a single click, he closes out the tab and once again reaches for the scotch. He lifts it to his mouth, as though prepared to guzzle it all and blot out his troubles, but instead balances it on his thigh. “And she may have convinced me that I must not want love badly enough if I wasn’t willing to take a major risk.”

“Sheconvincedyou?”

Nick smiles sheepishly. “More like she sat me down for a come-to-Jesus moment and told me to stop being a pussy. There’s no better motivation to do something you’re hesitant about than having a younger sibling goad you into doing it.”

For over twenty years, Effie and I have told each other everything. I was the first one to know about her being into women; she was the first and only person I told when I lost my virginity at the age of twenty to a guy in his early thirties.

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