Page 1 of Nothing Left to Lose

CHAPTER ONE

MILLER NORTON

In the bookofThe Most Stupidest Shit Miller Norton Has Ever Done, this would have to be in the top spot.

It was a bad idea.

Likebadbad. And stupid.

This idea was so bad and stupid, it would be the crowning glory in the aforementioned book of the most stupidest shit I’ve ever done. It’d have its own chapter, for sure.

“Whatcha thinking about?”

Shit. I must’ve zoned out. “Huh?”

He pointed to my forehead. “You get a line right between your eyebrows when you’re thinking.”

I resisted sighing. He knew me too damned well.

“Uh, thinking that this is a bad idea.”

Brody laughed, the kind of laugh where he threw his head back and got those cute little creases at the corners of his eyes.

See, therein lay the problem.

Brody Molina had been my best friend since our first year of high school. We’d been inseparable for eleven years, and I’d been desperately in love with him for every hopeless minute of those eleven years.

I had to wonder if he knew but he was too nice to let me down, and I was certainly too chickenshit to tell him.

Why?

Because he’s straight, and I’m chickenshit.

We’d been through everything together. First heartbreaks, first kisses, first times, first jobs, first parties at college, first jobs.

Doing all kinds of stupid shit like skipping school at sixteen to get stoned and sneaking into the movies. Going to college classes still drunk from a party the night before, that kind of thing.

Other stupid shit too.

Like the first time he went all the way with Becky Kirsten and I had to pretend I was happy for him when, in reality, I’d gone home and cried myself to sleep.

When I came out as gay as a gangly fourteen-year-old, he was the first person I told. I braced myself for rejection. I even kinda hoped he’d hate me so I could learn to unlove him.

But nope.

He was awesome. He didn’t care one bit. It changed nothing for him, he’d said.

But for me, it changed everything.

I loved him a whole lot more.

And so my years of teen angst and unrequited love morphed into my twenties of longing and heartache.

I was stupidly in love with my straight best friend.

And you might be thinking that this doesn’t sound as if it deserves a whole chapter in my book of stupidest shit, but let me get to the good part.

Because we were sitting on a plane, taxiing towards the terminal in Las Vegas. Why are we flying from LA to Las Vegas for a three-day weekend?

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