Page 7 of The Love Losers

“I wish more people felt that way.”

“You still haven’t answered,” she points out.

“They’re dead. All three of them. There’s this rumor running around town that my mother’s a black widow.”

“Is she?” she asks, perking up—interested now, although in my mother, not in me.

“No,” I say with a rough laugh. But I’m not amused anymore, not really. This will never be a subject I enjoy talking about, nor one I can take lightly. “Her first husband got struck by lightning—”

“He didn’t,” she says with a gasp, her hand rising to her chest. “You’re fucking with me. You have to be.”

Genuine laughter escapes me. “I assure you, I’m not. It was on the news. And her third husband died in a plane crash.”

Her mouth drops open, a perfect, pretty ‘oh’ of surprise.

I smile wryly. “My mother’s crafty, but it would be a stretch to credit her with controlling the weather or causing a plane to crash.”

“She’s unlucky in love,” she says, repeating what I said earlier, shaking her head as if in commiseration. “The statistics are skewed against her.”

“Yes,” I agree.

“I feel like that sometimes too. Roman’s not the first married man I’ve unknowingly dated. Will you believe it’s happened twice? The first one hurt the worst, but I really felt cursed when it happened again. It’s like I’m wearing some invisible sign that only assholes see.”

Isee her, but then again maybe I’m an asshole too, in a different way, so I feel no need to point it out. “My mother’s three husbands all died in strange accidents. There’s a lot I’ll believe.”

“And what happened to your father?”

There’s a sudden vise around my throat, but I speak through it. “An accident in our yard. He fell from an apple tree and broke his neck. They say it was instant.”

She shakes her head again. I hear the silentunlucky.Cursed.

My whole life, I’ve heard those words spoken, hinted, implied…I can’t escape them, so I’ve decided not to care aboutthem. It’s an approach that I’ve applied to too much of my life, probably.

Don’t like it? Tuck it away and never look at it.

“You can throw salt over your shoulder if you want,” I say with a smile. “People have been known to do that in our presence. The kids in my class used to dare each other to go on a date with my sister. See if she was a black widow too.”

“Fuck them,” she says with animation, and my smile grows wider. She’s a woman who feels things strongly and wears those feelings out in the open. I like that about her, even though I’ve lived my life in the opposite way. “I hope you gave them a lesson.”

“I did, and my sister tricked me into glitter-bombing my own bedroom as punishment. She believes in fighting her own battles. A little like you, I’m guessing.”

Her lips lift up. “You’ve got that right.”

“Do you want the salt now? Maybe some sage?”

She blows out a breath that makes a few strands of hair hanging from her ponytail waft out, and I find myself reaching over to tuck them behind her ear. Her hair is soft against my fingers, like spider silk.

She smiles at me, her eyes widening slightly. “If something so simple could cure bad luck, then I would have won the lottery years ago. So you figured your mother was some kind of wedding expert?”

I shrug, my fingers tingling slightly from the contact with her skin and her spun gold hair. “Maybe. I don’t care about any of that stuff. The pomp, the circumstance. It’s all a bunch of showboating. I figured it would give Nina a chance to bond with my mom, but she basically let Mom do whatever she wanted. The only thing she cared about was the money. That’s obvious now.”

She snorts. “Should have been obvious when she suggested you get married the second you told her about your trust fund.”

We’ve been at the bar for a long time now, and other than an older man with a sunburned pate, who’s always here and may have actually fallen asleep in the booth closest to the door, we’re the only customers left. It’s unclear whether the bartender cares or has any plans to close the place down.

I don’t want him to. I don’t know why, but all I really want to do right now is sit across from this woman. She’s easy to talk to, and we’ve spent half our time talking about nothing and the other half discussing our personal horror stories. She told me about discovering her ex-boyfriend’s picture-perfect family, and I spilled the details of my sorry story:

Meeting Nina, thinking she was different.

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