Page 34 of Worst Nanny Ever
Tonight, Rob, Bixby, and I auditioned someone else, but it didn’t go much better. The candidate showed up seventeen minutes late, called Rob “Bob,” and suggested we do a group colonic cleanse to bond.
So I’m feeling pretty spent as I approach my front door, bracing myself for…anything, I guess.
When I turn the corner into the living room, I see Hannah sipping a beer while she watches something with a very familiar soundtrack on TV. She’s snuggled up on the couch beneath a throw blanket.
An unopened bottle of beer sits on the coffee table across from her.
I shake my head as I approach her, but can’t help smiling as the cheesy soundtrack crescendos. “Really,Ships Ahoy?”
“The OG,” she says with a grin, pausing it. “What can I say? You stirred my nostalgia.”
I nod at the other bottle on the table. “I hope that’s for me and not for Ollie?”
She rolls her eyes. “Seriously, Travis? If you think I’m irresponsible enough to offer alcohol to your seven-year-old, then you shouldn’t have hired me to be your nanny.”
“Fair point.” I sink down next to her, keeping a few inches between us, and grab the beer, sighing with pleasure at the feeling of the cold bottle against my skin. “This doesn’t look like anything I have in the fridge.”
“I brought them. Liam made it. I thought we could catch up. Do you want some blanket?”
She lifts a corner of the throw, motioning for me to scoot closer. And even though my whole body still feels overly hot from practice, I do exactly as she suggests, moving in close until I can feel her softness pressed against me. She tosses the end of the blanket over me, enveloping us in it together. I’d sooner die of heatstroke than complain, because it feels good to be this close to her.
“Oooh, you’re warm,” she says, snuggling closer.
I shift my focus to the beer bottle, needing to latch onto something other than the feeling of her body against me. Lifting it, I ask, “Does this mean you’ve been talking to Liam? He said you’d had some kind of disagreement.”
It’s none of my business, but I can’t deny that I care. My sister and I aren’t close, but we were stuck in the trenches together, bonded because of it. I don’t want Hannah to lose her connection with her brother.
She shrugs. “We’ve texted. He dropped it off at my place yesterday while I was over here. I got to it before my neighbors did.”
I pause, digesting this. “What happened between you two?”
She grins. “Look at you. My nosiness is rubbing off.”
“So you only have yourself to blame.”
Sighing, she says, “Okay, fine. He was seeing one of my friends who worked at Big Catch with us. I warned Margaret it was going to end badly, and it did. She did some not-very-professional things, and I had to fire her. It was this big, awful mess. It’s been hard to move on.”
“She blamed you,” I conclude, feeling her hurt, even though she’s clearly dug it down deep and refused to put up a makeshift gravestone. I feel pissed at this woman I’ve never met, and also at Hannah’s brother, for putting her in such a twisted situationto begin with. Not my place to care, but there it is. She deserved more from them.
“Yeah,” she says with a sigh, running a finger distractedly around the mouth of her beer bottle. “So did all of our mutual friends.”
“Mustn’t be very good friends. You know, I have this theory about friends…”
She turns to get a more direct look at me, her knee brushing against me. “Oh yeah? Enlighten me, Travis.”
“Some of them are meant to stick around, and others pass through our lives to teach us something.”
“Sounds narcissistic.”
I can’t help but smile. “Maybe. But it’s true for everyone.”
“So what should I learn from what Margaret did?”
“That you’re fair, but not everyone is. Anyway, sometimes bad things lead to good ones. You met Sophie and Briar just after that. You might not have become as close if you were still spending all your downtime with Margaret.”
She opens her mouth to speak, then shuts it again before she gives me one of her big grins. “Admit it. Did you steal your wisdom from a fortune cookie factory?”
She’s not the only one who recognizes deflections, but I go along with it, smiling. “You caught me.” I nod to the bottle in her hand. “So you want us to drink from these unlabeled bottles that may have been made by the brother you’re fighting with or a stranger with a thing for strychnine. Either way, we could be in trouble.”
