Page 52 of Best Man
“That’s Niko, duh! That’s what Kat calls him, don’t you know?”
“Gi~rl … you’re callin’ him Sasha now?”
“WOOO WOOOOOOOOOOO!”
Paulina quietly groaned and her stomach sank. Slipups likethatwere way too obvious. She couldn’t be making those.
“It’s a popular nickname in Russia for people named Aleksander,” she sheepishly explained. Between rounds of sex, she’d asked him how he got the nickname Sasha, and that’s what he told her. “Right, Katerina?”
“You are absolutely correct,” Katerina said with a wily glimmer in her eyes. Sasha’s sister was too polite to crack jokes, but Paulina could tellshesuspected something, too.
“But what’s wrong with Niko?” Piper wanted to know. “And since when are you the Russia expert?”
“I’mnotan expert, it’s just what he told me. And nothing’swrongwith Niko. It’s just weird calling a guy by his last name all the time, you know?”
“Literally everyone else calls him Niko,” Piper argued, “and no one thinks it’s weird. Heck, Jax calls him Niko, and they’re best friends.”
“Well—whatever!” Paulina said, giving up in a huff. Everyone’s leering eyes made her feel a little hot under the collar, and her stomach a tiny bit queasy. “I asked him if I could call him Aleks, because Niko felt impersonal, and he said Sasha was better. That’s it. That’s the whole story,” she said, returning her focus to Piper’s hair. “Nothing more to it than that.”
“Alright, alright.”
Paulina tried to hide a big yawn in the crook of her elbow.
“Huh. You seem tired,” Piper said.
“I’m a little bit tired, yeah.”
“How long were you and Sasha up for, anyway?” Piper asked, putting an extra-special sarcastic emphasis onSasha.
“Until four,” she said.
“Wow. That’s late. You two are going to be like zombies today.”
“Meh. I’m a little tired, but I feel good. We got a lot done. In fact, I finished everything I needed to d—”
The words died in her throat when she realized that wasn’t quite true.
The speech!
I forgot to finish writing the speech!
“Oh, no,” she whispered beneath her breath.
The heat at her neck quickly spread, swamping her forehead, beads of sweat threatening to breach the surface of her brow. Her queasy stomach began to roil and churn.
“Oh God,” she murmured, “I think I’m gonna be sick.”
She passed the curling iron to the first person who’d take it and sprinted to the toilet.
***
“Poor thing.” Piper huddled behind Paulina and held her hair. “What happened to you?”
Her stomach heaved again. “I dunno,” she said, gasping and choking.
“It’s not morning sickness, is it?” Piper joked.
“Nah, it’s waytoo soon for that,” Paulina said. “Maybe in six weeks.”
