Page 44 of Drilled (Dad Bod Contracting 2)
“Do you take all those bracelets off every night, or what?”
Nova laughs, shaking both wrists, making the various bangles jingle. “Yep! I have a whole dresser drawer dedicated to bracelets. I couldn’t possibly wear the same ones all the time—that’s…that’d be anathema to the entire point of wearing them.”
“Does it take forever to put them on every day?”
She shrugs, and goes back to muddling the mint. “Not really. A minute or two, depending on how many I’m wearing. I was working today, obviously”— she gestures at her scrub pants—“so this is a minimal amount.”
“Are there any you don’t ever take off?” I ask, blatantly fishing for the story of the hospital bracelet.
Which is where her eyes go. “That one,” she says, tapping it. “But that’s an old, painful, shitty story and this is a party.”
I feel bad, now, asking about that. She smiles at me, and the hint of mischievousness is there, and also a knowing expression that tells me she knows I was fishing and doesn’t mind, and also forgives me for bringing up the past.
I’m impressed by the amount of expression she can put into a single look.
She slides a pink cutting board toward me, on which are a handful of limes and a knife. “If you’re going to pester me, at least make yourself useful.”
“We’re making more sugar-free mojitos?” I ask, slicing limes in halves and then quarters.
She nods, squeezing limes into a bowl and adding more mint. “Franco got a taste of yours before Ryder brought it to you, and he wanted one, and then everyone wanted one, and Ryder tapped out after making yours, and I used to be a bartender in college, so…here I am, making eight mojitos.” She shrugs. “Well, sort of mojitos. I’m using extra lime juice and a touch more pure LaCroix instead of adding simple syrup, so it’s not really a mojito, but it has the rum and the lime and the mint, so we’re just calling it a mojito.”
She slides a glass toward me.
“Try that one. I made it for myself to test the recipe.”
I sip at her drink, and I blink in surprise. “Wow. I thought Ryder’s was good. That’s amazing.”
“Yeah, well, that’s what six years of professional bartending will get you.”
“Six years, huh?”
She shrugs and goes back to muddling mint in the lime juice and doling it out into the glasses. “I have my MS in nursing.”
“A masters in nursing? What do you do? Which department?”
“Neurology. I’m an assistant to one of the top neurologists in the area.” She gestures outside. “I have the names right, right? Franco is the one with the long hair, with whom you have some sort of complicated history, Ryder is the other ginger at the party, and James, our gracious host, is the one who looks like The Mountain from Game of Thrones, except a little older and a hell of a lot sexier.”
I nod. “That’s the gang. And obviously you know Jesse.”
She adds the rum next. “A little. Imogen invited me over for a glass of wine one night, and he came over for a while, as well.” Her eyes shoot to mine, questioning. “I’m not sure if he lives with her, or she lives with him, or both, or neither.”
I laugh. “I don’t know either, honestly. I think it’s complicated. I know she’s at his place a lot these days, but he also basically remodeled her entire house himself, and is still working on it, so he’s there a lot, too…I don’t know. It works for them, so whatever.” I feel like I’ve deftly avoided the question of Franco.
“And Franco? What’s your deal with him?”
I sigh. I guess I was wrong about the “deftly” bit. “Um. We had a thing. Now we don’t have a thing. The end.”
Nova dips her middle finger in the lime juice and flicks it at me. “Nice try, but I’m an expert at topic avoidance technique. You can’t bullshit a bullshitter.”
“That wasn’t an avoidance technique,” I say, upping the ante by chucking an entire half of a lime at her head. “It was a shutdown technique. A little-known tactic called I don’t want to talk about it.”
Nova must have taken kung fu with David Carradine or something, because she snags the flying lime out of the air with a lazy swipe of her hand. “You asked about my bracelet, so I asked about your obviously still-a-thing thing with Franco.”
“Ahh,” I say, laughing. “I see how it is.”
“Tit for tat.”
“Hopefully it’s not tit for tit,” I say, “because you’ll win that game, I’m afraid,” I say gesturing with the knife at her absurdly massive mammaries.
She snickers, shaking her breasts at me. “Be afraid—I’ve knocked people straight the fuck out with these monsters.”
James and Franco enter at that moment, stopping short at the open sliding glass doorway between the back porch and the kitchen, their eyes wide, watching the scene between Nova and me unfold.
