There was a story behind why Brad was nicknamed Cream, but I never heard it—actually, I never wanted to hear it. I was hoping to go through my entire life not knowing…and now onto the weird family awkwardness here.
Brad and Nikki were not boyfriend/girlfriend, or at least I hadn’t been updated on an official relationship status.
What they were, though, were siblings to Bud’s parents. Nikki’s sister married Brad’s brother, and their first shindig that resulted in my best friend having to do up her pants happened the night their siblings were married.
Do the math.
Bud was four.
Nikki’s sister didn’t get preggo until the honeymoon.
Brad ending up in Nikki’s bed, on and off, had been going on for a long-ass time. I say it like that because there are always after-shocks whenever Brad comes around.
Then, he would leave.
Nikki had tried closing up the bedsheets to him, but he could charm and seduce her and say all the nice words to her to get those sheets back opened pretty much any time he deemed her worthy.
He’d hotfoot out, and Nikki would get a text from one of our other girls (we had a lot around town), and there’d be a picture of Brad curled around another girl.
They were back and forth so much, and it’d been going on for almost four years.
This wasn’t my drama, but I was her best friend, and I was pulling the best friend card and admitting only to myself that I was tired of the Brad-drama. Also, not shocked that he’d bring Bud around when he was hooking up with Nikki. How he got Bud into the house without Nikki seeing him before the bed-capades was something I also didn’t want to know all the details about because Nikki was all looking shocked at seeing her nephew naked.
And in her house.
“What’s up, Nadeem?”
I grimaced. “Don’t speak to me.”
Uncle Cream was the most real-life version of someone who reminded me of Billy Hargrove from Stranger Things. The difference was that Uncle Cream had straight hair, not curly hair. That was it. He could’ve been his twin, both physically and personality wise.
“Brad,” Nikki snapped, but my best friend wasn’t paying much attention to her recent lay. She was back to looking at me. Studying my bags. Studying the booze in my hand.
She noticed before, but got distracted. She was back to noticing and she was figuring it out.
My best friend was catching up here.
“Jay?” she asked.
Nope. That most definitely wasn’t a frog in my throat. And it hadn’t doubled in size when I nodded back.
“Yeah,” I rasped.
Another cringe from her, mixed with a pitying look. I hated the pitying look.
The frog just did a loud-ass ribbit.
I looked away, and shuffled back because I knew what was going to happen. She would herd Uncle Cream and Bud, no—she’d make sure Bud got clothes on first—and once they were gone, she’d take my whiskey from me. She’d go to the kitchen. She’d pull out some drink glasses, put in some of the nice cubed ice she always keeps on hand for me, and we’d pour ourselves a drink. After that, it’d either be a veg-out night, which I was now wondering how that phrase came about? Because we’d sit, talk, fill each other in, and we’d drink. Pizza would either get ordered, or we’d go the other way.
We’d drink. Talk. And decide we needed to go out.
It was Halloween, a night we both avoided because we were usually insulted by how humans viewed us, but… Jay happened.2Something Something“He was in mid-thrust?”
We were an hour into drinking, and Nikki jerked toward me, sloshing her drink on the way.
She didn’t notice.
“Mid-thrust.”
I’d relayed the story of how I came home early from work, heard the moaning and groaning from the bedroom, and thought Jay was watching porn. That was it. That’s all I thought.
I should’ve known better.
I did know better. That was the thing.
I had found texts on his phone three months earlier.
Silly me, right? Stupid me, more likely.
“Four years, Nik.”
She moaned with me. “I know. Four years.”
Fuck.
Four years.
“He was my high school crush.”
“He was. You liked him for so long.”
I did.
I had.
“You were, like, pathetic about it too. Like, really, really pathetic about it.”
“Uh…”
“You wrote him poems. You drew hearts with his name in them on all the desks you sat in. You’d stare at him in every class you both had. You were the water girl for the football team, and had a special bedazzled water bottle just for him.”
“Um.”
“It was pink, with his name in a circle.”
“Okay—”
“You offered to drive him home all the time, and you didn’t have a car. You started taking cooking lessons from his mom, and you don’t cook. You’re banned from your own kitchen by your landlord. Or you were, when you lived with him, I mean…”
An awkward silence.