“It’s the Witt Way,” I explained. “It’s best to just go with it.”
“I slept with Knox twice in the last forty-eight hours and then I slept with him slept with him last night. And I don’t know how much of it’s a mistake. And it was just supposed to be one time and definitely no sleeping, but he keeps changing the rules on me,” I blurted out to Stef.
We were on Liza’s front porch, waiting for Waylay to get her stuff so we could go back to the cottage and get ready for premature car shopping. It was the first time I’d gotten him alone since The Sex…and subsequent arrival of my parents.
We’d been trading texts for the last two days.
“You did it again? I knew it! I fuck—freaking knew it,” he said, dancing from foot to foot.
“Great. Congratulations, Mr. Know It All. Now tell me what it all means?”
“How the hell should I know what it means? I’m the one who chickened out on asking that fine AF salon god for his phone number.”
My jaw dropped. “Excuse me, but Stefan Liao has never chickened out on a hot guy before.”
“Let’s not make this about me and my temporary mental break. Go back to the sex part. Was it good?”
“Phenomenal. Best sex ever. Now I’ve trapped him in something resembling a relationship and I have no idea what to say to Way about it. I don’t want her thinking that it’s okay to jump from relationship to relationship. Or that it’s not okay to be alone. Or that it’s okay to have a one-night stand with a hot guy.”
“Hate to break it to you, Little Miss Uptight, but all of those things actually are okay.”
“Thirty-six-year-old adult woman me knows that,” I snapped. “But those things don’t look okay in the eyes of family court, and is that really the example I want to set for an eleven-year-old?”
“I can see you’ve entered the over-analyzing everything part of your freak-out,” Stef quipped.
“Stop being a jerk and start telling me what to do!”
He reached out and squished my cheeks between his hands. “Naomi. Did it ever occur to you that maybe this is your chance to start living a life you choose? Start doing things you want to do?”
“No,” I said.
The screen door burst open, and Waylay jumped out with Waylon on her heels. “I can’t find my math book.”
“Where did you see it last?” I asked her.
“If I knew that, I’d know where it was.”
The three of us headed in the direction of the cottage. Waylon darted out in front of us, pausing every few feet to sniff things and pee on them.
“Does Knox know you have his dog?” I asked.
“Dunno.” Waylay shrugged. “So are you and Knox a thing?”
I stumbled over my own feet.
Stef snickered unsympathetically next to me.
I blew out a breath. “Honestly, Way. I have no idea. I don’t know what we are or what I want from him or what he wants from me. So we probably won’t be a thing forever. But we might be spending more time with him for a while. If it’s okay with you.”
She frowned thoughtfully at the ground as she kicked at a stone. “You mean you wouldn’t hang out with him and stuff if I didn’t want you to?”
“Well, yeah. You’re kind of pretty important to me, so your opinion matters.”
“Huh. Then I guess he can come over for dinner tonight if he wants to,” she said.
Nash was home and resting in his freshly cleaned and restocked apartment. My parents were celebrating their weekly date night with dinner at a five-star Lebanese restaurant in Canton. Liza had invited Stef to be her “hot date” for a dinner party at a local “fancy-ass horse farm.”
As for me, I had a new (to me) SUV in my driveway, and my sort-of boyfriend and niece were in the backyard building a fire in the fire pit while I put away the leftovers.