Chapter Nine
Josie
My boxy little SUV—the modest replacement to the tiny compact car that the careless pickup truck driver had totaled during my freshman year of college—rumbled as I swung into the parking space in front of Angelo’s, and I threw it into park before I relaxed back into my seat and yawned. I’d gone into the lab at five this morning, a last-minute fill-in for a lab assistant who had gone home sick before her usual shift ended at eight. I could have canceled my breakfast plans with my sister and Sam, but I’d decided not to—a cup of strong, burning-hot diner coffee and a greasy breakfast sounded pretty good before I headed to campus for class and a long lab.
Through the large windows, I spied Annie and Sam already seated at a booth, looking considerably more awake than I felt. Both of them turned and saw me at the same time, and Annie raised a hand and gestured me inside, her long ponytail swishing with the movement. I waved back and killed the engine before heading inside.
“Where’d you find this place?” I asked as I slid into the booth next to Annie. Without a word, Sam silently slid a cup of coffee over to me in a saucer, along with several tiny containers of sweet vanilla-flavored creamer. “Bless you,” I told her, and started dumping the creamer into the hot brew, one-by-one.
“The guys are all obsessed with this place,” Sam said as she grabbed a menu from behind the napkin dispenser.
Annie just looked at me with a dark brow raised. “What, you mean Andy hasn’t dragged you here yet? I’m surprised.”
Sam cocked her head. “Andy? Am I missing something?”
My sister jerked a thumb over at me. “Josie Marie Walsh here has been hanging out with the littlest Pallas boy.” She looked at me. “How long has this been going on now? I can’t remember.”
“Have you been dating Andy since my wedding?” Sam cut in. “You two barely even talked, I had no idea—"
“Not since the wedding,” I said firmly. “A few weeks. He’s doing some work on my parents’ house and let me use his place to study because it’s so noisy at home. And things just sort of…went from there.”
“He likes her,” Annie said with a conspiratorial grin. “He called George and asked about her.”
I groaned. “Please do not tell me that you threatened to kill Andy if he hurt my feelings.”
“And I threatened to kill him if he hurt her feelings,” Annie finished before she looked at me and shrugged. “He hasn’t so far, has he?”
“I guess not.” I looked down at my coffee and stirred the last of the creamer into the steaming liquid, pale tan now, before I lifted it to my lips and took a sip. “The coffee here isn’t great, honestly. Are you sure the food is good?”
“The coffee sucks, the food is good,” Sam said impatiently. “I need more details, Josie. Is this a serious thing? What’s going on?”
I grabbed a menu and started scanning the long list of breakfast foods. “Not much to tell, honestly. I like him, he likes me.” Not strictly true—there was plenty to tell, but not much I was ready to share yet. He’d given me a key to his place, and almost every day for weeks, I’d let myself in after work and school to study until my brain stopped cooperating, and then more often than not, we would eat dinner together before tumbling naked into bed to devour each other.
I was no prude and had slept with a few partners before Andy. Good sex, I thought, with open communication and mutual satisfaction. But never—never—had any of them ruined me with over-the-top pleasure the way Andy did. None of them had ever slipped into my heart and mind so quickly as Andy, either.
Our whispered conversations, tangled naked in the sheets with sweat still cooling on our bodies, was the best part of my day, when my defenses were nonexistent and I could just lose myself in his smile, his laugh, his personality. He’d even let me read one of his short stories one night after a particularly explosive encounter, a gesture that seemed even more searingly intimate than the sex we had just shared. And I had loved it—it was a story about brothers, funny and poignant and full of the sweetness and light that I had come to associate with Andy himself.
“Well?” Sam prodded.
“Too soon to know if it’s serious,” I said flatly, my eyes still on my menu. “I have feelings for him, but I have a lot of other stuff going on too, with school and the MCAT and maybe medical school.”
Annie snorted. “Maybe medical school. Listen to you, Miss False Modesty.”
I stiffened and set the menu down. “I’ll call myself a medical student when I get the short white coat on my first day,” I said. “Are the eggs Benedict any good?”
“They’re excellent,” Sam replied. “Have you narrowed down your schools where you plan to apply?”
“Yeah. I have a list of twenty.” I worried with my coffee cup as a knot formed in my stomach.
Sam’s eyes widened. “Twenty? I thought it would be, like, three or something.”
I shook my head. “That’s not how it works. It’s so competitive that unless you have a really standout MCAT score, you can’t really count on anything.”
“You’re going to have an incredible score,” Annie cut in, ever the supportive sister. “And then you’ll blow Seattle for someplace exotic and glamorous, like…like Florida or Nebraska.”
I chuckled, but the knot deep in my gut just felt heavier. Annie was right—my dream might take me away from Seattle, away from my family and my community and the first guy to ever try and figure out what made me tick.
And if none of it worked out, I still didn’t have a plan B.