Condoms. It was full of condoms.
I slammed it shut, panicking. Jesus, how many condoms did one man need? I obviously wasn’t the first woman to wake up in his bed, though by the looks of it I was the first one he hadn’t had sex with.
That thought made me queasy for reasons I didn’t want to explore, so I pulled open the next drawer. Hair gel—Nick didn’t wear hair gel—and shaving cream. A stick of deodorant. A tiny black comb, which I scraped through my hair. I didn’t see any evidence of Gina here—no leftover makeup, no Tampax. I wondered if she’d stayed over often.
The third drawer was the jackpot: a tube of toothpaste and an unopened spare toothbrush. I ignored the fact that the toothbrush was probably kept for his one-night stands and tore it open, quickly brushing my teeth.
I was just spitting and rinsing when I heard my cell phone ring in the bedroom. I must have left it on the floor. I had no idea who was calling me this early, and then I heard Nick’s voice: “Evie’s phone. Hello?”
Oh, no. He didn’t.
“This is Nick,” he said, obviously answering the other person’s question. “Who’s this? Oh, hey. She’s in the bathroom. She just got up.”
I had a terrible, terrible feeling of dread down my spine.
“No,” Nick said. “I’m not the nice man from the bank.”
Oh, shit.
Mom.
I dropped the toothbrush and ran out of the bathroom, leaving my clothes on the floor. Nick was lying in bed, on his back now, the covers pushed off him, propped up on the pillows, my phone to his ear. Scout had pressed herself into his armpit. I ignored the jaw-dropping sight of his boxer-brief-clad body and drew a line across my throat. The universal sign forCut it out.
Nick saw me and frowned. “Sorry, but the nice man from the bank is an asshole,” he said in his bar-band voice. “He cheated on her.”
I launched myself onto the bed and grabbed for the phone.
I landed on his hard body, and he didn’t even flinch. He just kept his grip on the phone as Scout jumped up and ran to safety. “Stop!” I hiss-whispered at him.
“Where are we?” he said, echoing my mother’s question. “My place, I guess. In my bedroom. Who am I? I’m—”
I wrenched the phone away from him. “Mom!” I said into it.
“Who,” my mother said, her voice breathless with shock. “Who… isthat man?”
How to explain my mother? She was the nicest, kindest person I’d ever known. She was sweet and gentle and a great mother. She was also stuck in a time warp, where modern dating didn’t happen. Nothing about my current situation—literally nothing—would make sense to her. “It’s… it’s no one, Mom. It’s nothing.”
Nick raised his eyebrows at that, and I realized I was lying on him. Directly on top, straddling his hips. He was freaking sculpted, hard as marble. And I was pressing against… I could feel… He gave me an amused smile, like he was watching me figure it out, and I pushed off him, using my free hand as leverage against his shoulder. The hot, gorgeous skin of his shoulder.
“That was not no one,” my mother said in my ear. “Evie, it’s seven thirty in the morning and you’re with a man. A man who is not your boyfriend. I don’t understand what’s going on.”
“Nothing’s happening,” I tried to explain, disentangling myself from the bedsheets and running for the bathroom again. I gave him a pretty good show of my backside as I went. I realized I was dressed a lot like Gina had been the other night, except the shirt was Nick’s, I had panties on, and my ass was a lot bigger than hers. So maybe not quite as sexy. “I mean, nothing happened,” I said, closing the bathroom door behind me. “He’s just a guy I know. We were just sleeping.”
God, that sounded like every lame excuse made to a mother since the beginning of time. Except it was true.
“Evie.” My mother sounded confused and disappointed at once. She didn’t mean to be judgmental, I knew—she just didn’t get it, and the last thing I wanted to do was explain modern sex lives—mysex life—to my mother. “What was he saying about Josh? Are you not with him anymore?”
“No, I’m not,” I said. Normally, I would have waited until at least Christmas to break this to her, then say it had happened months ago. Thanks a lot, Nick. “He, um, he found someone else. And he was dating her behind my back.” I used the worddatinginstead offucking, because I had never used the wordfuckingin front of my mother in my life. “So it’s over.”
“I can’t believe that. Are you sure it’s true? It’s so strange. He seemed like such a nice man. I had high hopes for you two.”
Marriage, babies—that was what relationships were for in my mother’s world. Josh had seemed like a good prospect for both. “Yeah, well, I guess not,” I said.
“You seem to have… found someone else, though. And I don’t mean to pry, but… already?”
“No, Mom, I told you, he’s just—”
“No one,” Mom said. “That’s what you said. But I know you, Evie. If you’re in a man’s…bedroom”—she had to force the word out, it was so shocking—“at seven thirty in the morning, it’s because you’re very serious about him. It’s because you have feelings. That’s the kind of girl you are. That’s how I raised you.”