“What do you mean?” I ask carefully.
She shrugs and takes a swig of her beer. “Well, he’s leaving.”
“Yes, I know.”
“So…are you going to see him again before that?”
I fish my phone out of my pocket and glance at it. “I have two hours before I’m meeting him at his apartment. This will be the last time you’ll see me until he leaves. Does that answer your question?”
“Got it,” Nicola says.
“Kind of a bummer, huh?” Steph muses. “I mean…you’ve finally got him…and he’s going.”
I sigh heavily and brush my hair back from my face. “Yeah, thems the breaks though, right? I mean, heaven forbid I actually get a chance with the first guy I’ve fallen for ever since Kyle.”
Both of them stare at me with open mouths and it takes me a moment to realize what I’ve said out loud, what I haven’t even admitted to myself.
“Oh my god,” Steph says. “Are you saying that you’re in…”
I eye her sharply. “No.” I clear my throat. “No, I’m not. Obviously. I don’t know him. It’s still just a crush, whatever.”
“This is way more than that,” Nicola says. “It’s okay to admit it, Kayla. It’s about time you felt something for someone.”
“Is it about time?” I challenge. “Because this is shitty timing. I don’t want to feel anything more for him than just seeing him as a vehicle for awesome sex. Really. So let’s forget I said anything. I’ve got one week to have my mind blown and then he’ll leave and I’ll go back to being me again. Fuck. It’s better than nothing.”
Nicola’s lips scrunch together, looking stupidly sad.
“What now?” I ask, rolling my eyes.
“You’re going to get your heart broken.”
“What?” I exclaim, slapping my palms on the table.
“Nic,” Steph admonishes. “Way to be optimistic.”
The blood is rolling in my head so loudly that I can barely hear Nicola. “I’m just saying that if I were you,” she explains, “and I finally started to have feelings for a guy, and I only had a week with him, I’d be heartbroken.”
“That’s because you’re a sap,” I tell her snidely. “Even though you weren’t such a * before Bram got his dick in you.”
“He was the right dick,” she counters. “And this is your right dick.”
“Look,” Steph interjects. “We’ve all got the right dick right now. But Kayla and Lachlan are way, way different than Linden and I. Or you and Bram.”
Somehow I’m finding a way to take offense to that. “Oh yeah, how so?”
Steph’s brows raise to the ceiling. “Well. As you just said, you don’t know Lachlan. He doesn’t know you.”
“True.”
“And he’s leaving, so you don’t even have the time to get to know each other.”
“True,” I say, dragging the word out.
“And even though you seem a bit softer around the edges these days, you’re still you, Kayla. I bet even if he wasn’t leaving, you’d find some excuse to pull back and extract yourself. So actually, contrary to what Nicola thinks, I think this relationship, arrangement, whatever it is, is tailor-made for Kayla Moore.” She raises her beer in the air and looks me hard in the eye. “You go and screw the hell out of him this week. For those about to fuck, we salute you.”
Nicola grumbles something but raises her glass.
I don’t have a glass, so I can only nod at them. “Well, all right then. To fucking.”
“To fucking,” they say in unison.
***