Lyssa was struggling with the pistachios, attempting to use one of her nails as a nut chisel. When her finger slipped, a pistachio shot off behind the bar, narrowly missing Jason’s face.
I reached over and took the next one out of her hand, splitting the shell easily. I passed her the shelled center and she popped it in her mouth.
“Is Noddy helping with your roof?” I asked Dad.
He had clearly lost the thread of his story; his eyes had wandered. “What?”
Lyssa wiggled happily in her seat, chewing her pistachios, and it made me grin. I reached for the little ceramic dish so I could crack some more for her.
“Noddy?” I prompted Dad, before shelling another nut and passing it to Lyssa. “That’s Dad’s best friend,” I told her. To my dad, I continued, “You know Noddy is an awful builder. You should keep him out of it.”
Dad still didn’t say anything. Neither did Dean.
I looked to the bartender for backup. “Jason, you remember the time Noddy nailed his jeans to the fence he was trying to build?”
Dean, Jase and my dad shared a look.
“What?” I asked finally. “What are you guys staring at?”
CHAPTER 12
LYSSA
Pistachios were the turtles of the nut world, and their shells were basically impenetrable for girliepops with nails.
As much as I liked Kevin, roofing was the most boring topic in the world, so I let my mind wander while he talked about his roof. Mike kept shelling pistachios for me, and I kept eating them, delighted by the novelty of a treat that was usually inaccessible. Eventually, his shelling outpaced my snacking, and a collection of shelled nuts piled up in his hand, ready for me to take.
Fun fact: Once, in a bodega, I’d grabbed a bag of pistachios only to discover when I got home that every single one was individually plastic wrapped, the most perfect metaphor of redundancy to ever exist. I’d sent a pic to my stepdad, Charles, who called his next poem “Pistachios from a Midtown Bodgea.” I’d found them in Chinatown, but the poem was about a middle-aged man grieving his youth, so he didn’t really care about the specifics.
Belatedly I realized Dean and Kev were staring as Mike shelled nuts for me and I froze with a pistachio halfway to my lips.
“What?” Mike was saying, seemingly completely unaware that I was literally eating out of his hand.
“Pistachio?” I said brightly, pushing Mike’s cupped hand toward his dad and Dean, like he was some kind of human buffet.
They shook their heads.
Mike, still seemingly oblivious about how intimate it was to feed me like this, tossed the remaining nuts into his mouth and dusted his hand off on his jeans.
“Nothing,” Dean said.
“Yeah, nothing.”
Mike shrugged this off, and didn’t see his dad and friend swap a knowing look with Jason behind the bar, who looked like someone had just given him ten free puppies.
My cheeks were on fire.
The conversation turned to the touch rugby game yesterday. Kev told Dean about Mike punching Oz. Dean didn’t look surprised, but he did seem to find it interesting that Mike didn’t want to say why he’d done it.
It made me feel weird to know something that Mike didn’t want to tell his family, and weirder still that it had been about me.
I was trying very hard not to think about yesterday—not the embarrassing cheer and definitely not what had happened in the car afterward, when Mike had gone down on me on the side of the road and I had been so close to orgasming that I still felt physically pained when I thought about it.
Okay fine, I was thinking about it.
Constantly.
In bed last night, emboldened by the cover of darkness, I’d thrust my hand between my legs to search out the feeling Mike had sparked. I was wet just remembering what had happened, and it should have been easy to reach that same peak, but I was too frantic, too desperate, and ultimately way too sensitive. The pleasant shaking feeling eluded me, and so I gave up, feeling even more frustrated than when I started.
