Trading with the Boys

“Not anymore.”

Tate’s nose had stopped bleeding, though it was still swollen. I could see him restraining himself, biting back whatever he wanted to say. I appreciated him for letting me do it.

“Eric…” I sneered.

“What?”

“Answer the question,” I sighed in exasperation. “Why are you here?”

He looked down into his paper towels, which were significantly more bloody than Tate’s After half-spitting, half-blowing his nose into them, he stared up at me with two bloodshot eye

s.

“I’m here for David.”

David?

My brow furrowed. Even more begrudgingly, and probably only to save a cleanup on my kitchen floor, Jacob swapped out my ex-husband’s bloody paper towels for new ones.

“David’s not here,” I told him. “He’s been gone for two years. You know this.”

“Yeah well he’s coming back to town,” Eric went on. “Just for a day or two. Like me.”

“Why?”

“He’s getting married, Serena. To that girl he met in South America.”

I felt suddenly shitty. David and I hadn’t talked in a few months now, but the last few times had been him calling me. I could’ve at least picked up the phone and given him a call, but I hadn’t. Probably because I was so angry about the student loans.

“How do you know this?” I asked.

“I saw on one of his social media pages that he was stopping up here this weekend,” said Eric, “to pick up the last of his stuff and tie up some loose ends. Then he’s going back to Bolivia. They’re having the ceremony there.”

“And you’re going to the ceremony?” I asked, surprised.

“Heck no,” Eric shook his head. “I have to be back in Milan by tomorrow night.”

I laughed, but it wasn’t a good laugh. “Figures.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” I swore. “Nothing at all.”

Eric happened to look up at the wrong time, and found Cole staring at him intently. Wrinkling his lip in disgust, my ex-husband swung his gaze back to me.

“Anyway,” he sighed, “being in town for only one night I figured I could stay in David’s old room. That even if you still held a grudge, you’d at least grant me that.”

“You thought wrong,” I growled.

“So I grabbed an Uber here,” he went on without missing a beat, “and dropped my stuff in David’s room. By the time I realized something was off, this asshole attacked me from behind.”

He jerked a thumb at Tate, who only grunted.

“You’re lucky that’s all that happened.”

I couldn’t believe it, and yet somehow I could. Yes, Eric could be this stupid. Yes, he could be this oblivious, too. It was astounding to me that I’d once fallen in love and married this man, but I kept telling myself that people change. And not always for the better.

“So you live here with these three guys?” Eric asked, shifting gears. Suddenly he was looking at the guys a little differently than before.