Page 7 of Best Friends for Never

Heat creeps up my cheeks. Fine. So myat homeproblems are a little different from his. I have a destructive cat who loves to knock over theChristmas decorations I refuse to take off my fireplace mantel. Axel has four-year-old triplets and another baby on the way. But we’re still dealing with distractions. That counts, right?

He laughs, crossing the café and returning to the front window he’s spent a good deal of the morning reframing after an incident with the glass. He begins packing his tools, a sign we’re done for the day. “I’m not trying to use it as an excuse. Yes, it has been kind of rough lately, but I still have a job to do, and I need to learn to do it right. And not just for you and the business—which, by the way, is doing great, and we won’t be broke by the end of the year—I need to do it right for our clients too. They deserve that.”

I sink back against the counter with relief becausehe gets it.

I shouldn’t be surprised. He’s been a good partner since Day One, never making me feel like anything other than his equal.

If someone had told me when I was eight years old that one day, I would not only be friends with Axel Cooke but also running a successful renovation company with him, I’d have laughed right in their face.

The red-haired mammoth standing before me with three—going on four—children, who likes to spend his weekends coaching Little League baseball or peewee soccer or baking cookies for the local nursing home, is the same guy who used to make fun of me for being a theater geek almost daily. He’s the same guy who would “accidentally” look at my tests in science class and then tell the teacherIcheated offhispaper. The same one who once loudly regaled the whole cafeteria with a story about how the one time we played spin the bottle in sixth grade, I kissed him and cut him with my braces, ensuring I wasn’t kissed again until I was in eleventh grade.

He was a thorn in my side throughout school, but when I needed someone after my best friend left town, surprisingly it was Axel who was there to help pick up the pieces.

It’s pretty spectacular what getting out of a petty high school environment can do for someone’s personality.

“Thank you,” I tell him. “It’s just that with the theater project coming up ...”

“You think I don’t know that’s what has you stressed?” He dumps one of his many drills into his beat-up leather tool bag. “If I added up all the hours I’ve spent listening to you go on and on about that damn theater, then added the triplets’ ages together, we’d be about even.”

“Are you saying I talk about it too much?”

“It’s your dream. There’s no such thing as talking about it too much.”

His words warm me. Who would have thought such a sweet guy was hiding behind all those insults over the years?

“You’re a really good friend, you know that?”

My words have the opposite effect on him, and he groans, rising to his feet. “Stop saying shit like that to me.”

“Why?” I ask, pushing off the counter and setting about cleaning up my workspace, a much smaller task than his since I’ve basically been here all day, installing the coffee station and putting up the herringbone tile on the backsplash behind it. “It’s true. You’re like thebestfriend ever.”

“We’re adults, Parker. We don’t use the termbest friends.”

“That’s bull poo, and you know it.”

“Just sayshit,” he says for likely the thousandth time in our friendship. “You’re an adult. Adults cuss.”

“Just like adults don’t havebest friends?”

“Exactly,” he calls over his shoulder as he kneels and grabs a stack of lumber we’re done with and then tosses it onto his shoulder like it weighs nothing, pushing himself to his feet like he didn’t just add at least a hundred pounds to his already massive frame. Who needs to hire a big crew when I have six-foot-six Axel around to do all the heavy lifting? I swear, the man looks like he benches buses for fun.

“You’re just saying that because you’re embarrassed that Potty Parkerisyour best friend.”

You haveoneaccident justonetime and you’re forever branded as the girl who peed her pants on the playground.

The nickname haunted me all through elementary, middle,andhigh school, and I had nobody to blame but myself.

Axel snorts out a laugh. “That’s embarrassing for you, not me,Potty Parker.”

Hearing the name roll off his tongue so effortlessly sends a wave of mortification through me, and I pick up the nearest thing to me—my rubber mallet—and chuck it right at his back.

Being the giant he is, it bounces right off as if I never threw it at all.

“Did that even hurt you?” I call after him as he pushes through the front door of the unfinished eatery.

“Tickled!”

“Darn it!”

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