Page 17 of Flirting with Forever

“Will you stay and eat with us, John?” Via asked. “Mary’s gonna close down the shop in a bit and then we can eat.”

“Oh. Ah...” John looked to Mary.

Flustered, John’s money in her hand and at least a half an hour before she normally closed the shop, Mary smoothed her hair again. “Let’s just eat now. You should definitely stay, John. I’ll close the store down early tonight.”

She felt her friends’ eyes on her back as she hurried over to the door, flipped the sign and the lock and dimmed the front lights. Mary ignored their eyes as she pulled out her phone and sent a quick Tweet on the store’s Twitter feed saying that she was closing up a bit early. And by the time she got back to the counter, with everyone leaning over their tacos, her friends were too busy eating to point out that she hadn’t closed the shop early for them, but she had for John.

ITWASAweek later when John finally realized what was happening. He was in the middle of a date with a very nice woman named Tilli, who seemed just as confused about why his mother had set them up as he did.

John got a text from Mary, but he waited until pretty, brown-haired Tilli was in the bathroom to open it.

In their typical way, the text said two words and two words only. A name. Only, this time, it was a name that made John nearly choke on the very life in his throat.

Maddox Whitford.

Another text from her sat below that fateful name.Any relation?

“Yes, there’s a fucking relation,” John muttered angrily to his phone, slouching over it. His mother had set up Mary with Maddox? With his train-wreck half brother, who was just as likely to wind up hungover on a train to Niagara Falls as he was to actually make it into work on any given day? It had been just two months ago that Estrella herself had shaken her head at thePage Sixarticle about his father’s other son, outlining the fall of the drunken, high-society rich kid. And now she was magically deciding that Mary should date this guy?

“What thehell, Ma?”

John knew what Maddox did with women on dates. He used his trust fund to wine and dine them, promptly fell in mad, out-of-control love with them, got bored and either dumped them or sent himself spiraling on a bender of the first degree.

It was one of the many reasons that John was actually glad he hadn’t grown up in Maddox and his father’s world. He might not be the smoothest when it came to women, but at least he wasn’t reenactingThe Wolf of Wall Streetwhenever he found one he liked.

“Everything all right?” a nervous-voiced Tilli asked as she slid back into her seat, shaking her napkin out primly.

John looked up, his eyes focusing on his dinner companion. It all went painfully clear. Like HDTV on a sportscaster’s rosacea type of clear.

Tilli was a nice woman his mother had met at the Crown Heights branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. She was slight and shy and had laughed nervously at almost everything that John had said tonight. They had less than zero in common with one another, besides the fact that John had grown up in Crown Heights and Tilli currently lived there. This date had all the explosive chemistry of milk stirred into flour. There was not a chance in hell that his mother had actually thought this would go well for John.

All the while she was setting Mary up with Maddox.

Sammy at the block party. Elijah Crawford. Michael Fallon. Maddox Whitford. The freakingtacos. He finally understood the game. And was beyond frustrated that it had taken him damn near two weeks to catch on to the sly scheme of his mother’s.

“Ah. Yes. I just sort of realized that my mother was up to something.” He put his phone away and directed his attention back to Tilli.

She seemed to immediately wither under his gaze. “Is it very important?” she asked timidly. “Because I don’t mind if you have to go deal with it. That’s okay. It’s getting a little late anyhow.”

It was roughly eight fifteen on a Friday night, and another thing became painfully clear to John. Tilli didn’t want to be here any more than he did. “Um, right,” he tried to say gracefully. He lifted up and pulled out his wallet, leaving cash on the table for the burritos they’d both eaten. His mother really needed to stop figuring out ways to get him to waste cash on food he could barely afford. “I’ll walk you to the train.”

Looking like she had absolutely no idea how to say no to that, Tilli nodded meekly. The two of them walked quietly to the train, John’s mind traveling inexorably back to his devious mother.

He shook Tilli’s hand at the top of the train entrance and tried not to take her look of utter relief personally when it became clear that he wasn’t going underground with her. He knew he had a mean mug, but timid Tilli made him feel like he was the Grinch who stole Friday night.

He strode away and immediately pulled out his phone. His brother answered on the fifth ring. “Hello?” Maddox said fuzzily.

John frowned. It was a Friday, so it was equally plausible that Maddox would either be shit-faced or already sleeping it off in some woman’s bed. “It’s John.”

“Hey. Hold on.”

John heard some hushed mumbling and then the sound of a door closing. “What’s up?”

He wondered where his brother was. John knew better than to ask at this point. There was only a ten percent chance he’d get the truth anyhow. Maddox and John were only eleven months apart in age, but there’d been times in the last decade since they’d gotten to know one another that John had felt more like Maddox’s father than he did his slightly older brother.

John and Maddox were night and day. Both in demeanor and physicality. Maddox took after their father, light complexion and dark eyes. John’s swarthier skin and shockingly blue eyes didn’t fit into Maddox’s family one bit. Maddox was lanky and loose, always laying his head on someone’s shoulder or falling asleep on the train. John was stocky and wide-shouldered and self-contained. He kept to himself, while his brother kept to everyone but himself.

“Have you talked to my mother lately?” John asked.

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