Page 87 of Until Nalia
“You’re cool with this guy after what?” Harlen looks at me. “A few weeks? Clay and I had to walk through fire for god knows how long before you accepted us.”
“Christ,” Nico mutters. “Can’t you see that I’m getting too old for the bullshit? I just want to be on the beach with my wife. The sooner I know all my girls are in good hands, the sooner I can make that dream a reality.”
“Well, that’s not sexist at all.” We all turn and find that the girls have made their way outside with the kids in tow. “I can take care of myself,” Willow tells her father, placing her hands on her hips. “I didn’t need Clay to come along and take care of me.”
“Seriously, Dad.” Harmony shakes her head, giving him a disappointed look.
I glance over at Nalia and see that she’s holding one of Harmony’s girls, with a frown on her face as she looks at her dad.
“No one said that you girls are not capable of taking care of yourselves,” Nico states, looking through his daughters. “What I will say is I rest a little easier knowing that you have someone you can lean on when I’m not around, and eventually when I die I’ll go knowing that you’ll be taken care of.”
Just like that all of their frown’s dissolve and they all walk over to their dad wrapping him in a group hug. “You’re not going anywhere for a long, long time,” Harmony says quietly while Nalia and Willow whisper their agreement.
“Jesus, he’s good,” Clay mumbles, and I chuckle along with the rest of the guys.
Twenty-Six
NALIA
Billie
“They’re so cute,” Cat says when Nalia leans over so my dad can whisper something to her. Whatever he says makes her smile, and when he sees it, his face goes soft like it always does when he looks at her.
Rolling my eyes at my best friend I turn to my stomach on my towel. She isn’t wrong. they are cute, so cute it’s gross, and they look like they belong together, which is weird, because I always thought my mom and dad were meant to be together until I saw him with her.
And now, now it kinda feels like she and Zuri have always been in our lives, which is even weirder since at first, I really thought that I would hate her.
“Oh crap, they’re coming back,” Cat hisses, sucking in her already flat stomach while lifting her chest, and I laugh. “Don’t laugh,” she laughs with me, then sighs. “They aren’t even looking at us.”
“Probably because my dad told them how old we are.” I remind her of that embarrassing detail. I honestly wish I could scrub that introduction from my brain, but it’s now stuck there, and I will probably have nightmares about it for the next month because it was that humiliating. Not that my dad noticed when Nalia was introducing us to her cousin’s sons, who were both seriously hot.
Glancing their way, I try to see if they are looking in our direction. I doubt it, and it would be hard to tell anyway because they’re both wearing sunglasses.
Taking my eyes off them when my cell phone beeps, I pull it out and check the screens and it’s a message from my friend, Tori. When I open it up, my stomach bottoms out.
“You can’t be serious,” I whisper, and Cat rolls towards me, and I can feel her looking at my screen as I click on the link. As the page loads, I see that she wasn’t lying. Aaron’s picture fills the screen along with some information about him, including that he likes cats, even though he told my mom she couldn’t get a cat because he’s allergic to them. I slide through the photos on his profile and feel sick. As sick as I felt the first time I found him on this same dating app right after he moved in with my mom.
Nalia
“So, it’s officially official, you found your guy.” Ashlyn grins, then adds, before taking a sip of her drink. “I wasn’t sure that he was the one for you since your relationship has been pretty much drama free since you started talking about him, but now that I know that the cops have been called, I’ll start looking for a wedding party dress.”
“I wish I could claim that logic is ridiculous, but it is actually pretty accurate,” April mutters from her lounger.
“So, what is Logan going to do?” June asks, bringing the conversation back around to me, telling them that the cops who came over last night confirmed this afternoon that the bikes left at the end of the driveway were Matthew’s and his older brother’s. The same kid that we’ve been having issues with this school year.
“There’s not much he can do; the boys claim that they know nothing about the vandalism, and their parents said that the boys were home all night, so it couldn’t have been them.”
“Then how did their bikes get there?”
“Apparently, they were stolen from their front yard.” I make air quotes.
“Yeah, and I’m Mary Poppins,” April mutters.
“Basically, but maybe the cops showing up scared them, and they will stop being little pricks.”
“You can hope,” July says, then adds. “At least no one is being stalked or shot at.”
“This is true,” Hanna mutters quietly so that she doesn’t wake up the sleeping boy on her lap.
