Mr. Nice Guy by Belinda Williams

Chapter Thirty

Tom didn’t call.He didn’t text. He wasn’t at the apartment when Chelsea went to move her things on Saturday either, although she suspected Nadia may have had something to do with that.

Living with Nadia was . . . awkward. It was obvious her friend preferred to live alone, but she was also fiercely protective of her friends and wouldn’t hear anything about Chelsea looking for a share apartment. Chelsea was relieved. While she fully intended to find a new place to live, the fact that Nadia wasn’t in any hurry to kick her out meant that she could take her time. She didn’t want to rush into something that was less than ideal and find herself committed to living with people she didn’t like.

Chelsea concentrated hard on her work. Several weeks later, her first semester of classes began making her even busier. The distraction should have helped, but it didn’t. Chelsea still found herself missing Tom at the weirdest times. Like when one of the kids at Kinder Kids did something particularly funny, and she thought she’d tell Tom about it when she got home, except she didn’t live with him anymore.

Nadia suggested Chelsea try dating again, but her heart just wasn’t in it. She’d meant what she said about not dating bad boys anymore. And as they’d previously established, finding nice guys to date wasn’t exactly easy.

Was Tom still a nice guy? When Chelsea had first left the apartment, she wasn’t sure. She’d been too angry to think clearly. Now it was almost a month on, and she knew that, deep down, Tom was one of the good guys. In his mind, he was trying to do the right thing by not leading Chelsea on, but it didn’t make the reality of it hurt any less.

She hurt for him, too. She tried to imagine what it would be like to be hurt by someone so much that you couldn’t move on. Chelsea had certainly been hurt before by men, but not the deep sort of hurt that took real time to heal. Chelsea had been offended, cheated on, ignored, and mistreated in various ways, but now she realised that she’d never let herself be truly hurt.

‘Do you think I go out with bad boys because they’re safer?’ Chelsea asked Nadia one night when they were cooking dinner.

‘Hmm. Isn’t that a contradiction?’ mused Nadia, stirring the rice.

‘I mean safer because it never ends up being serious,’ corrected Chelsea.

‘There’s a first. Bad boys are safer, everyone. Line up, line up! Bag yourself a bad boy. We’ve got tall ones, short ones, angry ones, egotistical ones. There’s one for every appetite, but it’s a limited time offer and they’ll be gone before you wake up.’

Chelsea grinned. Nadia had been working hard to make Chelsea laugh since she’d moved in, and it hadn’t gone unnoticed.

Nadia grinned back. ‘Who knows? Why do we go out with anyone? We tell ourselves that it’s something about them. How they look. The way they act. But we all know it’s far more complex than that. I date bad boys because they’re easy, not safe.’

‘You don’t want a relationship though,’ Chelsea pointed out.

‘That’s true. But do you?’

‘Yes, I guess I do.’

Chelsea stopped cutting up the carrot she’d been slicing to reflect on her answer. Why else would she continually keep dating? Nadia only ever hooked up with guys when the mood struck her, but in Chelsea’s case, each new guy she dated was always in the hope that he might be halfway decent.

Nadia levelled Chelsea with a stern look. ‘Stop dating bad boys then.’

Chelsea burst out laughing. ‘Good point. Know any decent guys then?’

‘Yeah, Tom.’

Nadia winked and turned back to stir the rice.

‘You think I should be with Tom?’ Chelsea asked incredulously.

Nadia shrugged, still concentrating on the rice. ‘I wouldn’t have suggested the nice guy arrangement otherwise.’

‘What?’

Nadia turned to face Chelsea again, a wooden spoon in one hand and her other on her hip. ‘Oh, come on. You guys are made for each other. Admit it.’

‘We. Are. Not,’ Chelsea bit out. ‘And if that’s the case, why have you been encouraging me to date?’

Nadia sighed dramatically like she’d been asked to solve world hunger. ‘Two reasons. Distraction, and your poor taste. My bet is it would take one more bad boy to make you realise what you’re missing with Tom.’

Chelsea gaped at her friend. ‘But he won’t even talk to me! Or have sex with me!’

Nadia rolled her eyes. ‘Yeah, because he loves you. You two are just so stupid.’

‘Love?’ Chelsea sputtered. ‘What do you know about love?’

Nadia pointed the spoon at her. ‘I know that every time you walk into a room, he looks at you. I know that he goes out of his way to do, oh, I don’t know, pretty much everything he can for you. That guy adores you, Chelsea, with a capital A. It even makes a heartless bitch like me occasionally jealous. Plus, he says your name differently.’

That shut Chelsea up. So it wasn’t just her who had noticed the way Tom said her name.

Nadia’s eyes darkened and flashed mischievously. ‘Chelsea,’ she breathed, then sauntered over to stand in front of her. She trailed a finger down Chelsea’s arm. ‘Oh, Chel-see.’

Chelsea shoved her away, laughing. ‘Stop! OK? You’ve made your point, but there’s not a single thing I can do about how everything has turned out, alright? I can’t force Tom to open up to me. There’s not a goddamn thing I can do about it!’

Then she burst into tears.

Nadia dropped the wooden spoon into the pot, came over, and gave Chelsea a tight hug.

‘I’m sorry.’ Chelsea sobbed. ‘I know I’m pathetic. I’m trying so hard to get over him, but . . .’ She sobbed some more.

‘But you’re in love,’ Nadia finished for her.

Chelsea eased out of the hug. ‘Wait. I am?’

‘You’re such an idiot, Chels.’

With that, Nadia went to the cabinet and got out two wineglasses. Then she went to the fridge and pulled out a bottle of wine they kept on hand for emergencies—or for whenever they felt like it, which was at least once a week.

Nadia poured two glasses and handed one to Chelsea. ‘Drink. You’ve been in love with him since sometime last year is my best guess.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Chelsea said dumbly.

‘Drink more. You two are like best friends. An old married couple cohabitating together who haven’t had sex in years—or ever, in your case. You finish each other’s sentences and tell each other jokes. He puts up with your douchebag boyfriend stories and you don’t hassle him about his emotional distance.’

‘Emotional distance? When has Tom ever been emotionally distant until recently?’

‘Keep drinking. Like, oh, whenever the subject of him dating comes up, he runs about a million miles and then looks at you with puppy dog eyes. I swear my evil plan almost worked, but he ruined it when he insisted on ruling out friends with benefits.’

Chelsea was feeling less teary now, but way more confused. ‘You wanted us to sleep together?’

‘Well, duh. I figured it would loosen him up at the same time as blowing your mind and making you forget about all the bad boys in the process.’

‘How do you know he’s good in bed?’ Chelsea asked warily.

Nadia continued to look at Chelsea like the university shouldn’t have accepted her application. ‘Any guy who is prepared to dress up in full historical costume to get a girl off is going to be good in bed, trust me.’

Chelsea blushed. She really shouldn’t have told Nadia about that, but she’d blurted out a lot of unnecessary things the night she moved out of Tom’s.

The memory of it sobered her. ‘Well, I wouldn’t know now, would I? We never slept together.’

‘There’s your solution. You sleep with Tom.’

‘Um, how? We don’t live together. We don’t even talk anymore.’ She took another sip of wine, because that last part made her feel like bursting into tears again.

‘So you go over there one night and seduce him.’

‘Um,’ she said again. ‘That’s your answer to everything? Have sex?’

‘Sometimes talking doesn’t work, Chels. Particularly when it comes to guys. They need to feel things first. Not discuss them. Ugh.’ With that, Nadia drained the remainder of her glass. ‘Talking is so overrated, I tell you.’

‘I can’t . . . I can’t just walk into his apartment and sleep with him,’ Chelsea protested. ‘He’ll think I’m insane.’

‘The thought might cross his mind,’ Nadia admitted. ‘But then he’ll stop thinking altogether, don’t worry.’

Chelsea shook her head at her friend. ‘You’re crazy.’

‘No, I know men. I also know Tom. He loves you, Chels. I know it. Come on, it’s not like I’ll ever live happily ever after. You might as well try to.’

Chelsea finally gave up on the vegetables she’d been attempting to slice and lowered herself onto one of the kitchen stools.

‘I can’t believe I’m considering taking advice about men from you.’

Nadia shrugged. ‘Desperate times. Desperate measures.’

That was the thing. Despite the interesting new university course she was studying, despite her positive progress at work, and despite having great friends like Nadia, Chelsea was still desperately unhappy because she missed Tom.

But was she desperate enough to take Nadia’s advice?