Neanderthal by Avery Flynn
Chapter Twenty-Two
Griff
No matter what Nash was saying with that look on his face, Griff hadn’t been hiding in his Lego room.
Before his pain-in-the-ass cousin had shown up uninvited, Griff had been working on collection development and rearranging completed projects on the custom-made display shelves so that once he finished the first-edition Lego Taj Mahal that had finally arrived, he’d have the perfect place to put it. And while he was doing that, he had been listening in on the staff call updating Beckett Cosmetics’s progress on Us, a gender-neutral holistic line of hair care, skin care, and supplement products launching early next year.
Then there was the packaging debate going on between his number two and the head of marketing that he was mediating via emails on his phone. Oh yeah, and he was listening to the audiobook of the latest in the Lady Sherlock series. So he couldn’t be hiding. He was just busy.
“You’re so full of shit,” Nash said from his spot leaning against the doorjamb. “You’re hiding from Kinsey.”
“She’s next door, dumb-ass.”
Yep. Just on the other side of his bedroom wall. What? He wasn’t weird; he’d seen the building blueprints and knew how everything lined up. That wasn’t… Okay, it was weird.
But shit, he’d spent hours every night staring at the ceiling instead of sleeping and thinking about Kinsey. When he made breakfast in the morning, he couldn’t help but wonder what she ate first thing. And that was just the beginning—thoughts about Kinsey had become the program running in the background all the time. What kind of music did she like? Would she find that movie funny? Did she toast her ham sandwiches? Did she brush her teeth in the bathroom or while she was walking around the house?
Unaffected by the silence outside of Griff’s head, Nash asked, “And when was the last time you saw her?”
Griff was hit with the image of Kinsey biting down on her bottom lip and giving him one last look before disappearing into her apartment after their first date.
“Last week,” he grumbled as he moved the Death Star on its customized stand to a shelf across the room.
“There is a time limit on these dates, you know.” Nash walked into the room, swiping nonexistent dust off the Technic Bugatti Chiron and then moving along to trace the line of the Millennium Falcon, his gaze on Griff the whole time, obviously knowing he was giving his cousin a set of small heart attacks that he’d never mention. “You can’t just put it off.”
“What’s with you?” He crossed his arms over his chest, trying to work out the twists and turns of his cousin’s mind. “You know she’s engaged. I’m obviously going to win the bet.”
“Wrong.” Nash grinned at him, the I-know-more-than-you-do smirk that was a permanent part of his resting smug face. “You already lost.”
Griff froze. He’d been careful. He hadn’t said shit to anyone. No one knew that he was in love with Kinsey. He locked all his attention on Nash. His cousin didn’t blink, didn’t fidget, didn’t lose a single percentage of pain-in-the-ass from his obnoxious grin. The asshole had gambled and won—even worse, he knew it.
“Fuck off,” Griff said.
Nash laughed and picked up the Captain America mini figure from the 2012 Toy Fair that had been a bitch to track down along with the Iron Man that had been one of 125 made. “You know I’m right,” Nash said, putting Cap back on the shelf but facing the wrong direction. “You’re already in too deep to swim back to shore.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.” Pulse going a million miles an hour as he marched across the room to fix it so Steve Rogers faced straight ahead, hoping with each step that Nash would be distracted enough not to realize that Griff was lying his face off.
“How about you’re in love, besotted, smitten, head over heels, you fancy her. Really, it makes perfect sense. You work out what’s going on and what’s going to happen eons before anyone else does, your brain moves that quick. Of course you’d fall in an instant because that’s just how fast your mind works. Griff and Kinsey sitting in a tree. K.I.S.S.I.N.G.”
“Immature asshole,” Griff said, ignoring the fact that he was in a room completely devoted to an activity that a lot of people considered as being for kids only. “What in the fuck is this bet really about anyway?”
Nash flinched. It was small—barely perceptible—but Griff had clocked it. His cousin was almost unnaturally smooth without even a flicker of nervous energy. He was all confidence and know-it-all answers. But not now. Instead, he fidgeted with mini figurines and the key fob to his Maserati, which he usually left on the dining room table.
“You know the bet is all about winning Grandma Betty’s last present,” Nash said, maintaining eye contact but just barely.
Griff shook his head. “Bullshit.”
“What? That’s it?” Nash scoffed as he turned the key fob over in his fingers like one of the scam artists in the tourist-heavy zones with a quarter, distracting a mark’s attention while their partner picked their pocket. “You have that big, scary brain and bullshit is all you can say?”
He shrugged. “It’s all that’s needed.”
Better to be thought fool than to prove it. His dad was an asshole, but he’d been right about that. Plenty of people ran their mouths when they shouldn’t.
“The next date is tomorrow,” Nash said. “Since you dragged your feet hard enough to carve a pair of ditches into cement, Dixon and Fiona planned this one for you.”
Griff paused midstep as he made his way over to the shelf with the Statue of Liberty displayed on it, complete with an Ellis Island backdrop and a ferry full of sightseers. His gut clenched and he chewed the inside of his cheek like it was a hunk of Hubba Bubba. He wasn’t sure if Fiona being involved was a good or a bad thing. She was pretty great, but she’d also fallen for Dixon, so there were obviously some errors in judgment there. Not really, but he wasn’t ever going to admit that out loud.
Nash went on, either not noticing Griff was processing the new information about date planning or pretending not to. “You’re going to Paint and Sip in Waterbury.”
Okay, he could do that. It wasn’t like people talked a lot during those things. He could just sit there, paint some stupid sunset, and be done with date number two. Perfect. If he couldn’t figure out soon how to fall out of love with her, the sooner he got through the six dates, the better.
“Fine.” Griff picked up the Statue of Liberty, made sure it was balanced properly, and moved it over to its new home near the door.
There. Now there would be plenty of room to display his latest additions once they were built. All was right in the world. Well, at least in his Lego room. Except for Nash being in there and acting all squirrely. He’d figure out what was going on. He always did. In the meantime, he swiped his phone off the building table, flicked off the light switch, and walked out of the room.
Nash caught up to him in the kitchen, accepting the open beer Griff handed him.
“So are you going to call her and let her know?” Nash asked after he’d taken a sip and shot a meaningful look at Griff’s phone on the counter. “You may not realize it, but most humans like a little notice—especially when they’re doing someone a favor.”
Griff didn’t make a move for his phone. “I’ll text her later.”
“Do it now.” He picked up Griff’s phone and tossed it at him.
He caught it while grabbing a bag of chips from the pantry. “Why?”
“Because I think you’re doing your best to pretend that you don’t like her and, like the fool you are, have chosen the ostrich route.”
He laid the phone down on the kitchen table and did the pinch, pinch, pull to open the bag. “Fuck off.”
“So Mom was right; it’s more than like.” Nash reached in and grabbed a handful of barbecue-flavored chips. “You really do love her.”
“Aunt Celeste needs to dial back on the woo-woo,” he grumbled between handfuls of chips he shoved in his mouth while trying to figure out how she knew.
Nash snorted. “That’s never gonna happen—especially not when she finds out her interpretation of the cards was right.”
Fuck. There was no way this would end well. Aunt Celeste was scattered, but once she’d grabbed on to an idea, she didn’t let it go. If he didn’t nip this in the bud, she’d figure out a way to involve herself in this dating-bet disaster all the way up to her eyebrows. There was only one way out of this. He had to ask Nash for a favor.
“What will it take to get you to not say anything to your mom so she backs off?”
Nash’s smug smile and cocky attitude were back in full force. “Text Kinsey about the date now and type exactly what I say.”
“You are a bossy motherfucker.” He grabbed his phone and opened up his texts. “One of these days, someone is going to fuck your shit up.”
Now it was his cousin’s turn to shrug as if he had no fucks left to give. “Stop trying to change the subject, Griff, and start typing.”
He did. And then—fuck his life—he tapped out exactly what Nash said, cringing every letter of the way.
