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Nash doesn’t react.
“I don’t know,” Kenzie says. “I think all of you might have a temper.”
“Yeah, but he punched the guy who lived there,” Paige says.
“If you wanted the fake-nice version of hockey players, you should’ve stayed,” Koda says. “Greeley’s quite the host. Ask Blondie.”
Paige laughs into her water.
Kenzie stares at all three of them. “You’re all unwell.”
Nash doesn’t say anything at all. He’s drinking his coffee. His lip is split at the corner and swelling, there’s dried blood still on his chin and more on the collar of his shirt, and two of his knuckles are open, but his hands are steady on the mug. Forty minutes ago, he had a fistful of another guy’s shirt and blood in his mouth, and now he’s reading a laminated dessert menu like he’s considering pie. I had one argument with my boyfriend in a parking lot and shook for two hours afterward.
“Are you okay?” Kenzie asks him.
“Yeah.”
“You’re still bleeding.”
“It stopped.”
She sets her fork down. “I’m pre-nursing. Let me look at it.”
I roll my eyes. She isn’t even in the nursing program yet.
“No,” Nash replies firmly.
“I’m not going to do anything,” she says. “I just want to see if—”
“No.” He sips his coffee.
“Okay, well, you’re dripping on the table,” Kenzie says, and goes back to her pancakes, unbothered, because Kenzie doesn’t care about rejection. I would have been offended.
I glance down, and he is dripping on the table, a spot of it next to his mug that he doesn’t look at. I pull four napkins out of the dispenser and shove them across to him. “You’re making a mess.”
He looks at the napkins, then at me. “Thanks.”
“Don’t talk to me.”
He presses one to the corner of his mouth and goes back to his coffee.
Koda points his fork at me across the booth. “Relax, Blondie. Three years with a guy who cheats on you, I’d be cranky too.”
The whole table goes still. I look at Koda, and then I look at Paige, who has suddenly found something fascinating in her water glass.
“You told them?” I say.
“It came up,” Paige says.
“When?”
“In the kitchen. Before.” She finally looks at me. “Kylie, I was explaining why you were—”
“Why I was what?”
She doesn’t finish. Koda goes back to his omelet. Across from me, Nash sets his mug down and doesn’t look at anybody. I fold my napkin in half, then in half again, and I let it sit, because the alternative is crying in a diner in front of three hockey players, and I’d rather die.
Paige tries to fix the mood the only way Paige knows how, which is to make it worse. “So Kylie got a number tonight,” she says, way too casually.