See, they’d been at a farmer’s market (I used to do those on the weekends before my server gig with SC, and I was glad I didn’t do them anymore because for one person, that was a ton of work, oh, and, no shock here, I was with Kev for part of the time and he was always “too busy” to help).
Miss Tandi had bought a couple petits fours from my booth. Shanti was with her. As they were walking away, they ate them.
At that point, Miss Tandi stopped dead, turned, came right back, and bought me out of petits fours, saying to her daughter, “I’ll serve these to my ladies tomorrow when we have tea at my place after church.”
Miss Tandi, who could go for the gold in the Olympics when it came to chatting, kindliness and sociability, chatted kindly and sociably with me, and somehow that morphed to Shanti and me making a coffee date (“somehow” meaning Miss Tandi suggested we do that in the way moms had that was more a veiled order).
And the rest was history.
That was seven years ago, and at the time, I’d still been smarting at the loss of Jen, and ripe pickin’s for a savvy, sweet, edgy, together girlfriend, and Shanti fit the bill.
I still count that day at the farmer’s market as one of the luckiest of my life.
So now, with years under my belt with this woman being the sister of my heart, I knew what was going on.
“Let me guess. Titus,” I said gently.
“Krish and bun,” she mumbled from under the pillow.
Oh no.
“Crash and burn?” I asked, hoping I didn’t translate self-suffocation speak right.
She took the pillow from her face and slammed it into her belly.
“I asked him out for a drink,” she told the ceiling. “And the worst part about it was how cool he was in letting me down.”
I got up and headed to the kitchen, inviting, “Tell me.”
While I pulled out the Tito’s vodka, Fever Tree tonic water, and a lime (see? totally prepared for whoever would knock at my door), she spoke.
“He told me I was beautiful. He told me he thought I, and all the Angels were the shit. He told me he would totally go there, except he’s in the middle of reading the Rock Chick books.”
Oh no.
An aside: the romantic shenanigans of the first-gen crew up in Denver were such that they’d been written into books.
The only one of us Angels who’d read them was Harlow.
The rest of us avoided them because, from what we heard, including car bombs, grenades, businesses burning down, high-speed chases and assaults at haunted houses, we were terrified of them.
So, yeah, the Angels were covered so closely by the Nightingale Men because the original crew were dealing with HEA PTSD, and that might sound crazy, but it was true.
Though, now I kinda wanted to read Luke and Ava’s story.
I kept mixing Shanti’s drink as she went on.
“He says he sees the writing on the wall. He’s not the guy for me, and he doesn’t want to get his heart involved when he’s a side character or he has to wait for a spin-off or a next-gen, or worse, being wedged in some random other series.”
Okay, that might sound crazy too, but I totally got where Titus was coming from.
I squirted the wedge of lime into her drink then took it to her.
She was now sitting cross-legged in the lounge extension corner of my couch with the pillow still held to her belly.
Shanti accepted the drink with a mumbled, “Thanks,” took a sip and then kept at her tale of woe. “Now, due to sheer embarrassment, I can’t go back to the man cave.”
I gasped in shock and horror for two reasons.
