“Please don’t.” Oliver was lying on the same couch, one arm flung over his eyes.
“Your douchebag ex-boyfriend shows up today, after his Gucci-model boy toy dumps his ass to hop across the pond. In a carefully rehearsed scheme right out of a rom-com, Douchey McGee asks to help save your business in an effort to win back your heart.”
“He’s not going to win back my heart.”
“I notice you didn’t disagree with my characterization.”
Oliver let his arm drop to the floor. Seb was leaning over the couch, smiling expectantly at him. “Cooper is a douchebag. Continue.”
“Right.” Seb resumed his circling. “And then Avery, your cute-as-a-button twink of a best customer, who is a mild-mannered accountant by day, while his superhero identity is a Red Bull-guzzling, beet-juice-addicted, videogame fanatic by night, propositioned you, and you turned him down.”
“He asked me out for dinner. There was no propositioning involved.”
“He kissed you.”
“He kissed me.”
“With sexual intentions.”
“Jesus.” Oliver threw a cushion at him. “Where is your other half? Martin would be so much better at this than you are.”
Seb tossed the pillow back at him with a laugh. “He’s doing something with Penny.”
“What kind of something?”
“They’re organizing a spring fling at the elementary school. Don’t ask me what they’re flinging. Or how Martin got involved in all this. They made him MC of a fundraiser once last fall and now he’s the committee chair.”
Oliver had a pretty good idea how that happened. When the bookstore burned down, Martin had been quietly determined to help Seb get back on his feet, and he’d won over the whole town in the process. “He’s too good for you.”
“Ain’t that the truth. Speaking of which!” Seb poked a finger in the air and started pacing again, moving clockwise this time which was just as well, because the other way had been making Oliver dizzy. “On top of these two men, one ex-boyfriend, one aspiring, who both came into your store this morning, desperate to win your heart, we have Nick. He is youractualboyfriend, despite the fact that I am only finding out about this change in your relationship status today.”
“It’s not like I—”
“Nick,” Seb continued, like Oliver hadn’t spoken, “who is not answering his phone but who, we assume, is at home sleeping. Home, where he lives in a platonic relationship with his high school sweetheart ex-wife because their teenage son is a criminal mastermind who needs twenty-four-hour supervision or else he might take over the world. Do I have all of that right?”
That last part had some not insignificant embellishments, and Oliver hadn’t told Seb that Hayden came out to Nick because that wasn’t his story to tell, but . . .
Then again, Oliver should have been having this conversation with Nick. If he had answered his phone any one of the three times Oliver called him after he’d left the shop, it would have been a nonstarter because he would have gone to Nick to sort out what happened over the morning. Instead, he was stuck reviewing it with his shithead baby brother, so Nick had no grounds to complain.
“Yeah, that’s pretty much all of it.” He winced.
Seb flopped down onto the couch with a heavy sigh, resting one elbow on Oliver’s bent knee. “When you blow up your life, you really go for full hellfire, don’t you?”
“I saw none of this coming.”
“Not even the twink?”
Oliver groaned. Avery was the worst part of it. Collateral damage. “What was I supposed to see? He was sweet. I thought he was interested.”
“Hewasinterested.”
“In juicing!”
“In your sexy hipster bod! He was hot for teacher, and you didn’t even know!” Seb laughed, and Oliver kicked at him until he squirmed off the couch and fell to the floor with a thump.
Oliver buried his face in the cushion and waited for Seb’s laughter to die. “What do I do?”
“What do you want to do?”
