Jenna held her stomach. “I think my ovaries are aching.”
“Do you want to have more kids?” She’d never asked Jenna that. Blake was almost fifteen, she wondered if she’d rather be done.
“No.” Jenna held her arms up in an X shape. “No deflecting allowed.”
“Fine, okay, so he told me all that, that was at the fundraiser?—”
“At the fundraiser?!”
“Yes.”
“Shit, I knew I shouldn’t have left early.”
Part of Tiana wanted to put her friend out of her misery and say that it wouldn’t have mattered when she left, he’d done it in the privacy of the storage closet, but she wasn’t ready to share those secrets quite yet.
“And then when we got home?—”
“Wait!” Jenna raised her hand. “Did you say it back?”
“No.”
“Got it, you lied.” She pretended to write on an imaginary notepad. “Lied. Noted.”
“I didn’t lie,” Tiana defended herself.
“By omission, but it’s still a lie,” Jenna stated flatly.
Tiana wasn’t going to argue. “Anyway, when we got home, he told me that he’d spoken to Pops about me.”
“Oh, okay.”
“I don’t know the entire conversation, but he did say that Pops showed him pictures I used to draw.”
Jenna’s face scrunched up. “Pictures you used to draw?”
“Yeah, there was this bridge by my first group home, and the day I arrived there I saw someone get engaged. I thought it was the most romantic thing I’d ever seen. So I used to draw that all the time, for years. I always thought that was my gold standard for my happily ever after.”
“Why did he show those to Niko?”
“I think Pops thinks that I’m closed off because of Brock, and he wanted Niko to know that I used to believe in love or something, I don’t know. I was a kid. That’s not real. It’s a fairy tale. He also said that Pops basically told him that it will be difficult for me to accept love and to trust someone.”
“No cap.”
Tiana had to smile. Because Jenna had a fourteen-year-old she was always well-versed in slang, no cap meant he was telling the truth.
“Part of me is happy that Pops trusted Niko to speak to him about me like that, but then another part of me didn’t understand why Pops spoke to him about it. If he thinks I have all these issues, why not come speak to me about them?”
It bothered her. A lot. She thought she and Pops could speak about anything. So why go to Niko? Had they really gotten that close that she was getting cut out of conversations about her? He had always said he wanted a son. And baseball was his favorite sport. Niko had done a lot for him in the short time they’d known each other. It’s not that she didn’t want them to be close, but…
“Have you asked Pops about it?”
“No, I just found out last night.”
“Maybe the talk, even though it was about you, wasn’t about you.”
“What?” Tiana didn’t understand.
“I’m just saying, as a parent, I think…” Jenna took a breath and exhaled. “Okay, so Blake is very emotional. That’s not a good or bad thing, it’s just the truth. If she was going to be marrying someone?—”
