Mikey finally looked up. "Sacha's moving?"
"Sounds like it." And the thing with Sacha was, there was no telling if she'd move the three blocks it would take to be across town in Pickleberry Springs, or if she'd up and move to Mexico. All depended on what her visions and the spirits told her to do. "You still friends with that private investigator lady?"
Mikey's face went an unusual ruddy color. "Yeah."
"Might want her number myself if things go bad." He hoped it wouldn't come to that, but he couldn't let Sacha walk away.
She was still Will's family, even if she wasn't Aunt Jessie's anymore.
"Sure." Mikey's gaze dropped to the ice cream, and he grimaced. "Put that shit away."
"You wanna talk about it?"
"We girls now? Eat ice cream and talk about our feelings?"
Better than talking about Sacha and Aunt Jessie. "Goes good with the pouting you got going on."
"Ain't one to talk, buckaroo."
Will shrugged and dug into the ice cream. Hazel's Nuts, it was labeled. "You name this one?"
Mikey growled.
Will took that as a yes. He took another bite. Swallowed.
Damn good ice cream. "Girl who can make ice cream like this doesn't come around every day."
"Shove it."
"You want, I can put in a good word for you."
Mikey leveled a flat stare at Will. The kind that usually meant nothing good was about to come out of his mouth. Might could've meant one of them would end the day sporting a black eye too.
Will should've asked Lindsey if she had any valuables in here she didn't want getting broke.
"You playing matchmaker like your girl now?" Mikey said.
"She's staying out of this one. Told me she liked Dahlia too much to make the girl suffer."
Mikey shoved to his feet and paced in front of the fireplace. "She said something about us?"
"You believe it if I tell you?"
"No."
Will shrugged again.
Mikey scraped a hand over his bald head and made a quick turn. "You know what? Who needs this shit? Lots of girls out there. I'll just-I'll just go find another one."
First time Will had ever heard Mikey hurting over a girl.
He shivered one of those shivers he got when Sacha took it in her mind to tell him something.
Lindsey saw more than she believed.
"Could go get her back, man," Will said to Mikey.
"No point." Mikey pushed a fist into his other hand. "Even if I was a one-woman kind of guy, she doesn't want me. And I-I don't deserve her."
Where was Mari Belle when a guy needed a good sigh? "Then get over it. We gonna write songs today, or you gonna be a girl?"
Mikey eyed the guitar he'd brought over. Then Will's ice cream. "Suppose we're writing."
And for a few hours, they were almost who they used to be. No girls, no pressure, no family problems. Just two buddies working on making something big while a dog snoozed at their feet.
Same as they'd done almost half their lives.
LATE MONDAY afternoon, Lindsey was debating how many ibuprofen it would take to get rid of her headache when her assistant buzzed in. "You have a visitor, Miss Castellano."
She grimaced. She'd successfully avoided Will since Saturday night, but there had been something in his expression that had told her their conversation about who she was wasn't over. And that it wouldn't be over until he said it was over, not even if she managed to avoid him the entirety of the next two weeks.
Who she was wasn't his business.
But she had to wonder if she could interpret her match-o-meter readings about him better if she did know who she was. No one else made her doubt her career and her choices. Not the way Will did.
The people in Bliss thought she'd turned her back on their core beliefs. But Will didn't care about Bliss. He simply believed in her gift. He accepted it. He didn't think it made her weird, and he didn't question it. He quite possibly understood it and accepted it better than she did.
The problem was, she didn't want the gift. And she didn't know how to explain it to him.
"Send him in," she said to her assistant.
The door opened, except it wasn't Will who strolled through her door.
Lindsey straightened her lips and her backbone.
Four. She should've popped four ibuprofen, at least an hour ago.
She nodded once. "Mikey."
He was in his usual Billy Brenton ball cap, a red pullover, tight jeans, cowboy boots, and his growly face was firmly in place. He shut her door with an ominous click.
But the bloodshot eyes and sadness radiating from him suggested he wasn't here to reinforce Mari Belle's message from Saturday.
Lindsey leaned back and gestured to the two chairs across from her desk. "Make yourself comfortable. Coffee? Water?"
"Are Dahlia and me a good match?"
He had a droop in his posture, stubble on his cheeks and the desperate look of a heartbroken man.
"Are we a good match?" he repeated into the silence.
She gave herself a mental shake. "Do you think you're a good match?"
"See, I know the answer to that question, and it doesn't answer the one I asked you."
Were he anyone other than Will's best friend, she would've suggested he take his hostility and shove it somewhere the sun didn't shine, then had the firm's security help him with that. "We've met once? Twice?"
He paced behind the two brown leather chairs opposite Lindsey's desk, a flurry of color against the dark paneled walls. "Don't go talking in circles around me," he growled. "I got other bones to pick with you too."
"In case you missed the sign on the door, I specialize in bad matches. Specifically, in terminating marriages at the request of the people who make their decisions about the validity of their relationships for themselves."
He stopped and turned to fully face her, pulling himself to his full height. "Are we a bad match?"
Every instinct Lindsey possessed instructed her to evade the question. This was Will's best friend. If she gave him bad love advice, if she gave him false hope, or if he decided she was lying because he wasn't inclined to believe her, she'd be screwing things up for one of the few people in Will's life who had always loved him simply because he was Will.
No pressure. No pressure at all.
But was Will right?
Did she truly own who she was? Or had she been hiding from herself, messing with her own cosmic balance by ignoring what made her unique?
"I don't know Dahlia well," Lindsey said, "but she strikes me as the sweet, kindhearted type of woman it would be all too easy to walk all over."
Mikey paced more, adding a knuckle crack to it. "Are we a bad match?" he repeated.
"And I don't know you well," Lindsey said, "but I have been subjected to dozens of BillyVision episodes, and you don't strike me as the type to settle down, never mind with a small-town, plain girl like Dahlia."
He rounded on her. "Don't you ever call her plain."
Lindsey lifted a practiced brow. "Is she your usual type?"
"My usual type sucks." One corner of his mouth started to hitch, but a scowl took over. "Jesus. I can't even make a blow job joke." He pointed at Lindsey. "Last time. Are we a bad match?"
"I don't know what she's putting in her ice cream, but it appears to be working."
Mikey growled.
Lindsey swallowed a smile. Wasn't so hard with the way her heart was suddenly tripping as though she'd had too much coffee. "I barely saw you together," she said, fully aware that she was tiptoeing a line that a divorce lawyer probably shouldn't toe, "but I did not notice any overt signs that you were a bad match. For whatever that's worth." She didn't particularly want to tell him, but she did want to know how it felt to say the words aloud. And it felt easy. Not right, not wrong. Not simple, not complicated. Just easy.
"So we're not a bad match," Mikey asked.
"How much do you like her?"
He dropped into a chair and thrust his head into his hands, then mumbled something.
"I'm sorry?"
Mikey eyed her from beneath his ball cap, gray eyes swimming with sadness. The guy looked more pathetic than Wrigley. "She dumped me."
"You want her back."
There went the suspicious eye again.
"Why are you here, Mikey?"
He slouched. "To tell you to leave Will the hell alone." And even with the pain and the heartbreak and the desperation still haunting his expression, there was a steely rigidness behind his words.
There went her shivers again. First Mari Belle, now Mikey.
She'd hurt Will fifteen years ago. She knew that.
But such strong warnings from his sister and best friend all these years later made her wonder what she didn't know.
Lindsey grabbed one of her business cards and scribbled Bliss Bridal's number on the back. "The Battle of the Boyfriends is coming up. I believe you're acquainted with Pepper Blue. She's on the planning committee. She'll get you registered. And then you go grovel. Go grovel and beg and promise Dahlia everything you can give her, but don't you dare lie to her. I don't do good matches-that part's up to you. If you want her, go get her. If you don't, leave her alone. But don't blame me for your choices."