Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 92930 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 465(@200wpm)___ 372(@250wpm)___ 310(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 92930 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 465(@200wpm)___ 372(@250wpm)___ 310(@300wpm)
My mood also couldn’t have been better because Nina admitted that her date with Alistair was a dud.
Hell yeah.
A few new discoveries were made about Nina that night. One: she loved to eat. Two: she was a major lightweight when it came to alcohol. Three: Her ex-boyfriend had a name: Spencer.
“So…Spencer…was he your last boyfriend?”
“Yeah. We broke up a little over a year ago. In retrospect, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. Besides the fact that I found out he cheated on me, he did nothing but criticize me.”
That was a double whammy. To hear that she’d been cheated on and that he’d treated her like crap made me want to hunt him down. The alcohol from the massive scorpion bowl we’d been sharing was going to my head and intensifying my reaction to every word coming out of her mouth. It was also intensifying my reaction to her mouth itself. I couldn’t seem to take my eyes off of it.
“What do you mean criticize?” My blood was beginning to boil. “What kinds of things did he say to you?”
She looked down, hesitant to answer me. “Let’s see…what didn’t he say? For one, he had no tolerance at all for my anxiety issues. He would just make fun of me instead of trying to understand the condition. And he criticized my body any chance he got.”
Fucking A. This girl had the sexiest body I’d ever seen in real life. On any given day, it was a struggle for me to keep from expressing that to her and to keep from showing her how I actually felt about it. How could anyone lead her to believe that there was something wrong with the way she looked?
“He criticized your body.”
“Yeah…all the time.”
“Really…”
“Yes. He told me I wasn’t athletic-looking enough, that I could stand to lose ten pounds and that my ass was too big.”
Nina didn’t see it, and it was too noisy to hear, but I cracked a wooden chopstick under the table. Listening to this bullshit was making me so angry. Her ass was too big? Her ass was phenomenal. A thousand symphonies played in my head whenever I looked at that ass for fuck’s sake. How could I explain to her how wrong he was without admitting my true feelings?
“Nina…I hope you don’t mind me being blunt.”
“I don’t mind.”
“This…Spencer…needs his eyes checked and his ass kicked. There is nothing wrong with your body…not one thing. I hope you didn’t listen to him.”
When she admitted to believing him in the past, I nearly lost it.
“Nina…” I stopped myself and took a deep breath. I quietly grabbed the last chopstick and cracked that one under the table, too. (I’d need to find something else to destroy if I had to keep holding my thoughts at bay like this.) “Never mind. Just know…that he was wrong, okay?”
“Say what you were gonna say.”
“I’m not sure that I should.”
“Since when have you become tactful?”
“Since this conversation moved to tits and ass.”
She looked amused. So nice that she found it funny, because I was dead serious. It was taking everything in me not to tell her how I felt, that she was the most beautiful woman in the world to me.
“Seriously, whatever you were going to say, I won’t be offended.”
Offended? Shit! She had it all wrong. I needed to rectify this. Everything came pouring out of me at that point like projectile vomit.
“Okay…in that case, Nina, not just as your friend, but as a man, I am telling you straight up that you have an amazing body. It’s perfect. And your nimrod ex-boyfriend was right about one thing: you do kind of have a big ass.”
Okay. So that didn’t come out exactly right. I was buzzed.
“Excuse me?”
My heart was pounding as I reached across the table to touch her arm. “Let me finish. You kind of have a big ass…but it’s the most spectacular ass I’ve ever seen. You have an hourglass shape, and any man with a pulse knows that’s the hottest kind there is. You’re beautiful, and what makes you even more attractive, is that you have absolutely no fucking idea just how beautiful you really are.”
I let out a slow, deep breath. It was the most honest thing I’d ever said to her, and every word was the truth. She just looked at me with the slightest bashful smile on her face and seemed like she really wanted to say something. She took a long sip of the drink then finally said, “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
You have no idea.
We silently watched a couple of the karaoke acts. Just as some guy named Larry, who looked like he was on psychedelic drugs, started belting out Jessie’s Girl by Rick Springfield, Nina got up to go to the bathroom. I watched her every move as she walked away. She turned around briefly, and I laughed to myself, realizing she was probably paranoid I was checking out her ass, which I absolutely was until it was completely out of sight.