No Brainer ( The Darcy Walker Series #2) Read Free Page B

realizing we’d disconnected. Whoever had dialed my cell, though, was the persistent type. It had gone to voicemail twice and now belted out a tune by Milli Vanilli, my song choice of the month.
    Feeling my way to the sound, I grasped the phone and glanced down at the number. It was no surprise the good-boy in my life was rearing his not-so-ugly head. Dylan had this metaphysical ability to show up at the precise moment I was making a mess out of my day or someone else’s.
    Dabbing my face with a hand towel, I clicked the speaker with my thumb. “Hullo?”
    “Hey, sweetheart,” he murmured. “How’s my girl?”
    Let’s think about this … covered in pickle guts. “In a pickle,” I mumbled.

 
    2. THE BIG MAN
    A MONG P OLYNESIAN TRIBES, THERE’S A Big Man.
    “Big Man Theory’s” one of those unspoken things. He wasn’t by birth destined to rule, but there’s a certain something in his swagger that makes him the natural leader. So much so, his mere presence trumps the royal bloodline. As a result, most Big Men are probably forced to watch their backs. My best friend, Dylan Taylor (my Big Man), however, was always busy watching mine.
    Everyone wants a personal bodyguard, and I suppose that’s what Dylan is to me. In fact, he fought off an armed Eddie Lopez until the unspeakable happened, and the police grounded her like a rabid animal. That in a nutshell was Dylan; he didn’t care if odds were stacked against him—he understood what needed to be done and did it. It wasn’t just the situation with Eddie that made him my hero, though. Certain circumstances in my childhood forced me to think of other things—adult things—and before I knew it, my mind was obsessed with so many minutia that I forgot what relaxed looked and felt like. Dylan was my grounding force. He had a quality about his heart that was pure. The weaker you were, the stronger he became to build you back up.
    Most never got to experience a love that deep, but we’d been holding hands since we were six years old. Whether through mud pies, backyard baseball, or preschool overnights, we’d always been the other’s preferred companion. When someone has that effect on you, it’s hard to reconcile those emotions. In some respects, he was a best friend: keeping secrets, talking me through catastrophes, and fighting my battles. In others, he’d been a brother: a ponytail yank, squabbles over meaningless matters, and a kick in the seat of the pants. Still, at times, he parented me: a nurturer, loving disciplinarian, and always accessible.

    Every year, I branded him with a new pseudonym, primarily because of the evolving status of those feelings. This year was the Big Man—not only for reasons of pecking order—for reasons of stature.
    We’d always done everything together, even growing inches in sync, but by the end of sophomore year, he’d gone off and left me height-wise. Thankfully, my endocrine system heard my nightly prayer, and I was coasting at 5’9”. Dylan, however, rocketed into legendary status. When he jumped, it was five inches higher; when he ran, he clocked two seconds faster; and when he smiled, it grew half an inch wider.
    Big Man league in my book.
    Mouthwatering, testosterone-in-motion in everyone else’s book.
    “Wake up, sleepy head. Let’s go see Mickey.” That deep baritone voice, no doubt, belonged to Dylan. I peeled back an eye, scanned the perimeter, and peeked at the figure squatted within a breath of my face. Yup, it was him: deep voice and sexy as all get out, but on a boy that the Best Friend Rule said was “hands off.”
    An imposing 220 pounds, his muscles were strong, defined, and built like they’d been chiseled from the finest granite. Then there was the hair. All of that package topped itself off with a short, jet-black mane he wore in one of two ways: classic and stylish around his strong brow and cheekbones or modern-messy like he’d just rolled out of bed. Today was messy, and messy looked …