“Pfft. No, thank you,” Roni said as her phone chimed like a traitorous secret teller, reminding her that she had a text from Quincy waiting to be read.

“You’re way too good a dancer to hide away in here.” Angela eyed Roni’s phone on the table and said, “And too damn hot to keep hiding from Quincy.”

“I’m not hiding from anything or anyone.” Roni pushed past her and snagged her phone.

“No?” Angela crossed her arms with a challenging expression and said, “So that lingering text is not from Loverboy?”

“I told you to stop calling him that.” Thankfully, Angela didn’t call him that when he occasionally came to pick up his niece, Kennedy, from Roni’s dance class, which Kennedy had started attending in September.

Angela knew her so well. She had been the one to drag Roni to the charity bachelor auction at Whiskey Bro’s bar five months ago, and she had won the date with Quincy specifically for Roni, despite Roni having begged her not to. Though now Roni wasn’t altogether sorry her bestie had done it.

“And I told you to stop being ridiculous and go out with the guy,” Angela insisted. “You guys text all the time anyway.”

“No, we don’t. We text sometimes, and we don’t talk about anything deep. He flirts and asks how my day was. We talk about dance and his job at the bookstore, our favorite foods, and shows we’re bingeing, and sometimes we send funny pictures to each other. I don’t know anything real about him.”

She’d been thinking about that a lot lately, curious about who he really was and why he was okay keeping their conversations light and flirty, when most guys would have pushed harder, then given up. Sure, Quincy had tried to get her to go out with him at first. Angela had won him for Roni for that purpose, after all. But when she’d said she was too busy to date, he hadn’t pushed, and when her grandmother had passed away over the summer and she’d said she wanted to grieve alone, he’d given her time to do so. He’d texted more often to make sure she was okay, but he had never pried into her life, which she’d appreciated. Then last Friday, he’d texted about going out after Halloween, I think it’s time we take our masks off and get to know each other better, and now she was as nervous as she was excited about that idea.

“Sure you do,” Angela said. “You know he’s smart and hot as hell, and we’ve both seen how sweet he is with his niece. We also know he never reacts when the moms gawk at him because he’s too busy paying attention to the kids or you. He’s obviously a good guy, Roni, and I bet he’s all kinds of bad in bed.”

“Ohmygod. I’m sure Joey appreciates you noticing that.” Angela was engaged to Joey Carbo, the co-owner of Jazzy Joe’s café, where Angela and Roni often had lunch. They’d been eyeing each other for months before he’d finally asked her out, a little more than a year ago.