"Just promise me it'll be soft ice cream and I'm in too." Nate spoke up, hooking an arm around Grace's waist and looping hers over his shoulder. They'd left the crutches in the truck, and her best friend knew her well enough to know that she hated to be carried. And if her dad tried to help her, he would just pick her up like she was still a small child.
                              
"If it's not soft, they can always microwave it for you." Grace replied with an awkward shrug.
                              
"This is why I don't let you cook..." Nate muttered, not saying it quiet enough for her to miss though.
                              
"I can flick your face if you'd like." Grace batted her eyelashes, trying not to grin too evilly as he shook his head quickly no.
                              
"So what exactly prompted this round of best friend bashing?" Malcolm asked as he climbed into the passenger seat of West's truck, looking over his shoulder at Grace and Nate in the back seat.
                              
"She started it." "He started it." Grace and Nate both said at the exact same time, in fact sounding as if they really were small children still instead of college students.
                              
"Forget I asked. If you two don't kill each other, the war stories will certainly keep me entertained into my dotage." Malcolm said sarcastically. At 44 years old, he was a long way from being considered elderly, but he still cracked the old age jokes as often as anyone else in their strangely mixed families. Malcolm was five years older than West, and almost seven years older than Nate's mom, Alice. It prompted a lot of cradle robber jokes.
                              
"Ha-ha dad, ha-ha." Nate said dryly, rubbing at his temple as the inevitable headache must have raged in his skull.
                              
Now Grace did feel a little bad, not only for laughing at him, but for breaking his nose in the first place. It had been an accident, and she knew Nate didn't hold it against her, but it had to have sucked even more than her ankle. Grace rested her head on his shoulder, letting him use her head as a pillow in return while her dad drove them to the ice cream parlour. Sadly enough, this was not the first time this quartet had gone in to the Baskin 'N Robbins after a trip to the emergency room. It had all but become tradition itself with how frequently Grace ended up hurt, and the moment they hobbled in, the ice cream lady started to scoop out their go to favourites. It's a rather bad sign that they were in there that frequently that they didn't even have to order anymore....
                              
Nate maneuvered Grace over to the table and got her seated before he walked over to the counter to grab the sundaes. Inevitably his bruised face made the girl behind the scoops act all sympathetic but for a chance Grace's best friend, the ultimate Cassanova, ignored the subtle-as-a-flamethrower flirtations and brought her the sundae without flirting back. She gave him a surprised look but Nate didn't seem to notice the shange in his own behaviour as he sat down next to her. Maybe his face hurt worse than he was letting on? The guilt suddenly swirling in her gut only added to the vaguely nauseated feeling the sprained ankle and the pain medication gave her, but Grace ate her ice cream, knowing that there wasn't a whole lot she could do about any of it now. She didn't mean to be so clumsy, and it was embarassing considering how graceful both of her parents were. But it definitely looked like that particular talent skipped a generation, because Grace earned her nickname of Graceless almost daily.
                              
"So did you finish that photography assignment that's worth a million and a half percent of your mark?" Grace asked Nate, remembering him working on a weird ass portfolio for class. She never told him that he was a genuis behind the camera, but he knew it and she loved to look at the photos he took. More often than not he could sell them to a company like Hallmark and make a quick buck, although it wasn't something he really told anyone else about. Most girls never got to know the man behind the charming smile.