by Tara Sivec
It’s so damn hot I almost forget why I’m laughing.
Almost.
“Oh, I just find it amusing you remember May 24, 2018 as the date I blocked you and stopped talking to you.” I smile, rocking back and forth on my feet.
Birdie scoffs and rolls her adorably clueless eyes at me.
“Considering that’s the date it happened, I don’t really see why you’re so amused that I remember it.”
Cocking my head to the side, I give her a smirk.
“Well, because it’s also the date you made things social media official with Backpack Douchefuck with a super sweet picture of him kissing your cheek in front of a fountain.”
“It was a waterfall,” Bodhi pipes up from behind me.
“Are you sure?” I ask him, glancing back over my shoulder.
“Oh, definitely. Remember how the sun was shining right on the water spray and that magical rainbow behind them as the water crashed to the rocks?”
“That’s right!” I snap my fingers. “The trees were so green and lush. It was a beautiful day.”
“Perfect day to make things official, I’d say! Well done!” Bodhi claps, both of us turning our heads to look at Birdie, who is an alarming shade of green that almost matches the carpet.
“Do you need to sit down? Take a minute?” I ask, still tamping down my need to laugh as I reach out my hand to Birdie, and she smacks it away.
“You’re lying,” she mutters, looking away from me to Tess. “Tell me he’s lying.”
Tess is already furiously scrolling through something on her phone, and I continue rocking back and forth on my heels, whistling softly until Tess finds exactly what I know she’s looking for.
“Oh shit. He’s not lying,” Tess says, looking up from her phone with wide eyes before looking back down at the screen. “You posted the picture of the two of you in front of Saffron Falls with the caption ‘He asked again, and I finally said yes! We’re officially dating!’ that morning.”
I continue whistling to myself until Birdie’s eyes slowly come back to mine and her mouth is dropped open in shock. I’m not exactly sure if she’s put all the pieces together yet, but it doesn’t matter. At least I got this shit off my chest and she can stop walking around acting like she’s the only one who got hurt that day.
“Probably why your relationship tanked, huh?” I ask with mock sincerity and an understanding nod. “Guys don’t really like it when you can’t remember your anniversary.”
I hear Wren giggle from her end of the bar and know from the way Birdie gasps her sister is going to pay for that later.
“You…. I…. You told me you didn’t care,” Birdie finally says, stumbling over her words, since her brain is probably on the verge of exploding. “I asked you if you cared if I started dating him, and you said no and that you were okay with it.”
Wiping the smile from my face, I pull my hands from my pockets and advance on her until Birdie can’t back up anymore and her back is pressed into the edge of the bar. Leaning toward her, I rest both my hands on top of the wood on either side of her, caging her in. Her breath hitches when I hold my face a few inches from hers, trying to slow down my rapidly beating heart and not crash my mouth against hers so I can finally fucking know what she tastes like.
“You told me you were okay with it,” she whispers again, and I die a little inside when she nervously licks her lips, and I’m so close I can see every little taste bud on the tip of her tongue.
Closing my eyes, I loosen my stiff elbows and lean closer to her, sliding my nose against her cheek, breathing her in until I get right by her ear.
“Yeah, well, it turns out I wasn’t fucking okay with it.”
Her breath hitches again when I throw her words back at her.
Pushing off the bar, I pull back from Birdie and turn away from all the shocked faces staring at me. Birdie needs time to let what I just said process and hopefully for everything to click inside her head.
And I need time to release the painful throbbing in my cock after being that close to her and not kissing her.
CHAPTER 11
Birdie
“Skip the foreplay.”
“I am the worst friend ever. I can’t believe what an idiot I was. How did we not see this?” Tess sighs dramatically, taking a big sip of her cherry slush while she sits straddling the bench of our purple picnic table.
“Will you shut up? You aren’t an idiot, because you didn’t miss any signs or whatever the hell you’ve been going on about for the last however many hours,” I mutter, bringing the straw of my own slush up to my mouth as my arms dangle down from the edge of the top of the purple picnic table, where I’m currently sprawled on my stomach. “Whatever happened back at SIG doesn’t mean Putz has liked me all these years, that’s ridiculous, oh my God, piss off!”
My voice gets so high-pitched there at the end I think I feel my ears start bleeding, and I take another big gulp of my half-melted blue raspberry slush, hoping it will make my heart stop trying to beat its way out of my chest. I’m back to calling him Putz now, because it puts up another layer of protection between that man and my heart, just like calling him Campbell to his face did from the day I met him.
“Can you speak up? I don’t have my hearing aids in.”
“For shit’s sake, Ed, shut up and drink your butterscotch milkshake and mind your business!” Tess shouts, pointing her white Styrofoam cup with a plastic lid at the older man sitting at the red picnic table a few rows down from us.
Ed decided right around the time Wren started singing Lil John’s contribution to the song “Shots” by LMFAO at the top of her lungs that he didn’t want to take all night drinking his milkshake in his golf cart in the parking lot. He’d much rather have a front-row seat to whatever crazy was happening under the awning on the other side of the Dip and Twist.
That crazy being how we forgot all about our rule to never mix hard liquor with slushes on Sip and Bitch night, because these are trying times, son!
“These are trying times, son!” I shout, my inside thoughts becoming outside thoughts as I watch the cup of blue ice and vodka in my hand swing back and forth down below me.
After Palmer walked away from me in the bar and left me to pick up my own brain splattered all over the room when it exploded, we all stood in stunned silence and waited out the storm. When the sun came back out, Murphy left to check on any damage there might be to the course with fallen branches and leaves, while Tess, Wren, and myself piled into Wren’s golf cart and hightailed it into town, making a quick stop at the liquor store along the way. The sun has set, the bottle of vodka is damn near gone, and there’s nothing left of the storm but a few drops of lingering water that fall from the roof every so often into the puddles on the sidewalk below.
And the damage and debris left behind inside me after what Palmer said before he walked out of SIG.
“Yeah, well, it turns out I wasn’t fucking okay with it.”
Remembering the feel of his warm breath caressing my ear, his strong jaw pressed against my cheek, and the smell of hot, wet man surrounding me makes my skin break out in goose bumps all over again, just like it did the first time. And it confuses the hell out of me all over again, just like it did the first time, wondering why he got all up in my personal space like that, and ran his nose against my jaw like that, and said what he said like that. All this vodka sloshing around in my brain and the stupid crap coming out of Tess and Wren’s mouths isn’t helping me make sense of anything either.
“You aren’t a bad friend, I’m not a bad sister, and it’s not our fault we didn’t see what was right in front of us,” Wren says from… somewhere.
Rolling over on top of the picnic table and sitting up, hugging my slush to my chest and willing my head to stop spinning, I look around and find Wren lying on her back on the cement in the middle of all the picnic tables, staring up at the awning above us.
“Good God, woman, you need to get out of the house more,” I mutter, shakin
g my head and taking a loud, slurping sip of my slush. “Get up off the dirty ground, you dirty-ass.”
Wren rolls over onto her stomach with a giggle and pushes herself up, dusting off the back of her shorts as her messy bun flops to the side of her head even messier than before, with brunette strands falling down into her face. She then stumbles over to our table, aggressively shoving Tess aside to make room for her on the bench.
Even through all the turmoil and vodka wreaking havoc on me right now, I can’t help but smile, laugh, and at least feel good about seeing my older sister have a little fun. She’s always been the mother of our small group, even before she became a mother herself, but at least she knew how to unwind every so often. Since her loser of an ex continues to suck the soul and fun right out of her every time he shows up here, and her ride-or-die best friend moved away years ago, it’s been a long time since I’ve heard my sister giggle, and I like it. Even if she’s giggling because of all the vodka she’s inhaled over my misery.
“As I was saying,” Wren continues, sitting up straight at the picnic table and folding her hands on top of it while I crisscross my legs, loudly slurp my slush, and stare down at her. “Tess, you aren’t a bad friend, and I’m not a bad sister just because we didn’t see that Palmer has had a thing for Birdie this entire time.”
I try to scoff at the ridiculousness of what Wren is saying, since I’ve been hearing it all damn night once we got to the Dip and Twist, but vodka and ice get caught in my throat and my fucking heart gets lodged up in there as well. I start coughing so hard Tess has to lean forward to pat me on the back.
“Yeah, well, it turns out I wasn’t fucking okay with it,” Palmers raspy, wounded voice echoes in my head, and I cough even harder while Wren keeps talking through my slow, painful death.
“We didn’t see what was right in front of our faces, because we weren’t looking at Palmer,” Wren explains, unclasping her hands to rest one of them on my bent knee and giving me a soft smile. “We were looking at Birdie. We were seeing Birdie, the one we adore. We saw her love, and we saw her pain, because she’s our person, not Palmer. We were only focused on her. We weren’t paying any attention to him or what was in his eyes or in his heart. Now that I’ve switched my focus and I saw the way he looked at her in the bar this afternoon….”
Wren trails off, her and Tess sharing a knowing look on the bench in front of me that makes me want to scream, especially while I watch my sister and my best friend fan themselves.
“I mean, holy hell, Birdie,” Tess says, shaking her head as she stares at me with wide eyes. “I almost got pregnant standing behind that bar just from the way he was looking at you.”
“Who’s pregnant?” Ed shouts from the red picnic table.
No one answers him, and I close my eyes and shake my head back and forth, refusing to go down this path again. I spent half my life analyzing every look, every smile, every touch, and every word out of Putz’s mouth, picking them apart and trying to find some kind of a sign that he might feel something more for me than friendship. I wasted years pining for my best friend, and I’m not doing that again, no matter what kind of crap Tess and Wren think they saw. It doesn’t matter that I finally have an explanation for why he stopped talking to me, and it’s just because he never liked Bradley and was annoyed I wasted my time with him. Not because of any kind of stupid feelings Tess and Wren are imagining were there all this time. Just because I can work on forgiving him now for being an idiot and leaving me for two years doesn’t mean I’m going to take a walk down Delusion Lane again and think he’d ever want something more than friendship from me.
“It’s also the date you made things social media official with Backpack Douchefuck.”
“Yeah, well, it turns out I wasn’t fucking okay with it.”
When stupid Putz’s stupid voice won’t leave my head, I shove my straw back in my mouth and suck up nothing but vodka that has sunk to the bottom of my foam cup to try and erase it from my mind.
“Birdie and Palmer sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S- oh shit!”
Wren’s off-key, drunk singing comes to an abrupt end when she falls off the end of the picnic table, since she felt the need to add a full body dance to her stupid song.
“I knew Tess was lying when she kept coming in to refill the slushes, saying the three of you were just really parched after the storm brought in all this humidity.” My mom comes up behind Wren, and I continue sucking vodka wordlessly as Tess laughs, watching Mom slide her hands under Wren’s armpits and haul her back up to her feet. Our mom has picked us up off the floor during numerous Sip and Bitches and has it down to a science. She really should be thanking us for all that extra upper body strength.
“Have a seat, Laura. We were just about to give your daughter some advice on putting Palmer’s wedge in her rough.” Tess snorts, patting the empty spot on the bench next to her that Wren vacated.
“Oh my God, Tess, you can’t talk about Palmer’s wedge like that. Birdie doesn’t like it when we bring up his dangly bits.” Wren giggles, and I aggressively wrap my lips around my straw and suck again, wondering why in the hell I was so happy about Wren unwinding.
“Good to see I’m not too late for Sip and Bitch and dangly bits,” comes from somewhere behind me.
Every. Fucking. Time.
Wren and Tess’s drunk asses scream at the top of their lungs when they’re startled by Putz’s deep voice filled with humor from close by. I slowly turn my head, the straw in my mouth sticking to my suddenly dry bottom lip and coming right up out of my cup as my head moves, to hang there off my lip as I stare at the man standing a few feet away in the middle of the aisle where Wren had been laying and making cement angels a few minutes ago.
He’s changed out of all that wet clothing, even the tight, long-sleeved shirt that clung to every single contour and dip and muscle in his chest, arms, and washboard abs that were highlighted through the sopping material that almost made it hard for me to form words when we were back at SIG and he stood right in front of me… wet… dripping… and muscly….
Even though he’s standing not far from my table, dry as a bone in a pair of gray cotton athletic shorts and a white T-shirt with a signature gray swoosh across the wide expanse of his chest, thoughts of what he looked like earlier after coming in from the rain make my breath hitch, along with the fact that he’s standing right in front of me when I’m not ready for him to be standing right in front of me.
That nervous intake of air makes the damn straw still dangling from my bottom lip suck back up into my mouth and fly to the back of my throat, making me choke and cough until I finally manage to dislodge the plastic tube, where it goes sailing out of me to hit the front of Putz’s shirt and flutter to the ground.
Putz chuckles, because of course he does, and then bends down to pick up my straw, because of course he does. God forbid he leave any litter on the ground for more than two seconds, the hot do-gooder.
“It’s about time you come say hello to me,” my mom says to Putz, not even caring about my mortification level right now as she walks around Wren and right past me, spreading her arms wide as she goes.
Putz leans over and tosses my straw into the garbage can on the other side of him before scooping my mom up in his strong, muscly arms when she gets to him, making her squeal. And making me suddenly jealous of my own mother and want to kick her legs out from under her when Putz puts her back on her feet.
I am never drinking again.
Just like my sister, my mom has always had a soft spot for the guy, since his mom died when he was a baby and his dad sucked balls and never gave him any kind of love or affection. His quiet, lonely, shy personality tugged at her motherly heartstrings from the first moment she met him, when I brought him here for a treat after his first day of training at SIG. He immediately put on an apron and got behind the counter when he saw how busy she was. I clutch my Styrofoam cup tightly in my hands as I watch the two of them share a few minutes of whispered words with their heads clos
e together, until I feel my fingers start to squeeze right through the foam, and I quickly set my almost-empty cup down on the table next to me.
Calm down, Birdie. He’s talking to your mother!
The two of them finally split apart, but not before my mom gives him a soft, loving pat on the cheek. Walking back over to the picnic table where Wren took her seat next to Tess again at some point, my mom gives each of us a kiss on the top of our heads, pulling her golf cart keys out of her apron pocket as she heads toward the back of the building, lifting her hand with the keys and jingling them in the air above her head in a wave goodbye.
“Make good choices that do not include drunk-dialing me at three in the morning!”
“We can’t make that kind of promise this early in the evening, Laura!” Tess shouts after her, the smile on her face dying and her eyes widening when she turns back around and looks over my shoulder.
I turn to see what she’s looking at, and I’m stunned stupid, because all I see is Putz’s chest a few inches from my face, since he walked right up to the edge of the picnic table, and I’m sitting on top of it. His firm, well-built, delicious-smelling chest that is right in front of my face, my eyes taking entirely too long to make their way up to his face. He’s smiling down at me, and my heart flutters as I open and close my mouth like a fish with my neck slightly bent while I look at him. I try to find the straw to my damn drink for some much-needed vodka, when I realize I spit that stupid straw to my damn drink at his hot chest just moments ago, and my cup is not even in my hands.
Okay, so the vodka is definitely less needed.
I quickly clamp my mouth closed and look up higher to see he’s not wearing one of his usual golf hats, and I can see his thick brown hair is slightly damp. I know it’s not still from the rain earlier when I take in a deep breath of soap and a tiny hint of that expensive cologne that makes all kinds of dirty thoughts float through my head, like all that soapy water sliding down his naked body in the shower he must have taken after he left SIG, and him running his palm down his washboard abs and over his happy trail to wrap around his thick, hard—