Just a Boyfriend

by Wilson, Sariah

  And now it was like I missed her even when she was sitting next to me in class.

  Not to mention how hard it was to pretend like I didn’t want her so badly that I felt like I was drowning with my need for her.

  I lifted the socket wrench, glad that I had something to do with my hands, a way to turn my mind off and just focus on the task in front of me.

  Instead, I saw Ember’s face. She still wouldn’t stay in her box.

  I felt like I’d been living my life for other people. To keep them safe and to make sure they weren’t hurt.

  When was that going to happen for me?

  Or was it my responsibility to make it happen? To find Ember and tell her everything that was still in my heart?

  I let the wrench lower to the ground as I considered that it might not even do me any good. She hadn’t seemed to indicate a whole lot of interest in me. I mean, I got the distinct feeling that she was still attracted to me, but nothing much beyond that. Maybe she’d met someone recently. I only had to look at how fast Woodby and Bethany had become serious. Ember could have met someone new, and I didn’t figure into her plans at all.

  Or there wasn’t a guy involved, and the past was the past for her and she no longer had those feelings for me.

  I only had to close my eyes, and I was back in the moment where I hovered over her in her bed, with her telling me that she wanted me. The way her dark hair had spread out all over her pillow, how her eyes had darkened with desire, her lips swollen from my kisses. She’d said, “I love you,” and it was both the best and worst thing I’d ever heard.

  I didn’t know if I was ready to let go of the possibility of her. If I told her my true feelings, that I’d never stopped loving her, she might rip my still-beating heart out of my chest and stomp on it in response. And what if she said there could never, would never, should never be anything between us? It would be the right thing, what was best for our loved ones, but I didn’t know how I was supposed to move on from her.

  I suspected it would involve another cross-country trip. Although putting miles in between us last time hadn’t changed anything.

  I worried it had only delayed the inevitable.

  What was I supposed to do, then? It was better that Ember wasn’t coming here today. I needed the reprieve to figure out what I should do next. Because with both my mom and Ember, delaying wasn’t a long-term solution.

  Time for me to figure out my next move.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  EMBER

  “I really do need to get laundry done,” I told Deja.

  She wasn’t buying it. “I thought you were going to stay away. No more Bash. For someone you don’t want to spend time with, you seem to spend a lot of time with him.”

  “It’s not my fault I keep seeing him everywhere.”

  “That probably happens because you’re stalking him.”

  Throwing the last of my stuff into my laundry bag, I swung it over my shoulder. “My mom also texted me this morning and asked me to come. You know I can’t tell her no.”

  “If that’s the lie you have to tell yourself.” She followed behind me as I made my way to the living room. “And what other plans do you have for today?”

  “My laundry, checking in on my mom, saying hi to my sister. And there will be Thanksgiving food and a game of touch football.” I opened the door, ready to escape this conversation.

  She wagged her finger at me as she said, “Touch football doesn’t mean that you should be touching football players.”

  “I second that!” Molly called out from her room. I shook my head at both of them and said I’d see them later.

  On the drive to my mom’s, I admitted the truth to myself. I’d done my best to be strong this past week. I’d seen Bash three times when we had algebra together. Of course he’d been funny and bantered with me and Sabrina. He drew little pictures on the margins of my paper, and it was as cute and adorable as it sounded. He kept making me forget that he wasn’t attracted to me and didn’t love me and most certainly did not want me to be his girlfriend.

  That was the problem with Bash. He made it too easy to get caught up in him.

  Just yesterday I’d told him I wouldn’t be going to the Sebastian family event. That I was too busy. Which was true. I was always busy. There were always more things to do than hours in the day to get them all done. But somehow, like every other college student in the country, I managed while still finding time to have a social life. Usually this meant a massive lack of sleep. I was willing to lose sleep for Bash’s sake. I’d certainly done enough of that in the past since he’d been the cause of many a sleepless night.

  I considered turning around multiple times. I knew that I should have. But instead I just kept driving. I was pathetic. A Bash addict. I wanted just one more little hit. In a room full of people related to him, which would hopefully deter me from doing anything unseemly or sad. I could just watch him, drink him in, and then come back and beat myself up for my weakness later. And probably eat cake while I was doing it.

  I arrived quickly and had to park several houses down as there was no room anywhere else in the driveway or in front of the house. The noise hit me when I reached the front yard, but once I was inside it was nearly deafening. A total madhouse. With all the different people and blended families, I’d given up remembering who belonged to who and what branch of the Sebastians they came from a long time ago. Roscoe bounded over to me, his tongue out, happy to see me. I crouched down to give him a quick rubdown. As soon as I finished he ran back to some small kids who he kept nudging with his head.

  “Mom?” I called out, and several adult women turned to look at me. My mother stuck her head out of the kitchen.

  “In here, sweetheart.”

  What had she done to her head? I set my bag down on the staircase and went into the kitchen. It smelled divine, all turkey and pumpkin-y. But I couldn’t stop staring at her hair.

  She noticed. “Like it?”

  After chemo, her once dark, thick, and straight hair that had hung down to her waist grew back in gray, curly and coarse. She was never quite sure how to style it since it was so different from what she’d been used to.

  But right now it was bright pink. I mean, shocking pink. It looked like her head had blown a giant Bubble Yum bubble.

  “It’s in honor of breast cancer research,” she said, and I realized that I hadn’t spoken in a while and was probably making her uncomfortable.

  “If you like it that’s all that matters,” I told her.

  “That’s awfully polite of you.” She said it with a knowing smile.

  “So what can I do? How can I help?” I clapped my hands together, ready to get to work. There were probably a million things she needed done.

  I saw the irritation that flashed briefly through her eyes. “Everything’s almost ready, actually. You can go join the others.”

  “Come on, let me help.”

  “I’m not an invalid anymore,” she said, her shoulders squaring off like she was getting ready for a fight.

  I threw up both of my hands, like I was surrendering. “Whoa, I’m not saying you are. Only that you have a house full of Sebastian men who can eat more than a killer whale at a sea-lion buffet.”

  Before she could presumably protest, Marley stuck her head in the kitchen. “Hey, Ember! Tricia, my dad can’t find the serving platter.”

  Mom closed her eyes for a moment. “Tell him, for the third time, that it’s in the garage. On the right side, fourth shelf from the bottom. He needs to get it and clean it so we can use it for the turkey.”

  “Dad!” Marley yelled as she ran off, presumably to share this information.

  “I swear, marriage vows should include that you’ll have to promise to help your husband find stuff that is right in front of him. Things you’ve given him explicit instructions for. Because sometimes I feel like that’s all I ever do.”

  “You’re giving me so much hope for marriage,” I told her, trying to keep the sna
rk to a minimum but unable to help myself. “To be fair, he did really step it up with that whole in-sickness-or-in-health part.”

  She reached up to touch her flamingo hair. “Yes, he did.”

  I grabbed some baby carrots. “I think your marriage vows should have included something about how you’d love him completely even though he chews his food so loudly. You should probably get an award for putting up with that nonsense.”

  “Are you being sarcastic? I can never tell.”

  “You can’t tell? Here’s a hint: I’m always sarcastic.”

  Mom’s phone buzzed, and she picked it up. “It’s Doug. He still can’t find the platter. That’s how you can help me. In the garage, right wall, fourth shelf. This isn’t rocket science.”

  “Sure.” I felt like I was being Mom-nipulated. More of her trying to throw me and Doug together. Like she believed that if we just spent a few more minutes together, everything would click into place, and he’d be my new dad, and we’d be one big happy family.

  Don’t get me wrong, Doug was a great guy. He just wasn’t a father to me. Things might have been different if they’d gotten married when I was, like, eight. If I’d grown up with him as the only father figure in my life. But that didn’t happen.

  I lived in the same house with him for one year, and during that time we were both focused on my mom and her treatment and recovery. Plus, I didn’t know what to say to him because I hadn’t known what Bash might have told him. So I just kept to myself, and then I went away to college. Not very far away to college, but I was living on my own.

  It was different for Lauren, and that was good. I think my mom wanted me to have the same sort of relationship that Lauren and Doug had, but she didn’t realize that was never going to happen.

  I made my way out to the freestanding garage and was immediately hit with a blast of heat. Doug was nowhere to be found. Jeez, he wasn’t even in the right part of the house to find the platter. I started over to the far wall, already spotting the platter when I noticed a pair of legs sticking out from underneath the front of the truck. The jeans molded nicely to the strong legs, and I didn’t remember any of Doug’s relatives being this hot.

  The legs moved, wheels rolled, and next thing I knew, I was looking at freaking Bash. He had a drop of oil on his cheek. How was that sexy?

  Suddenly I understood why my mother had cut her own fan belt.

  “You’re here?” he asked in a way that made me think he wished I wasn’t. He stood up and I took a step back.

  “I’m here. Unless I’ve died and turned into a ghost without my knowledge, in which case, it would make total sense that I would haunt you. You totally deserve it.”

  He grinned at me as I grabbed an oilcloth. I reached up to clean the drip from his face, and I was so shaken by standing so close to him that the rag slipped, leaving my fingers on his skin. How could he be so soft and so strong all at the same time?

  I yanked my hand back as if I’d been scalded, because that was exactly what it had felt like.

  We stood there for . . . I don’t know how long . . . close enough to kiss, his breath washing over my face in waves, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he gulped. My heart started somersaulting as flames roared to life inside me, rendering my limbs weak and shaky.

  I somehow managed to move closer, swallowing as I did so. Was I ever going to be able to breathe normally around him?

  He broke the spell first by walking over to his dad’s workbench and put the tool thingy in his hand back on the wall. “I thought you were too ‘busy, busy’ to be here.”

  I leaned against the truck for support. How was he fine and talking when I felt like this truck had just run me over? “I . . . um . . .” I couldn’t exactly tell him that I’d come here just to look at him because I’d missed him. “It was just . . . laundry!” My brain finally seized on something I could use. “I had laundry to do.”

  He grinned like he was thinking about a private joke. “I brought my laundry, too.”

  I wanted to groan. I couldn’t even come up with an original excuse. He had beat me to it. “Yeah, well, speaking of, I better go get it started. So we can both, you know, do laundry.”

  “Sure thing. Hey, are you sticking around for the game? I seem to remember that you said something about how you were going to tackle me.”

  Tackling him sounded really good, so I knew it was time for me to go. “We’ll see.”

  Rushing out of the side door, I hurried back inside, grabbed my bag from the stairs and got up to the laundry room. I opened up the bag and threw a bunch of clothes into the washing machine, added the detergent and fabric softener, and started a load. I let out a sigh and leaned against the wall. Now I was officially telling the truth. I had come to do laundry.

  A large bag that I assumed was Bash’s sat propped next to the machine. A green T-shirt that matched the color of his eyes lay on top, and without thinking, I grabbed it and smelled it. A little sweaty, but it still had that magic Bash scent.

  “You’re ovulating,” my sister said as she walked past the open door.

  Mortified that someone had witnessed me doing something that was so humiliating, I dropped the shirt and followed after to find out why she would say something like that. “What?”

  She headed into her bedroom and flopped on her bed. “We just learned about this in chemistry. Women like the smell of men’s sweat more when they’re ovulating. It’s the only way to explain the kind of gross thing you just did.”

  I ran through a series of possible excuses. I had mistaken his shirt for one of mine. I thought Roscoe had peed on something and was double-checking. Lauren was high and didn’t see what she thought she saw.

  None of them would work. My sister was too smart for that.

  I looked back into the laundry room, where apparently I’d knocked over Bash’s bag in my attempt to follow after Lauren.

  And the irony of my and Bash’s dirty laundry comingling was not lost on me.

  “That must be it. Science,” was the great explanation I came up with.

  She nodded, going over to her nightstand, rummaging through the top drawer. “That, or you’re completely in love with him.”

  My brain sputtered at her assessment. That she was right was irrelevant. I couldn’t let her know. “What?” Had I feigned enough outrage and shock? “Why would you say that? There’s nothing going on between me and Bash.”

  Technically true, even if I didn’t want it to be.

  Lauren straightened up to give me a look like she thought I was the dumbest person ever. “Please. I saw you guys together at the beginning of the summer. There was so much chemistry between you two that I was afraid I was going to get pregnant just by being in the same room with you.”

  And since this was my life, of course my mother chose that moment to be walking through the upstairs hallway, and she immediately said, “Who’s pregnant?” in a panicked tone that only a mother of two daughters could use.

  “Ember. If she keeps hanging around Bash,” my soon-to-be-disowned little sister said with a smirk.

  That high level of alarm stayed in my mom’s voice. “Is something going on with you two?”

  “What? No.” While I couldn’t lie to my roommate Deja, I’d been lying to my mom about Bash for years, and it was basically like breathing at this point.

  Not because I was a dishonest person, but because I knew how much it would hurt and upset her, and at this point I was all about protecting her from unnecessary stress. And there really was nothing going on between me and Bash, even if I did want to throw myself at him every time I saw him and beg him to whisk me away to some cabin in the woods where we could be all alone and he’d carry me across the threshold and then upstairs, where he’d slowly start to unbutton his shirt, his gaze never leaving mine, and then he’d reach for me and say I was wearing too many clothes, and . . .

  “Ember?”

  “Huh?”

  “Are you okay?” My mom peered closely at me, like she did when I
was little and she was worried I had a fever.

  “I’m fine.” Totally fine. Fantasizing about Bash while other people were in the room staring at me, but otherwise, totally fine.

  “That’s . . . good,” she said, her disbelief evident. “Since I have you here, there is something I wanted to ask. It’s a big favor, so you can say no.” But even as she said the words, I knew that wouldn’t be my answer. I couldn’t disappoint her.

  Her face lit up when I nodded. “So I’m helping host a fancy ball where we’re raising money for breast cancer research. And they’ll be having a little mini-ballroom-dance competition. Each board member has been asked to get three entries. I have the other two, and so I’d like you to be the third.”

  “I don’t know how to dance like that. And good luck finding somebody tall enough for me.”

  “Ian can be your partner!”

  Ian? Who was Ian? It literally took me a second before I realized she meant Bash. And okay, he was certainly tall enough, even when I wore heels. But seriously? Bash? “That’s not going to work if neither one of us knows how to dance like that.”

  “That’s the best part! It’s just a waltz, which is actually easy to learn. And Ian already knows how to do it.”

  What? My mouth hung open. Bash knew how to dance a waltz? I could make all my dance-movie rom-com dreams come true?

  Not all of them. There was no way I was going to do a tango with Bash in front of a bunch of strangers.

  “Oh, say yes, Ember. It would be so great for Doug to have Ian around more.”

  Guilt crushed my chest. I didn’t want to say no, and I didn’t want to hurt anybody. “I don’t know.”

  “You only have that one exhibition game left next weekend.”

  How did this woman have my schedule memorized better than I did? “Right, but I have school and training and my job and other stuff. I’m busy, you know.”

  “Please? It would mean so much to me.”

  My mother didn’t ask very much of me, even when I’d offered my help to her. What else could I do but accept? “Okay. If Bash is in, I’ll do it.”